skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My opinion today is largely the same, yes. I love Clojure and in my spare time I use it for everything. If I tried to do a web app in Common Lisp again, I'd probably have an easier time of it today than in 2008, because I know a bit more.

But I couldn't justify using either for a project for work. I generally choose Ruby instead nowadays. In Clojure I still end up rolling my own libraries for a lot of things, which is really quite fun in my spare time, but not justifiable if I'm billing by the hour and there are a dozen Ruby gems already written to do it.

We have seemingly constant threads on HN saying "I can't hire a good programmer!" What are the chances of my non-programmer boss hiring a good Lisp programmer? At the small non-profit at which I work? Good freaking luck.

I'm still using some PHP scripts at work today, and I still cringe to see the code, and I whine a little (to myself) whenever I have to edit it, and my boss still loves the end result, and it's done its job well for 2 years. What else matters? I believe in "Worse is Better" in this case.

I do sneakily use Clojure at work for small data-munging tasks. But not for code anyone else ever needs to see.

(I do also wonder why this blog post from 2008 made it to HN.)
No amount of deception by the teacher makes any of their science-y explanations correct.

It's not that they had an alternative model of how it could have happened, and tried to offer a explanation with a technical term. It's that they were just throwing out technical terms.

If a teacher shows an egg being pushed into a bottle with a match in it, and one student guesses 'quantum tunneling', that answer is just as wrong as the answers in this essay, and driven by the same process of inserting magic words.

If they had mentally searched through potential technical explanations and couldn't find an answer, and were unwilling to take the time to question every pre-supposition, the correct answer is "I don't know".
Alan Kay is a legendary computer scientist. He is not a legendary expert in psychology or organizational behaviour.

Why do I care what business self-help books he likes ?
Save yourself some time and money: buy a grinder, a Nissan vacuum thermos and an Aeropress: http://www.aerobie.com/Products/aeropress_story.htm. I've tried several espresso/coffee makers and barring one that is commercial grade and several grand, the $25 Aeropress can hang with the best of them.
Jakob Nielsen knows that's vague and hard to understand.
I think the Kindle DX would also be a more fair comparison to the iPad (especially the new, twice the contrast ratio DX).

I have both, and actually use both. I would probably go with DX and Netbook if I were cost-constrained. The only time I read books on the iPad vs. the DX is when I'm in bed and don't want to turn on a room light, and even then, it's with the Kindle app. I use the iPad for plenty of non-book applications.
For every vote it wins them, the proposed abuse of privilege will lose them three votes.
You're simultaneously misrepresenting jeb's statement and the efficient market hypothesis[1].

It's more like saying "markets aren't always right, but they're useful, otherwise they wouldn't exist".

The efficient market hypothesis says "the market may be wrong sometimes, but you can't consistently tell when".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis
Oh... gaming. Yes.. I enjoy gaming very much, but the sad thing is that I absolutely suck at games. Especially in the games I like. And now days gaming seems bit crap with consoles taking over etc, so the best I can do is try to make my own games (which hasn't been very successful either).

About being waste of time like TV. Well, it can be very true. But like TV and movies, if you just cherrypick good ones then it uses much less time and provides intellectual challenges instead of being a waste of time.
And once again, John Gruber has his lips firmly wedged into Apple's asscrack.
I think everyone should stop prefacing personal assessments of people by quoting their credentials first (MSc/PhD from a top X university), as I feel it should have absolutely no bearing on how intelligent one perceives them to be. I've met some seriously incompetent grad students, and they all seem to get their degrees in the end regardless.
Minority Report science adviser John Underkoffler points to the future of UI
Say you want to connect to a database, fetch some data, and present it using HTML. Here's how it can be done using a DSL based on Scheme macros:

http://brl.codesimply.net/brl_4.html#SEC31

I can't forget to fetch the next row from the database. I can't forget to check that I'm at the end of the result set. Grouping the results is easy and straightforward. The statement and connection objects are automatically closed when the request is done. Compare that to PHP.

I'm getting better, but even today I feel a little irritated when someone says PHP was designed for simple web/database apps. I know what a language designed for simple web/db apps looks like, and PHP is not it.
Ruby 1.9.2 RC1 is released
Money is obviously part of it, but now the whole picture. The difficulty in finding programmers that are gifted is not that you are competing with other companies, it's that you are competing with the programmer taking his ability and resulting wares directly to the consumer. Between startups and lifestyle businesses the lone programmer has a lot of options that other professions don't necessarily have (nurses, for example).

You have to keep in mind that you are competing with the excitement and potential earnings of running your own show.
Pivotal Labs doesn't work for free. If you go to Pivotal's front page, what they do is pretty much do all the coding for a startup. They take a business person's ideas and then code them up and implement them. From there they then teach the business people either how to maintain it or how to hire a dev team that can (or work with the dev team they've hired to learn how to work with the codebase).

