skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Although I use Rails for most web apps that I do now, there was a period from about 11 years ago to about 5 years ago that JSP was the sweet spot for me. I would put a lot of embedded Java in JSPs, and as an app matured, I migrated the code to custom tag libraries (easy to write once you have everything working in JSPs).

For me part of the lure of JSP apps was that I really liked Tomcat as a development and deployment platform. For apps that needed a lot of background processing, I started work threads in servlet init methods, and liked having everything in one JVM.

I had one app running without restart for several years until my customer's admins let the server run out of free disk space. I am not at all confident of a Rails app running for 3 to 4 years with no restarts.

To answer your question: I might still choose JSP for high volume web apps. For apps with a modest number of users, Rails makes more sense for me.
Then how do you explain Evernote with this theory? They seem to be doing just fine.

I am not talking about creating a desktop app or a new protocol. I'm suggesting a better reader web app with more functionality than just displaying RSS feeds. Something that makes keeping up with the information overload more manageable, be it RSS feeds, email, articles, etc.

Thanks!
"Lost" Languages to Be Resurrected by Computers?
What relevance does that have to this story? He beta tested something, he isn't in charge of it.
Keynotopia: iPhone/iPad app prototyping with keynote
Skype iPhone update: no additional charges for calling over 3G
You are assuming shared memory as the communication medium. When using processes, you can use sockets for IPC for example. The advantage is that the application can then scale beyond a single system with no change - something that's impossible to do with threads.
It's easier to implement and more scalable. Far from a red herring, the persistent focus on threads for concurrency imposes limitations that are unnecessary in modern systems, and slows development.
I wonder if a thin coat of clear nail polish would accomplish the same thing in a less ugly way.
I've been tracking my diet and exercise routines on Daily Burn, and I like it a lot. It's an easy way to track calories and macronutrients. You'll learn a lot about what you eat after you track it for a few days.

http://dailyburn.com/
diff <(ssh user@host cat remote-filename) local-filename

is a bit more intuitive too. You can put anything that writes to stdout in the <(), too. (Useful for decrypting or decompressing on the fly.)
SketchChair: sketch, print, and cut your own flat pack chair
What made William James such a good philosopher: he was a good human being
Facebook's user population has been larger than the US population, ~300 million, for about a year. Facebook, considered as a nation, would have the 3rd largest population in the world. To move into 2nd place, Facebook would have to pass India -- 1.2 billion users/citizens.
That's probably the right solution, but it's a hard problem. NetBSD is probably the kernel that goes to the most effort to make clean, modular, orthogonal abstractions across hardware families and components, but it took them a lot of design effort up front, and continual policing of the abstraction boundaries and debugging of weird variants to make things actually work that way.
yeah the quality is going to be terrible and your going to hear a lot hissing but it will work!
He left off the use of proxytunnel, which lets you tunnel SSH through an HTTP/S proxy, even if it requires authentication:

http://proxytunnel.sourceforge.net/usage.php

Also, as others have mentioned, -D is pretty useful (SOCKS proxy).
The "demo" version of heroku has only one process, I think, and 5MB storage. The first professional version is already quite expensive. I pay 10$/month for my server (split with a friend).

I host several projects on that one server (incubation...).
How I Cope With My Startup
Thanks RiderOfGiraffes, I always find your links quite handy. You somehow bring back to my mind Saunt Lora's proposition in Anathem.
Software development passed outside the realm where a single human brain could fully comprehend the entirety of the project at every level of detail about 5 decades ago. The question is not whether abstractions are required to allow human brains to deal with threading, that's a given, the question is whether or not we have the right abstractions.
Reminded me of a good quote:

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” - Mark Twain
It was an interesting recruiting idea, but it's out there now.
I think HFT is bad because it substitutes "create value" for "game the system".

I won't miss the .01 that much, but if they do it a billion times.. they still didn't create anything. They just extracted money from the system while producing zero value.

