skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How big do you all think Facebook can reasonably get to? I have to think it's going to be difficult for Facebook to grow anywhere near as fast as they did to this point unless they can get to China.

It seems like most US companies (search, portal, etc.) haven't done very well in China - will Facebook be able to buck this trend?
Some classic AI books sort of take this approach, introducing concepts followed by small programs, followed by more concepts, followed by building up more complex programs, etc. They aren't mainly PLs books, but they serve as Lisp intros as well. Traditionally, teaching Lisp and teaching AI was done as an integrated process, which is an approach that gives the PL side some built-in, non-contrived examples to use. However, the focus is admittedly very much on the AI, and Lisp gets introduced sort of in passing, when needed.

Two examples (code examples/solutions linked) are Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (http://www.norvig.com/paip/README.html) and Building Problem Solvers (http://www.qrg.northwestern.edu/bps/directory.html).
I love hackathons. With more content this could be something that I would use. As far as feedback. Geolocating on the homepage for hackathons near the user would be an instant way to demonstrate the usefulness. Just a thought.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
Nice links!

Agreed about the amount of space used up when the blocks are closed, but once you've clicked a few to view the internal code, it's not such a big deal.

Perhaps someone else would like to take up the challenge of make the jQuery code navigable by treemap!?
Python's free lists
Dell recalling motherboards containing malware-infected firmware
I prefer scripting languages over a pure Java stack simply because I can reload the page and see what's happening with the new code. Yes, you can use JRebel, hook up a debugger and tweak settings to get some hot code replacement, but they've always failed me at one point or another, resulting in hours of fun. The compile-check-fix-compile cycle gets under my skin, especially when you're using frameworks and libraries that take a minute to bootstrap.

The JSTL is not a factor in speeding up development. A lot of people even prefer a Velocity or Freemarker template engine when they are using Java. And I've never worked with MyBatis but have done plenty of projects with Hibernate/JPA and let me tell you: I've often come at a point in a project where I was wondering how much time I had saved by not writing the easy SQL queries and how much time I had lost by trying to work around some random restriction in the Hibernate API. For all the "hate" Django's ORM gets, I've never run into the same obstacles.

With all that said, the Play! framework addresses a lot of these issues and is a lot more fun to work with.
Because it takes hard work and discipline to objectively determine where to optimize or whether an optimization is necessary - let alone to determine which situations need to be optimized for in the first place.[1]

And, frankly, quite a bit of premature optimization takes less time than doing that work.

[1] Optimizing for readability has definite pay-off over the life of a project, but good luck quantifying it ahead of time.
What? The comments are why I read Hackernews.
Software developers are artists
painting by numbers (art by demographic statistics): http://www.amazon.com/Painting-Numbers-Komar-Melamids-Scient...

When I was 10, The Flintstones had an episode about this. Fred and Barney gathered statistics about what people wanted in a song, and then composed it. They catered to all subjects, and a punchline was that one of them was "mothers-in-law". The song was terrible; the main message seemed to be that such art lacks integrity (not in an ethical sense, but in a sense of fitting together, being whole, being one thing). Of course, such lack isn't necessary (eg. the Monkees had some great songs), but it is much harder than speaking out of a deeper truth. Perhaps it's like the flow of writing off the top of your head vs. over-editing and getting a patchwork of concepts and mismatched conjugations.

I've always liked the idea of a work being both popular and critically acclaimed (who doesn't?). I do think there's a thrill in doing something that is very cool to yourself; but there is also a thrill in doing something that is truly valuable to people. Both can be aspects of the heroic journey, of serving something greater than oneself: serving an idea, or serving a community.

But I think this may be a little different for art (which Sivers is talking about) and software (which I'm (mainly) talking about).
They aren't programmers, though.
I think the most interesting aspect of this is that you have implemented a VNC client in JavaScript and HTML. That realy is your core technology and probably has the most value. I could see that being realy useful for implementing things like 3d CAD in the browser, the interface and controls could be plain HTML/CSS and use your vnc technology to show the 3d graphics being drawn on the server.

Could you offer some insight into how your JavaScript vnc works?
Literate programming in smalltalk
The Harsh Realities of Starting a Small Business
You don't need the cast :-)

Func<int, int> Sum(int x) { return y => x + y; }
Ask HN: Are you tired of Google Reader?
Currently Google Reader is the main app that most use to read RSS, but it doesn't really handle reading other sources such as articles that you come across online. For those, there's Instapaper and Read it Later to name a few.