Its just what pivotal does for a living, so my logical conclusion was that Diaspora was using Pivotal for code, and their comments on their blog were filtered to with PR speak.
ACTA Slouches On, Final within 6 Months
The $150k programmers don't answer job ads. They get all of their work through referrals.
Huh? Apple's PR letter specifically says that their 'mistake' has been there since the "original iPhone". And the 'grip of death' can kill calls and more importantly, IMO, affects data transfer rates (as I use my iPhone more as a browser than a phone and naturally hold it the 'wrong way') so I'm not sure why you conclude it's not a real issue.

Gruber has never tired of making jokes at AT&T's expense even though he personally has great service in Philly and AT&T has the fastest network. Let's see if he brings the same level of snark to his Apple and Jobs posts henceforth.
Writing a modern, fully featured operating system sees quite hard. Especially when most OS's seem to include a web browser :)
Organic soil 25lbs (10kg) : $11

Handtools : $25

Garden hose : $20

Garden hose attachments : $18

Seed packets $4 x 8 : $32

Various pots : $70

Primer and varnish : $40

Now that I think about it it probably wasn't my wisest shopping. But I live in the city and to get to a gardening center would take a few hours by bus or metro.

But these are sunk costs, you only need to by seeds once, you only need to pots once, a big bag of soil costs almost the same as a small bag and can last a while. If this little experiment works out I will have learned a lot from the experience and have the required material.

But I'd never spend $11,000 on the first run. That's a really expensive education. If anything the guy proves that "his" urban farm is unsustainable.
It's a girl ("I am the daughter and granddaughter of immigrants (Indonesian/Chinese on one side and Russian on the other side)").

1) The problem with domestic outsourcing is you frequently come up against the issue of "I wont need to support this in a month so fuck it I'll just finish it the quick hacky way now." For small site projects like wordpress blogs this may be acceptable, but for actual software I still can't imagine a situation where outsourcing is cheaper, which is why most respected software companies don't do it.

2) Which is a huge issue. The concept that you WANT them to go away afterwards (again, with the exception of something like a wordpress blog) both disincentivizes them to produce high quality, lasting code and also means you lose your support for their code base.

I'm not saying this is how your company operates, I'm sure you have great programmers who deliver good products. But I've yet to see the scenario everyone dreams of: We pay a lower price long term and end up with a great maintainable codebase that we can easily pass off to other developers and we never have deal with the outsourcers again. Just never happens.
I really don't need yet another language to program on Windows.
No, you're really paying your developers to build domain/business knowledge and familiarity with the codebase. Then when you need a bug fixed or a new feature, it's a snap. You're also paying them so the competition can't hire them. Remember the value of any company engaged in IP is not in the stuff it owns and not even in the stuff it's already done: it's in its ability as an organization to identify and solve new and commercially relevant problems. The value of such an organization is quite literally in the heads of its people. Without those people what is it? A brand?

Contractors, no matter how individually talented they are, can't do any of this. You can outsource payroll and catering; you can't outsource IP creation and survive.
Looking at this reminds me of the "Booksmarks Toolbar". Is there anyone that doesn't remove it? Why is so much screen space wasted for little reason?
Tips to Write First Term Paper
Writing your first term paper can be a daunting task especially if you don’t know what you have to do. A term paper is a lengthy document which needs to be written in the proper manner. Therefore, this article is dedicated to helping you with your first term paper.
She admits as much in the post:
"The title of this post isn’t exactly true. Outsourcing (the way everyone does it) does not work (where work is defined as save tons of money and produce quality software)."
Mathematician deciphers hidden 'Hello Code'
> You could the same for so many PHP frameworks.

You don't even have to include the word "PHP" in there. A lot of frameworks include a massive amount of functionality that you're almost never going to use. And for the few times you might need to use it, it'll probably take less and less learning and less dependency on code you don't control just to code up something by hand.

But my complaint isn't about frameworks or their relative complexity. It's about how most people touting some of these solutions pride themselves on how terse the end result is. This goes well beyond DRY. A good abstraction is great for providing a clean view of the logic, but some abstractions and meta-programming take it so far that now the logic is no longer obvious.

> Again the only thing I'm hearing here is arguments from people who are too lazy to actually see how things are done from a functional perspective.

I've done functional programming work in the past (ML) but the fact is, it's just much harder to just get things done in functional languages. When you find the perfect domain mapping for functional work, it's great, but most of the time you don't have that. It's like arguing the Esperanto is a nicer and cleaner language than English -- that's probably true -- but if you want to get work done you use English.
Gaggia Classic is very good. It's the same machine type as Rancilio Silvia, and about $150-200 cheaper. I can't claim that it's better as I have never owned Rancilio, but it's definitely worth considering.
Interesting idea, distributed reservoir with a shading house. It should be produced as cheaply as possible to ensure the widest use. $15 is very expensive in other countries, and yes, thief would happen. If it's dirt cheap, no one would care.

