skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've done a small amount of coding in Java and am mostly a .NET guy, so I've seen a bit of both worlds.

It's an interesting take on .NET he has. I find that answers and sharing is as prominent in the .NET community as the Java community -- perhaps not as many F/OSS projects. Dunnno.

As far as setting up NUnit, takes about 5 minutes. Sure, it'd be better if there was a whizbang plugin for the IDE, but if you wanted you could make one easily enough and distribute. It's not convenient, but it never seemed like a huge deal. I've used NUnit, XUnit, and the MS tools. If I remember correctly, seems like there is an open-source pluggable test running tool. Never have played around with it.

And if you need help? Google is your friend. There are so many .NET people out there blogging and sharing code that you can just about ask Google any problem you might have. Hell, I've copied the error right from the IDE and pasted it in the search box -- works almost every time.

I like both communities, although I have become less of a fan of MS over the years. Lately I'm leaning towards coding in F# on mono for new projects, but I haven't set up the stack yet.

He does have a point, there is a difference in the cultures. But both communities are very accessible and easy to work with, at least from my experience.
I'm not so sure I would want to work with this guy, Zed Shaw on the other hand was one of the nicest people I've ever gotten an e-mail from
As a language C# is ok, and there's not all that much difference to Java. If you use the Mono compiler and MonoDevelop IDE, which has integration with version control and NUnit, then things aren't too bad and you don't need to deal with a culture where every trivial utility is ransomware.
Maybe he should make his blog an iphone app instead, the root URL took me 5 minutes to load
NLP in Python vs other Programming Languages
By different, he doesn't mean revolutionary.
> The BB might as well be a text only device

The odd thing about this, to me, is that as text-centric as the Blackberry is, every single handset I've played with has had atrocious text rendering (with the last being a friend's Storm).
Oh my god that's horrible! Next they're going to get sued because they're not donating to research aimed at improving blind people's vision.

Some of the comments on that article make me want to cry.
This year by year increase in features - what I refer to as the "TV remote effect" - is of concern. Really they ought to concentrate upon consolidating and removing unnecessary features from the language.
> How would you feel if a credit card you used routinely and, likely, had a very high limit was cancelled by someone calling your bluff?

I'm not emotionally attached to any of my credit cards.

High limit cards aren't hard to come by. Cancel one and I'll use another.
were you on nutmeg?
false.
He clearly could benefit from my CSS consultation, offered at only $200 an hour.
If you have a web site that delivers information, I'd say it should degrade gracefully. But if you have a web app, requiring javascript is no different than having a desktop app that first requires you to download the desktop app before you can use it (duh). Notice that every example they use is a web app.
Alexis Ohanian at Angel Boot Camp
Using this article's threshold of 287ppi@12" for "retinal", and the EVO screen specs on wikipedia which give it about 217ppi, it would be retinal at a distance of 15.9".
Ironically, the very first dancing-silhouette iPod commercial was set to a Black Eyed Peas song--before they made it big.
The mail application on Android feels very clunky, but I think the gmail application on both Android and iPhone are pretty comparable in terms of features/flow.
But isn't Coke kind of ubiquitous already?
HTML and CSS are not optional. I don't see why JS should be.

The only two things I'm concerned about are mobile platforms that don't have a complete JS interpreter, which presumably will be less of a problem in the near future, and accessibility for screen readers.
Relax. It lasts a few weeks, then you'll practically never hear of it again.

Except that in twenty years somebody will mention the word vuvuzela and it will make you nostalgic for the summer of 2010.
Microsoft by the numbers
For commercial third party library's in the Java world people tend to charge for support. In the .NET world people charge for the code itself.