EDIT: As far as who's being hurt? All of us. Smart people should be creating value, not playing silly parlor games against each other for money. We're all missing out by making a video game more profitable than creating things.
One of the biggest 'ah-ha' moments I had with SSH was that I could create my own hosts with certain properties. For example, if I wanted a backup server with a special user and key I could add it to my ~/.ssh/config file

Host backup-server
HostName backup.example.com
User backup
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/backup_dsa

Then just have a shell script run

$ ssh backup-server

It ended up working really well.

Also, control sockets.
Dan should see the original (un)design: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/07/stack-overflow-beta-de...

More seriously, the link above shows how early on Jeff Atwood got design input from the people who use the site. Jeff's comment on Dan's critique also show how they continue to work with the users on design, and they've hired a designer, Jin, who also commented.

The post is like a small version of the American Airlines design critique post from a while ago, complete with a polite explanation of why the design is the way it is.
Er, yeah, -T will work, but of course you don't get an interactive shell. Works for one-off cmds or for running a shell script or something.
That was something of a palace coup, though--- x.org wasn't really an upstart fork, but a secession of a large portion of the XFree86 core team. They also managed to get the X Consortium to hand over the old x.org domain to them and bless their version as the new official reference implementation, which cemented their new status.
I really want to get an old DynaTAC shell and insert the components from a new twenty-dollar phone.

You can get something pretty close.

http://www.babikenshop.com/triband-retro-brick-mobile-cell-p...
Pretty sure you and I just said the same thing, though let me just add that just because you hang something off a socket doesn't mean your design can't serialize around it. Having 100 concurrent workers doesn't help if all of them are just lining up waiting for another program to answer their messages.

Of course, this is the exact same problem you have when you try to make a naive design concurrent by wrapping all the global variables in mutexes.
Secretary Napolitano Announces Major Aviation Security Milestone
Along the same lines as number 1. You can transfer a directory with

$ ssh user@host "tar cvzf - /path" | tar xvzf - /path
It looks a lot better than the official bumpers.
100 percent of passengers traveling within the United States and its territories are now being checked against terrorist watchlists through the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) Secure Flight program
The orange banner is the worst part of the design. I hate it, and have refrained to use the site in part because of it.
If you'd like to join in the header-sniffing fun, here's a bookmarklet that will show a site's HTTP headers in a popup: http://pastebin.com/pTDun3GT
I have run websites done in Java running on Tomcat plus MySQL plus Wine/Win32 programs and a few other services with 128M Linux servers. Tomcat takes up about 30M to 40M. The 512MB or 2GB are simply misinformation.
Kind of off topic, but I'm not a fan of their re-branding. Perhaps there's some oDesk envy? (Rent a Coder is now vWorker for those that didn't click through)
Heh, but I think an accessory for an Apple product should have an Apple-level attention to detail: iOS 4 changed the text on that button to just "End", not "End Call". Granted, the joke works better when it is explicit.
How a 15-yo Kid Tricked Apple With a Disguised iPhone Tethering App
How developers can win Congress
In school, we had a group that did microgravity experiments in freefall, could be useful research applications along those lines. Although I'm not sure how much control you have over the physical satellite.

Perhaps you could do some LEO photography? I'm thinking, if this is possible, there could be some interesting mapping applications.
I think Java and its plethora of frameworks makes new developers feel overwhelmed. Python clearly has Django, Ruby clearly has Rails, Java has... what? Struts? Spring? Tiles? Servlets? JSPs? Tag libraries? Where do you start?

To an outsider, it feels like there is a mountain of material to wade through before you can really get going with a Java webapp; for Python and Ruby, the perceived barrier to entry is much lower.
The 0Exploit Privilege Escalation
Do this and feel good about it:

* Create a leaderboard for your 'cheerleaders' (ie. the most cheery people).

* Let them send eachother virtual gifts. Make all but a few of them free.