Also for people stealing sapling, how about planting unattractive trees? Like poisonous trees. Nature doesn't care one way or the other.
Count me surprised as well, by now iOS devices make up 50% of our mobile traffic. My guess is that the market for a 'browse-from-your-couch' device was massively underestimated, even by Apple.
There's a great David Bowie song about this:

'Don't believe in yourself, Don't deceive with Belief.
Knowledge comes with Death's release'

I think he was trying to say: Don't assume anything, just be!

I really enjoyed reading this submission, thanks!
Well played, sir. My emphasis on REAL in the parent comment was meant as proximity sensor bug being more severe/higher priority (IMHO) than antenna bug in terms of dropped calls.
I ordered a kindle yesterday ($250, 1/2 of the iPad price, for a refurbished DX from amazon warehouse deals was just irresistible) and even though I do not have any first hand experience yet, I think that the device has a lot of potential. I have a lot of PDF textbooks that I never get around to read because I just cannot read on a computer for longer periods of time. Therefore, I intend to use the kindle for reading through the textbook the first time I work my way through it (which will likely take a long time and therefore the e-ink comes in handy) and search through the PDF on my computer if I, at some point in the future, need to reference something. As far as I know kindle caches pages before and after the current page and accessing these pages is exactly the type of movement that one performs then reading through a textbook the first time through. Can anyone who has experience with kindle say if my assumptions wrong?
One thing nobody is questioning: why does the perceived signal strength (what is displayed) affected by how users hold the phone? If the displayed signal strength doesn't correlate well with actual signal strength, I don't see how gripping it a certain way should make any difference??
He mentions the well-known defection halfway through the article.
Shhh, don't question Apple.
I would be completely lost without my Bookmarks Toolbar at the top. Sometimes I wish it could be two rows.

Every one of my top pages is there that I frequent. I also have my social bookmarking links in there for saving pages for later. I have my main folders there with my other Work/News/Research links in them for quick reference too.
The clinic I go to has a staff with two doctors and several nurse practitioners (nurses with special training who are authorized to do some doctor-like things like make diagnoses and prescriptions for low-risk conditions). When I see an NP I am grateful for their presence, as my doctor probably has enough shit to do and can't be bothered by my mild to moderate medical questions.

The proliferation of nurse practitioners and physician assistance may provide something of a release valve to counteract the elitism, scarcity, and costs associated with doctors at least until there is reform within the medical profession itself.
Looks like they can remove those copy and paste buttons from the default layout.
The domestic firms to which you outsource typically don't want #1 to happen. They want to build a long-term relationship and hold your repeat business. They want to become such experts on your software that it's not cost effective for you to pay their competitors to work on it.

The way they can stay less expensive than in-house development is simple. They can use time division multiplexing to put an entire team of workers on your project. Each worker may have six or seven customers he works on across the year, six or seven codebases with which he is intimately familiar.

You may have the budget for one developer on salary, full-time. Instead of hiring that one guy to alternate between overwork and sitting on his ass, you could pay an entire team of people for three months of work every couple years. Additionally, you get the skills and experience of that entire team. You're not limited to what one contributor is comfortable with.
You can still get crudgy code with TDD.
Here's what I said back to him:

Thanks for this post! I live in the US, and for a long time bought Nokia phones, frequently paying for them to be imported to the US. I traveled around the world for work for years, and the last phone I owned from Nokia was the E90.

The E90 had some great, great hardware. It was the swiss army knife of radio devices. It was years ahead of its competitors.

AND, the software was horrible. Truly terrible; so bad, that I frequently traveled with an iphone as well as a winmo device in case I needed to do something other than the primary use-case for the E90: rock-solid messaging all over the world. When I say horrible, I mean that it was clunky, poorly designed, and just a total pain-in-the ass to use, so much so, that it cut a lot of my enjoyment. This can’t continue, especially at this point in the global market for smartphones.

Ovi was totally non-competitive, the last time I looked at it. It’s currently an also-ran in a world with one awesome app store, and one okay one. On top of that, mobile developers have become used to a great development environment with Xcode. At the same time, your average apple app-store app kicks ass all over a third party Nokia application, in terms of features, coolness, usability and price. This is not a ‘come back swinging’ situation as much as it is a ‘total rethink’ situation in my opinion.

Where I’m going with all this is somewhat simple: the software question is significant for you guys: interface, app environment, customer experience, the whole nine yards. I have seen nothing from Nokia in the last five years that makes me think you’ve got a handle on this. The current best mobile UI teams in the world are:

1) Apple
2) HTC
3) Palm (except, palm’s guy just went to ..)
4) Google

I don’t have solutions for you, because I don’t know what it’s like inside Nokia right now. Do they feel that Rome is burning? Are they fiddling?