The incentives in the Java world are completely wrong. It's best to make your library as complicated as possible, because then you'll get a lot of people buying support. If you charge for the code then you make it as easy to use as possible to avoid support.
IPhone 4 camera beats the smartphone competition
You'd think. And yet, the "Rails doesn't scale" meme survived for a remarkably long time... Still does, really.
That is because there are only really three versions of the framework out there: 1.1, 2.0 & 4.0. The compiler has changed (see: var, LINQ) and libraries have been added but the CLR hasn't changed much. Take a look at how C# implements lambdas - it's all compiler magic.
Looking at the Word of the Year finalists (http://money.cnn.com/2008/11/11/news/economy/wordof_year/ind...), they are sort of lame - Frugalista, Moofer, Topless meeting. Definitely questions the credibility of New Oxford American Dictionary.
Interesting approach to customer acquisition. After taxes he'd be sitting on just over a million a year without working much more than 40 hours a week.

But maybe his pricing is predicated on the desire to not work 40 hour weeks?
Doesn't make it any less lame.
Technicalities in Utilizing CAD Conversions
Architectural designing utilizes many services. Image conversions,
like a raster to vector image conversion, provide the ability to utilize the modern
digital technologies for the production of architectural designs. There are many
situations in which old images, hand drawn images, and sketches need to be converted
into more useful and multipurpose digital designs.
But just as images should have alt text for people who prefer not to load them, sites requiring JavaScript should have some obvious message to indicate the need for JavaScript when a user decides to not run scripts by default.

It's insanely trivial to do, and just seems polite.
I've worn a ski-mask into a bank....
I read it as "hypermilling", and I thought United was trying to mill a 777. Out of what, I wasn't sure. :)
| For the study, participants were taught to meditate by focusing on the sensation of their breathing, acknowledging and dismissing any stray thoughts that popped into their heads.

For those who do practice meditation, what are other techniques that are effective to you?
It seems unlikely that Tolkien rots your brain, but I agree that it would have been more useful to compare meditation to just sitting quietly or taking a nap (and to reading Tolkien). I recall some previous studies on meditation found that it didn't make much difference if you were doing specific meditation or just spending some quiet time.
Removing features is impossible. The best you can do is starting over once in a while.
Classic papers of statistics
Can you vary the pitch on a vuvuzela similar to how you vary your pitch on a bugle (or a trumpet without using the valves)?
He's claiming his role in Tap Tap Revenge as justifying that rate. If all you know about his role at Tapulous is what's been written at TechCrunch that probably sounds impressive. Of course if you know some of the guys there who don't have a soapbox and a sycophantic following that's a pretty hilarious opener.
A combination of several cold emails + a couple forum posts on relevant forums, it didnt take more than a couple hours. This was really a very minor side project.
Generally the view is all the browser-side components: HTML, Javascript, and CSS. The only change in MVC with AJAX is the ability to make calls to the controller without a full page load. Using MVC is still good practice.
For those not likely destined for the top 10 and that don't have large investments to recoup, these top 10 statistics are fairly irrelevant. A survey among developers who ported their app to both platforms would be far more enlightening.

For a company that spends a lot on development and marketing, and will likely have a top 10 app, those top 10 numbers may certainly mean that their Android investment won't pay off.
The GMail client is OK but it's lacking in the feature department. No option for a 2-3 line preview of the message body, when composing a message you can't pick contacts from your GMail contacts or local address book -- you have to type in the addresses each time, as far as I can tell it doesn't support copy & paste.
I once decompiled a Windows Microsoft DLL imported function, and it clearly had a lot of optimisations such as quitting if the 1st character is 'n', etc.

So I've seen this optimisation with my own eyes.
Interesting, how else have you seen lambdas implemented in a compiled language?
Lessons Kids Won't Learn in School
Hey Bret,

This is Nick. Compelling headline indeed. As I told someone else at Facebook today, unfortunately it's difficult to gain traction without a compelling headline. However the article doesn't specify a specific change in strategy just a continuation of the existing one.

As I posted this morning, declaring war may be a bit of an exaggeration, however most people have been unaware that content off Facebook shows up in search results and that pages can be optimized for such.

At f8 this was announced but not until recently did I begin seeing results that link off-site. The article was a way to illustrate how the Open Graph underlies Facebook's search strategy. Until you show the average user a picture of what that means, theoretical discussion only gets so far.