I was wondering is there room for innovation in reading apps. I think it's safe to say that people read a lot more (specially online) these days than ever before. In addition, I don't think the amount of reading is going to decrease in coming years.

Do you think there's a market for a better reader app or Google has already won the war? In addition, will you pay for a better reader app? If so, how much and what features you would like to see?

Thanks!
Facebook's blog post actually says "500 million people all around the world are actively using Facebook" (emphasis mine), which makes this much more impressive.

Though I'd like to know what qualifies one as active. I'd also like to know the total number of registered users.
It doesn't take me days to get a Java web app up and running. It takes me minutes. In days, my Java web app is done.

I'm a senior engineer who codes for pleasure, so maybe I'm faster than average --- but if it's taking you days to get your libraries together and minor db changes touch every layer, you're doing something wrong.
Partial functions in Ruby, plus a comment why to use them
I normally don't post my own writings to HN. Yet, as many people say here in the comments, there seems to be a shortage of tech submissions here, so here it is.

This is a quite fresh blog and I have a mental queue of articles summarizing years of evaluating Erlang, Haskell, Clojure, other Lisps (yeah a have even LFE macros created just for fun) and stuff. The writings are definitely not technically groundbreaking, but I usually put some effort explaining why stuff XYZ is worth using in a daily coding and I think that's the value I want to share. Please stay tuned if you liked the general outcome, or point me to the things you didn't like :)
The checks that CAs perform before issuing a cert can be pretty minimal - sometimes as simple as sending an email to an administrator address at the domain in question.

And do you trust all of the CAs who have certs on your machine? I did a quick check of the list on this box and I have no idea who most of these organizations are!
Presumably you saved up at least 50K from that job, which means you have bought the security of knowing you won't starve, which is a great happiness if you realize how bad life can get.

if you didn't save money, well.............
Competitive doesn't necessarily mean productive.

The stock market functioned perfectly well (well, you know what I mean) for 100 years before HFT came about. Now that it's here, does the stock market work better? No, it works worse, if anything. It's just another way for insiders to win by rigging the game.

My problem with Wall St and seemingly Dixon's is that it's all about rigging things to your advantage rather than competing on quality. HFT doesn't create value, it just agglomerates wealth to those with servers in the right colos. Mutual funds and credit cards, as you say, are optimized towards leveraging an immovable market position to extract money from the rest of the economy.

If someone on Wall St is creating value commensurate with their salary, I'm all about that. But it seems like the vast majority are extracting their salary from the rest of the country as an effective tax on investment rather than actually creating wealth.
This is one of the specific reasons the Stripes Framework (http://stripesframework.org/display/stripes/Home) was created. The idea behind it is that most Java frameworks require too much configuration and the start-up time (to get rolling with development) isn't short.

Stripes looks to solve both of these problems while making it (actually) fun to do Java development. There's extremely little XML config setup.

There's not a single person I know that's familiar with Struts (1 or 2) and/or Spring MVC (or any other Java framework for that matter) that's tried Stripes, learned it in a day or two, and not really liked it.

Daoud also has a great book, "Stripes: ...and Java Web Development Is Fun Again" that's a great resource for starting out. In addition, the Stripes community is small enough that you can access the code contributors on a daily basis through IRC or the mail lists.

With Stripes-Reload and Stripersist, you can get a CRUD app up and running in under a few minutes--I think that's on par with RoR, isn't it?

IMHO, it's worth looking at.
Really? So how do you align that with e.g.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work or the 'without prejudice' clause in art. 2.3 of the Berne Convention?
When CONSTants vary (critique of 'const' in C++)
Yeah, but 99.9% of what you want to do with web.xml can be summarized in about 2-3 pages of documentations. It's NOT as complicated as you make it sound. The same goes for JSPs and JSTL. You could have a decent understanding of both technologies in an afternoon of reading.
I too found registering with open id confusing. I actually searched around the web how my openid url should look like and pasted it in input box. It didn't occur to me that Google logo below might be a button that will do that for me.
Thanks for making me feel a bit better. The only way I can get a valid web.xml file is by getting started from a simple copy and then relying on my IDE to warn me when I'm about to make a mistake. Come to think of it: I don't know when I last started a Java web app from scratch. The first thing I do is copy the configuration from an existing project and strip out everything I don't need.
"users who have returned to the site in the last 30 days"
facebook.com/press/info.php?factsheet
The overall article makes sense BUT, I know people who have worked in the same place for over 10 years, love the job, are productive and get results. They don't work their butts off, they have achieved some kind of state where they know what the company really needs are delivers exactly that.
From my own experience of working with Java/JSP at work and PHP for side projects (I'm also learning Python), it comes down to developer productivity -- rapid application development, deployment speed and developer experience. For most small- to medium-size projects, you can achieve the same results in Java, PHP, Python, Ruby and even ASP, but the journey towards completion varies greatly across languages and tools.