Do this and take a pill in order to sleep at night:

* Automate the creation of 'sad' entries. (Just enough to make your 'cheerleaders' feel important, but not too much, or they will feel spammed)

* Automate the sending of free gifts, send to lots of 'sad' people. Basically, here you're trying to seem like a vibrant gift-giving community.

* Automate the sending of premium gifts, send to only a few 'sad' people. To set a precedent for paid gifts. Be sure to show this on your front page, and somewhere in your app.

* After a real-life user posts a 'sad' entry, immediately redirect them to Facebook to share their sadness, thus increasing the spread.
Same here. Whenever a web site has some intrusive pop-up like thing like this, I almost reflexively reach for the back button.

The worst is AllThingsD's "note about tracking cookies." Why do they think they need that?
It's vain when you think that your deepest feelings are so interesting that people would want to hear about them them. It's vain when you're more concerned with what you have to say than whether people will enjoy hearing it.

I get genuinely angry when I go to a gig or a show where it's obvious that the performers are self-absorbed and have no interest in the audience. The audience have paid to come into town, they've paid for their tickets, they are paying for drinks at the bar, the least the band can do is try to entertain them. When bands play indulgent solos or play a bad song that the drummer has written, they're insulting their audience by saying that their ego as a band is more important than the enjoyment of the fans.

If you keep a diary or paint purely for your own pleasure then that's fine, the problem comes when you expect people to care about your art. We tell aspiring writers and musicians and artists that they should 'be true to their art', but I think that's dead wrong - I think your duty is to be true to your audience.

There's an interesting exception in comedy. A bad comic can't hide - if he's not funny, it's obvious to everyone. Today, comedy is really the only artform where it's acceptable for an audience to boo off a performer, but historically it was commonplace in all performing arts. I think we as a culture should be prepared to say "no, you haven't worked hard enough on your performance, go home until you're good enough to entertain". It happens every night at comedy clubs, but rarely anywhere else.

I think that mistake is a symptom of the prizes-for-all narcissism that says everyone's opinion matters no matter how ill-informed or poorly thought out, that every crude doodle is a work of art if the doodler really meant it. A fundamental trait of narcissism is magical thinking, the belief that wishing something makes it so. The art world has in many respects come to define art as whatever the artist decides is art.
No, the old search was Solr based, this one uses only the lucene index file structure. Not even the scorer is lucene-based.
So does this mean this is the year people will finally give up on calling Facebook a "fad"?
I wrote some stuff about monads on HN a while ago that some people found helpful: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=247446
I'd like to have more filtering in Reader. E.g. hide articles based on a regex. Have a collaborative filtering layer so once I've voted a few dozen articles from a feed it figures out what to hide.
So they have very good and thorough documentation. Why is that a problem? In my experience, setting up web.xml is a matter of copying the prepackaged one and change a few lines to specify settings about your app.
you should try. all -T does is not allocate a tty: most shells will still work. bash/zsh/rc do for sure.
That gives you tab completion, too!
I guess it turns out that all of those people who want rentacoders to make facebook clones really aren't that far off the mark.
Tips for Getting Your Startup on Stage
I wonder if a REPL might be counterproductive in a first language. Everyone seems to agree that the ability to produce a "thing" quickly and easily is important. In contrast every time I see an tutorial or introduction to a language with a REPL making a thing is always de emphasized in preference for showing off the language facilities.

Well except Logo which was all about making art "things."
Thanks. I really like these collection of online interpreters. I have just been trying to decide on a new language to play around with (ruby being one of them) and it's great to run through these tutorials and get a good basic feel of the language.