I hope it wasn't interpreted as a shift in strategy, but a photo is worth a thousand words and a headline can multiply that! You and I (as well as most people on this site) understood the implications of the Open Graph, but the average user had no idea what it meant.

The search results image makes things more apparent. Happy to adjust if you think this is excessive sensationalism ... this is definitely an ambitious search strategy no matter which way you cut it.

Best,
Nick O'Neill (AllFacebook.com)
As an earlier poster pointed out, GMail's non-js app is a totally different app, and let's be honest, it's a giant pain to use compared to the js version, and for most people it wouldn't have been worth the expenditure to make. GMail wouldn't have caught on if it were just the pure HTML version. Degradation is nothing but a nice-to-have for an app like that.
Known as "yield protection" or "Tufts syndrome" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yield_protection )
"The social network" first teaser
Tangential, but I feel compelled to note that:

* I have never met Zed
* Like many others I have heard all sorts of stories about him
* People are capable of change
* In my recent experience Zed has always seemed civil, thoughtful and passionate about code

He may have been a jerk in the past, I can't speak to that, but he seems like a decent guy now.

Yours,
the anti-pigeonholing squad
I'm actually building an Android app now instead of iPhone app. Here are the rationals: 1. I don't have an iPhone nor an Android phone so there's no inclination from the device point of view, 2. My last mac was 10 years old and can't be used for IPhone development while Android app can be developed on Windows/Linux machine. 3. The low downloads and low app numbers on Android side indicates that it's a virgin market while the device numbers are huge.

We'll see how it goes.
Other techniques ? There is only one core technique. Some people do yoga as an adjunct activity. I have an hourly chime that keeps me centered in case I stray. Minimum amount of TV. Walking vs driving. If I have to drive, I stay in the right lane and focus on the sensation of driving instead of pedal to the metal. I throw away stuff or sell them on ebay constantly to keep down the clutter.
I had to check when this was written. Sadly, it's this year.

He says that .Net coders don't answer each other's questions. What's stackoverflow then?

He says that the .Net ecosystem is not as rich, and mentions nUnit, but not the other major open-source testing frameworks - xUnit and mbUnit. Then there's also MS testing, or if you like BDD, there's NSpec and SpecFlow.

I've seen seven or eight open-source .Net IoC containers (including one from Microsoft). By far the weakest of the major ones was Spring.Net, the straight-up port of the popular Java tool. If you don't like EF (Microsoft's ORM), there's NHibernate. Subsonic and others. If you don't like Webforms or asp.Net MVC, theres Fubu and OpenRasta.

Unfortunately a Resharper licence is the price of entry into a lot of IDE goodness. He has that right anyway.

The .Net shop that I work in doesn't choose tools to use in our .Net development efforts based on cost or licence. We choose what makes sense. There is really are few or none "only paid, proprietary software" development shops left. It's all mixed.
I know it's not the same thing, but I quite liked multiprocessing. Although it's severely limited in terms of passing objects around and there is always the overhead of spawning new processes.

As a sidenote, the John Nagle there is the same one in Nagle's algorithm:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagle%27s_algorithm
did anyone else notice the comments on the bottom where the author had never heard of stackoverflow? I think he wrote this article based on his preconceptions rather than reality.

A lot of what he says is true (developers who use Microsoft products are generally more willing to pay for software). but there are plenty of open source projects and a TON of online references - and there were even before the latest and greatest stack overflow came into existance.
I agree with everyone that Perl syntax can look random gibberish, however, their particular Perl example seems quite easy to interpret.
Well, mostly false anyway. A guy in systems programming could still know how to do it, as could a game programmer, and neither might be versed in the multi-tiered art of web development. It's not even a very hidden feature for some browsers and there are plugins available that serve only that purpose. You should have stated your reasoning for why you disagree however, because "false." doesn't cut it here.
That's the essence of mindfulness meditation (the technique used in the paper). There's a completely different school that requires the use of mantras like "om" etc. Transcendental meditation is an example of a mantra-based technique. For myself, I find the mindfulness approach more useful and grounded than the mantra approach. There are also more active techniques such as tai chi, qi gong and yoga but they only qualify as "meditation" if they're done with a very conscious and meditative mindset.
One of the best current reasons to have a fall back is performance. It turns out that 100% JavaScript web sites have a horrible performance profile. Having just got back from Velocity conference I can say half the performance talks were about postponing as much JavaScript on the page as possible to cause faster render times.