IMHO deployment on the Java stack is not as fun. Time spent configuring Tomcat, Ant, and compiling code adds-up, especially for a basic web app or prototype. The Java stack also has a larger learning curve for beginners.

However, if you work on "enterprise" applications, especially ERP, finance and banking, Java is currently the lingua franca.
I once worked for a software house that had real standards, real code walk-throughs, and real quality control. Standards were enforced vigorously through automation and peer review. Those standards included precise variable naming conventions.

At the time, I hated it because I thought it cramped my style.

Since then, I have worked in many shops with no standards at all and most of the crap I've had to maintain looked just like OP's examples. Probably written by someone who didn't like his style cramped.

Funny how it sometimes takes years to understand that which once made no sense.
Know the way to make money
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Lose Weight: What Are the Best Ways to Naturally Increase Metabolism?
It is very fast without sacrificing abstraction.

This is what I use it for. My program ends up being as long as Perl, but as fast as C. For me, that's the best of both worlds.

For gluing libraries together, it's not the best, but in the last few months it's gotten quite good. There is hardly anything I want to do that would involve reinventing any wheels that I already have in $other_language.
I agree with what you're saying, however I was unclear and my intention was the point out that it's the corporation that is satisfied and even prefers factory-style workers for large numbers of positions. I'm talking about corporations for whom the business is not software.
Death Grip Testing on iPhone Competitors Shows Mixed Results
So the theme is "let users know about conveniently located competitions." definitely a possibility when more hackathons are using the site to organize. Chicago today - the world next.
Your example 2 is actually not as ridiculous as you state. For example, the following lines are from Market Watch Frame 1 in the TPC-E benchmark.

open stock_list
do until(stock_list.end_of_cursor) {
fetch from
stock_list cursor
into
symbol

select
new_price = LT_PRICE
from
LAST_TRADE
where
LT_S_SYMB = symbol

We spend a lot of time trying to optimize these types of OLTP transactions and in certain cases you may be better off using this structure than a more esoteric, less optimized construct.

Edit: I guess I should mention that the cursor in there is going to hurt. Just an example -- don't always actually do that and rely on us to speed up your transaction.
ahoyhere, thanks for the insight. I am working on pricing for our startup right now. We serve different markets, but I found your pricing structure interesting, that is why I used it as an example. Is there something to be said for offering a very cheap package instead of free (similar to the Chompstack pricing)? Have you guys tried that at Freckle?
I'm curious what your framework of choice is.
Cool design and layout.

What's the radius you've set for your search? I put in an East Bay zip (in the SF Bay Area) and nothing came up.
map is already a short identifier and a real word

This is heresy, but I actually think it might be better if it weren't a real word. I find I benefit from inventing names for functions or data abtractions. It helps to clear the mind of what those things might be.

Plus making map into mp or whatever makes it much more googleable. And don't get me started on Clojure having map and a Map.
Wikipedia statistics
It pays to be smart eh?
Hey, Taking any interns for free?
I was a math major too, but no way would I consider CS to be too easy.
no in that case they would execute him by a firing squad and tweet about it (sick)
How to Build Momentum
Google restates the FTC’s dissection of newspaper revenue: 80% advertising, 17% newsstand, 3% subscriptions. “Pay walls,” it says, “could be an effective way to raise the 3% revenue figure.”