That said, if I were VP, I would personally put in place a small skunkworks team developing some rapid cycle premium Android devices to test the waters. If you wanted you could overlay the Ovi store on top of the Android Market in an effort to try and control the app supply chain better.

I would be stunned if Meego ever surpassed Android; the momentum is far too great right now. And, your job I would guess, is to ensure dominance, regardless of how many eggs you break while making the omelet.

Best,

Peter
These days when so many people have widescreen laptops, I wonder why things like the bookmarks toolbar don't default to docking to the left or right side. I can't afford to give up space at the top or bottom of my screen, but my left and right sides have room.
PyTables 2.2: entering the multi-core age
I think the problem is that we can't write down all our assumptions, even if we try REALLY hard. This is some of what inspired the mathematical formalism movement; trying to make sure that we know what we think we know.
A Brief Comparison of MongoDB and CouchDB
There are a few things this heat-map is not showing that are pretty important and may negatively affect their redesign decisions.

1) Add-Ons.
If we have add-ons that make other areas of the browser clickable, and those areas are highly used by a high number of add-on users, then that too may need to be taken into consideration on the redesign.
Example: a downloads bar at the bottom of the page, or maybe firebug.

2) Visuals that may or may not be turned on. For example, the X on each of the tabs. I close out tabs a lot, and that little X I have next to each tab is probably used more than any other button.

3) Custom settings. I guess this doesn't matter as much, but I, for example, have my settings in such a way that more tabs display across the top than the default install, so I never use that annoying down arrow on the right.
Twitter Fail Whale Sails to New Heights
Yikes, seems like few people use the RSS icon to subscribe. I'd better an "RSS Subscribe" link to my website.
Thank you very much for such an informative comment.
Do "back button" clicks only mean the physical (err. how else do you say this?) clicking off the button or does hitting the back button on my mouse trigger this?

I use back a TON, but I can't remember the last time I clicked a back button.
That is a very clever idea, simple and sweet. Too bad it's patented.
Yes, but I might not care. If I ask for a function that takes a particular data structure and writes it to a particular file format, as long as it's not in my hot loop, I don't care how badly it's implemented (assuming it works on all my edge cases). On the other hand I might want to make sure it's maintainable or fast enough, in which case I might just write it myself.
Yes money is power, but government is a cultural institution. We already have ethical and legal rules against corruption, they just need to be strengthened at a societal level.

Saying 'absolutely nothing' can be done is a defeatist attitude. It's fine for money to be used for influence within the rules of the system, but when it's used to fix the rules, that goes against everyone's interests. It also behooves the rich to acknowledge the value of a fair playing field since consolidating too much power often leads to violent revolution (ie. instant nullification of the power-value of money by the masses).
Thanks for the breakdown.

Did you get a box (or whatever) to make compost in? I guess even now you have lots of kitchen waste, that will make for great soil. I heard used coffee powder is good for most potted plants.

A worm compost is fun, but other methods work as well. You can compost not only food wastes, but also most kinds of paper.

If you want to go really crazy, go the humanure route (http://weblife.org/humanure/default.html). Needs a bucket and some saw dust and a compost heap. Make sure you separate the phases.

By the way, what's the advantage of organic soil over just taking a shovel and digging up some dirt?
I think the right scroll bar is difficult to use in most browsers without a maximized window. There needs to be a better UI for vertical scrolling, for example grow the right bar as your mouse moves closer so there is more surface area to drag.
A perverse case of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome. Please forgive me.
"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
This is a standard technique in B2B sales. Instead of trying to sell a predefined product (aka a solution), have a conversation with the customer about the issues that they want to address. It's a reasonable approach for complex problems because you have no idea whether your product is the right fit until you're aware of all the little details.
The C9 Lectures are awesome. I personally liked the C9 Lectures from Dr. Erik Meijer about Functional Programming Fundamentals. He uses Haskell to guide you through the fundamentals, so it's also a chance to have a look at the language itself (The lecture's based on the book Programming in Haskell, http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/book.html). There are 13 parts, and you can start with the lecture by watching the first part here: http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Lecture-Series-Eri...

On a sidenote: the enthusiasm Dr. Meijer spreads during the whole lectures is somehow contagious; he's done a very good job with these lectures IMHO.
I would've changed the article name to "Outsourcing to India doesn't work". I fully agree with that, and can share many more horror stories.

However - domestic outsourcing (such as to the company that I run ;)) does work. We use TDD, source countrol, iterations, product roadmaps, daily standups, code reviews, continuous build integration, and all the good stuff.

Also, all the good domestic outsourcing companies approach the projects with a "let's build a long-term relationship" mentality. Why wouldn't we? It's much more profitable and less of a hassle to do a good job and keep getting repeat business from the same customer than to do a crappy job and keep spending budget on marketing to attract new ones.