Accessibility used to be a decent argument (at least to those of us who cared) but it isn't any more. I say that as a co-author of WCAG2.
It's a pity that they did not interview the folks at JHU/CTY/SET , ( http://cty.jhu.edu/set/jcs-apa.html
and http://cty.jhu.edu/ ) which has done much more rigorous research in this area...

The headline doesn't really match the article.
+1 Insightful. Requiring js for navigation is poor practice, especially if javascript is not needed for anything else. If you're only using it for animations/effects, requiring it can probably be avoided as well.

I think the difference is that before, javascript was more of an "addon" feature to web pages, where now we are now able to create things with javascript that just aren't possible with static HTML only, or are far more usable, responsive, etc.
Marginal tax rates being high is a great idea. I'd be with you if people with high salaries spent all, or virtually all, of their salary. But they don't.

In this economy we need more money being spent. When things are doing well again, you could try to make a case for the rich being richer, but it's a strange cause to take up.
I'd like to hear from him in a month or so how it worked out.
This year by year increase in features - what I refer to as the "better than Java effect" - is not of concern. They're not going to remove features from the language, because that would break existing code for no reason, and that would be insane. The only reason to remove a feature is if it can cause damage. Maybe Scheme should get rid of call-with-current-continuation, but I can't think of any features C# needs to get rid of. Can you?
Yes, Jeff Skilling is a despicable person, just as Lori Drew is. In neither case should we twist the meaning of laws so that they turn virtually everyone into a criminal. If the government's interpretation of "honest services" law were upheld, it would arguably be a crime to take a personal call or visit HN when you're supposed to be working.
did anyone else notice the comments on the bottom where the author had never heard of stackoverflow

"never heard of stackoverflow" is much the same as "never googled a tricky .Net question". Someone's due for a dose of culture-shock.
So why does image-based development suck for deployment? If you can regen an environment from a simple text file what's the issue?
Well put. I wasn't taking the half billion in acquisition cost into consideration. However, I think with their still-huge current audience, a couple of cool-by-association acquisitions(pandora,indeed) and celebrity spokespeople, it stands in a very good place.

As a competitor to Facebook, they're sinking. But if social networking in this capacity turns, taking their medicine now for poor-sighted assumptions could make a so-so company poised to look smart in hindsight, should they right the ship.

I agree, there are major disadvantages to having this kind of link to old industry money too(being slow, hackneyed CEO culture, etc.) But, Murdoch is wily and buys talent.

I wouldn't bet against them; if for nothing else, their vehement protection of pride.
The smallish company I work for is in the early stages of transitioning to a new development platform as all their existing systems are antiquated. The company doesn't have any particular dependance on Microsoft technology, and from my perspective it's a great opportunity to embrace a contemporary open source platform.

Sadly the management seems to be considering that all new development should be in .Net and centralised with TFS. I can't rightly understand why anyone would want to tie themselves to this costly, closed platform when they can essentially choose anything.
Well, it turns out there are many Ruby communities, some vocal, some not. Talking abut the Ruby community is going to end up missing a lot of what is going on. Mostly, though when people talk about a singular Ruby community they mean Rails.

I've noticed that you've said this a lot of times on here (and ruby-talk, if I recall) and you're right - it's just sad that you have to say it and that people still make the assumption you're trying to counter.
one known side effect of stem cell injection is cancer.