Also may have found a small bug:

In Functions [of a Geisha] when I did the final example ((1,"George")) it does not advance, however clicking and hitting enter seems to work.
Antennagate Addendum
I liked the term "beachheads of bad code". Will probably use that next time I come across badly written code in a commercial context.
From my experience, I agree with you on Hibernate. MyBatis however turned out to be rather painless. I've also noticed that Play framework and looks really great, just haven't had the chance to play around with it much.
i notice there is no php in that profile
It's still probably inflated by people with multiple profiles and people that quit within the month etc. However, it's also still accurate enough to be really impressive.
Google Energy signs 20-year wind power contract (114 MW)
Until the buyers catch on
Given what I learnt in GEB, with the strange loops that could develop given this infinite recursion, StackVM will likely become conscious in the near future.

StackVM? More like Skynet.
It's the competency barrier.
Dear Gartner, Fire Andrea Di Maio
Microsoft Codename "Dallas"
No, it doesn't. Next!

ts;dr: This title is such flagrant linkbait that I can't bring myself to click on it, even though I'm a hippy rubyist and bash on java all the time.
Flipboard is a marvelous way to surf Hacker News
A digital camera inspired by Holga
5 Reasons Why Nexus One Failed
'Her Campus' - building a community for women
It is unnecessarily verbose, just as Java itself. It is a problem because it makes finding and digesting the required information difficult. Unfortunately there seems to be only a choice between insufficient documentation (RoR) or too much documentation.

Anyway, if you are fine with Java, more power to you. The question was "why do few people here use Java" not "why nobody should use Java".
“Jitterbug” phones are marketed as simple, no-frill for certain demographics. (Mostly senior citizens and the vision impared.) IIRC, the outfit also tried to market a phone for little kids called the “Ladybug,” but that didn’t get far.

http://www.jitterbug.com/
Skype iPhone update: now supports multitasking
Well, because they'll die in a matter of weeks, for one. Sending up a swarm of them just makes the loss costlier and thus strengthens the case for sending up a proper satellite.
As a gradually reforming software performance engineer, I spent a lot of time discovering type 2 items off in enterprise software. I think your background is similar.

What is more amazing, is I think a number of projects I worked on as a performance tester had no developer on staff or team for a large enterprise software product who could make a determination that the type 2 error had occurred. I think this was mainly the result of having only background in a specific tech stack (I saw lots of low-hanging opportunities for doing set operations in the database rather than pulling stuff in with J2EE or even in db code written in an imperative style . . . <shudders when thinking of T-SQL in legacy product> ).
An evaluation of the usual suspects would have been more interesting. I'd also suggest: start with a small language that doesn't surprise people -- like lua maybe.

Anyway, I personally learned much from my early exposure to Pascal (after having learned BASIC as first language), which was designed as a teaching language that doesn't meet any of those requirements.
Facebook's user ids are generated sequentially. If you register a new account today, your user id (without padding) will be over 1.2 billion [1].

I also find it hard to believe that 75%+ of people who have -ever signed up for Facebook- would be active in the past month.

------------------------------

[1] Obviously not all of these are real, many could have been deleted, etc. But we're talking about gross number of accounts, not humans.
No idea why you're being downmodded. This is a barely, if at all coherent rant that is a month away from being 6 years old.

Most all of it boils down to "there are too many choices" or "eww xml", etc.
cool. I was thinking about setting up a hosted lucene thing after watching my friend trying to get solr to do 'did you mean searches' - of course I didn't do it so kudos to you!

The thing is, you're going to have to be very clear about QOS, future pricing, vendor lockin etc. before you can get people with established businesses to sign up to it.
Any solar hackers out there? I wonder if you could extend that lifetime at all - that's like a bonus experiment on top of whatever else you're doing.
Was never aware of that. Maybe stackoverflow could do with a redesign to make it more obvious ;)
Loan Originator ooba Boosts Performance, Cuts Downtime with F5 BIG-IP Solution
Misfit Entrepreneurs
Maybe I'm remembering wrong, but didn't QBASIC actually have a REPL?
I was referring to things like ADO.NET, event driven control data bindings, etc.
- I can't stand working in an IDE.