I found that to be an incredibly interesting sentence, after having previously watched this video.

http://www.ted.com/talks/eva_vertes_looks_to_the_future_of_m...
The curse of management
So is an IntelliJ license on the Java side.
The difference is that Rubyists just get on with shipping code and products without obsessing over the one true toolkit or vendor.
Building the World's Largest Telescope, a Mile Under Antarctic Ice
The Blurring Line Between Amateur and Professional
They're also exceptionally low, currently. There are no rates above 35%, whereas they used to be above 70% back in the Eisenhower/Kennedy/Johnson/Ford/Carter/early-Reagan days. But I suppose which rates and which kinds of incentives count as too high / too low is always relative and subjective...
Some ppl in Microsoft see F# as exactly this fresh start.
Of course not, but some subtle gestures would be quite nice.
So what value exactly is there (for a programming language) in being "cool"?
Ok, I've added the WebTiming API checks to boomerang.
I completely agree with his sentiment, although I would rephrase it:

Users who disable javascript are responsible for dealing with the problems caused by lack of javascript.

As for why it's false, I think it's obvious. You can turn off javascript with the click of a user-friendly UI button, whereas programming ability is a much harder to attain skill.
Would you expand a bit on the accessibility aspects of this? One of the only reasons I even worry about using Javascript heavily in my sites these days is due to accessibility concerns -- are you saying that folks who are blind are able to use Javascript now?
A Bias for Scamminess
I learned Transcendental Meditation about a year ago, and it has had a seriously profound effect on my life.
Eversureaqua reverse osmosis water treatment
Eversureaqua is a supplier of quality water purifiers, offering under sink reverse osmosis water filters, reverse osmosis water systems, reverse osmosis water purifiers and gives information for reverse osmosis water treatment and reverse osmosis water purification.
Dating Site Spawns Sperm Bank For Beautiful People
This is pretty sweet. Just the other day I was thinking that doing this in C might be a fun way to scratch and itch and have a fast practical solution for others.

There's still room for a more comprehensive solution than either this or Lein gives. Maybe I'll have to scratch that itch if it gets to be too much.

This is certainly nice for just having a ready-made REPL with all your favorite libs already on your classpath. Kudos, David!
Pretty much everyone I'm talking to is saying this is the hottest job market in Silicon Valley in the last 5 years.
I'm having a very hard time seeing this as an improvement over apache/nginx/lighttpd text-file configuration. Web server configs also have a tendency to be heirarchical, which sounds extra-painful in SQL.

Let's take a real-world nginx conf for example (comments and blank lines elided to save space). I can't imagine how trying to shoehorn something like this into sql is a win. Even Java-style XML situps seem preferable:

http {
include /usr/local/nginx/conf/mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;
log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] '
'"$request" $status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
'"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';
access_log /var/log/nginx_access.log main;
error_log /var/log/nginx_error.log debug;
sendfile on;
tcp_nopush on;
tcp_nodelay off;
gzip on;
gzip_http_version 1.0;
gzip_comp_level 2;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_types text/plain text/html text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
upstream mongrel {
server 127.0.0.1:5000;
# server 127.0.0.1:5001;
# server 127.0.0.1:5002;
}
server {
listen 80;
client_max_body_size 50M;
root /var/www/apps/mysite.com/current/public;
access_log /var/www/apps/mysite.com/shared/log/nginx.vhost.access.log main;

if (-f $document_root/system/maintenance.html) {
rewrite ^(.*)$ /system/maintenance.html last;
break;
}
location / {
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_redirect false;
proxy_max_temp_file_size 0;

if (-f $request_filename) {
break;
}
if (-f $request_filename/index.html) {
rewrite (.*) $1/index.html break;
}
if (-f $request_filename.html) {
rewrite (.*) $1.html break;
}
if (!-f $request_filename) {
proxy_pass http://mongrel;
break;
}
}
error_page 500 502 503 504 /500.html;
location = /500.html {
root /var/www/apps/mysite.com/current/public;
}
}