Are you saying this because you mostly work with smaller web apps, or other reasons? For larger projects I find IDE's (especially Eclipse for JAVA indispensable).
Thanks for the wishes.

Now to address your suggestions:

1. That is awesome, I have added it to our wiki. This is easily doable and we'll probably implement it.

2. We haven't yet looked into implementing cut&paste. Should be doable.

3. James will join me in the next videos.

4. We're definitely building a test environment. We couldn't do it earlier because we didn't have a good remote method call execution framework, but now James wrote dnode [1] and we can get to implementing it!

[1] http://github.com/substack/dnode
£65k = ~98.8k in the US. But, even still 170k is penuts to the type of people that can get those jobs.
What? KitchenSinkNuclearReactorDependencyInjectionSingletonFactoryObserver is excessive?
>Purity Basically the only proper way to write your software in Java is system independent; you’re stuck with the common denominator. On the server side this usually isn’t the biggest problem, but when you do client stuff, you might want to use the system tray in Windows. No! Thou shallt write pure code! Oh sorry, I bought this really cool OS that has all those cool features, but now I can’t use them because that’d affect my purity. Get the f@#$)(#@$*@#!

First, this limitation is true of any "cross-platform" language. If you're writing "pure" Python, you don't get to use the system tray either. Of course, both Java and Python have native interfaces (via JNI and C extensions, respectively), so you do get to use the system tray if you choose to do so. You'll just need to leave the world of the least common denominator and write an interface to the native OS.

>In Java not everything is an object (or can be treated that way): there’s also primitives. Primitives (int, float, char, double, byte, …) are radically different than objects. The only reason they’re here is for speed’s sake, and to complicate things more. This sucks.

I do agree with this point. In retrospect, something like C#'s autoboxing would go a long way towards smoothing over the distinction between objects and primitive types. I haven't programmed Java in years, though. Does it have autoboxing yet?
Apple vs. Google vs. Microsoft vs. HP: Truth About the Smartphone
Right back at you: Baydin
Interview with Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn: the early days
Agreed on the emotional. I have worked on several JSP sites that are 5 or 10 years old. In every case the JSP code is terrible. In all there was not a clear understanding of the MVC model. Sure there was some MVC handwaving, but for the most part there was a lot of java code doing bits of this and that which should be in the model.

Another problem is the 5 to 15 minute compile, deploy, restart the server cycle.

And the nasty use of XML to integrate the half dozen frameworks which are never consistent from client to client. All of this is a huge blow to productivity.
I used to write desktop apps and also do drivers and VxDs for Windows. One of the things I strongly disliked about that work is that you are working in an environment where there is a huge amount of infrastructure that you are intimately dependent upon and that is hidden from you.

Java brings that kind of thing to the server, and I want no part of it.
> rather than his point - Stack Overflow's design is poor,

Well, that's supposed to be his point. But saying something is "poor" because it doesn't match your personal taste isn't really much of a point and will never convince anyone. And nobody is obligated to provide a "defense" for not liking your favorite color.

"To my ears, the Rolling Stones succeeded despite that the fact they are poor songwriters and Mick Jagger has limited vocal range"
Is the death of the CD looming?
I read this very recently here on Hacker News, about paying a succesful salesperson/marketer more than the CEO (presumably yourself) in a startup.
His design also has a larger fold. Keeping the browser screen shots of equal sizes would be fair.
Yeah, we discussed this. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1522807 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1529572
Hmmmm, I wonder if I'm alone in having the "internet" and "internet advertising" change the way I read pages compared to traditional(expert) views of how people read pages.

Main point being I focus exclusively on the center content portion. Ads and BS have trained me to completely ignore sidebars and mostly ignore headers(some sites the header/center content is not clearly seperted). I never look at banner/menu until unless I want to explore site.
Jive Software raises 30 million
What are you using for the underlying virtualization?
Just to be fair - if this is your criteria, Rails is worse than most Java stacks.