Amdahl's Law, anybody? Its not just relevant for software optimization. Certain other hot topics could use a logical assessment like that (e.g. greenhouse gas emission).
>Maybe it's because I was always more social with adults than the annoying other middle/high school idiots

Having good communication also means being able to relate to your peers, despite what you think about their intelligence.
Ask HN: Machine learning careers
I am interested in machine learning and natural language processing, but am slightly put off from devoting a significant amount of time towards it because I am under the impression that to make a career doing this, it is seemingly mandatory to have a PhD and you will be working in a research lab at a large corporation, the government, or a university. Is this true?
Well, I was thinking of the piece of the 5th amendment that says "No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". I don't know what you call that clause, but there is definitely such a thing.

In my opinion, it's intended to protect against government oppression in the form of taking away things you value. But if you were to include "access to family" on that list, I'd put it about where I'd put "avoidance of bodily injury". Here: "Life, family, liberty, property".

That government institutions can so casually disrupt family bonds, either temporarily, permanently, or during a long investigation? It makes a mockery of the protection against government we are supposed to have. They can't search your car without a warrant, but keep your head down or someone might call the CPS and they might arbitrarily decide to TAKE YOU FROM YOUR PARENTS.

(And it's silly to bring up a seriously abusive case like Josef Fritzl. The right to exercise your parenting philosophy is like the right to exercise your religion. I want to defend it against busybodies. I even want to defend your ability to hurt people, up to a degree. But there's a limit; we don't tolerate sexual assault in the context of cults, and we shouldn't tolerate it in the context of parenting either.

With that said, would I want to limit the state's ability to ACT IMMEDIATELY to separate kids and parents in a seriously and clearly abusive case, in order to offer normal people the protection of due process? Yes, I think I would make that tradeoff. Abuse is rare, and the kid who's lived with the problem for years can manage another six hours while you get your expedited, emergency warrant.)
Try Haskell: An interactive tutorial in your browser
As a developer and all around geek I frequently find myself being asked to help with digital devices (i.e. change a digital watch to summer time, set the wheel circumference on a bicycle computer, etc). I don't think I am alone in this here. This is our life. With the knowledge that holding down "SET" for 3 seconds, the digits tend to start to blink, that makes us invincible in the digital age.

Obviously, this guy proves that it goes far and it applies to a website such as stackoverflow as well. When I came to stackoverflow 1 year ago I had an amazingly streamlined experience. But of course, I had previous experience from using the internet. I expected that

* the site search box to be in the upper right corner, and use the verb "search" or "find"
* the login/register links to be in the same upper right corner
* most publishing tools have a permalink to be found in relation to posts on the page
* 'flag' is likely related to fighting spam, a problem most open forums have
* 'tagging' is that which was made popular in this whole web 2.0 craze
* "Ask Question" would mean something involving "asking" and "a question"
* an up/down arrow, above and under a number would increment or decrement that number
* it is beneficial to place a mouse pointer over items to see if there is clarifying mouse-over text, but with little fear I tend to push buttons to see what happens as well

Complaining about ads by guessing they're not effective, or that the careers link is just hidden ads also seem quite malicious. They got to earn money, and having read jeff's/joel's blog entries on the success of ads on stackoverflow I am very sure that they've been trying out different things to see what works.

It is difficult to criticize these remarks without sounding a like a wise-ass. He does have remarks about sensible things, such as the graphical element used for sorting answers, or the background colors of areas that have static and less than important information. But I guess this guy primary mistake was to frame his remarks as "these are things that need to be changed, because im a designer and user experience expert", rather than "these are things that would be interesting to perform A/B-tests on to see if they improve the experience". That is how it came across anyway.
When You Startup with UX
I would recommend worrying about Windows licensing now. I worked for a company doing something quite similar for two years and I remember that Windows licensing is a bit of a sticky spot.
Spring, Spring MVC, SiteMesh, JSTL, JSP and iBatis.
Recently I started working on a new project using Tapestry 5.1 in GlassFish 3. That particular combination requires replacing GF's StAX lib with a different implementation that Tapestry depends on. Then there's the usual issue of reconciling the 2-3 different logging frameworks that various components depend on, writing the (albeit minimal XML descriptors for the app, web app, EJB, configuring resources in the app server admin console, etc.

It's unlikely you can do all that in minutes, so you're probably talking about copying an existing app template.

Adding a db column requires modifying the entity itself, DTOs, form beans, and of course the relevant JSP/templates. With Rails conventions you'd only modify the pages.
"However, once an employee shares all of his external knowledge, learns all that there is to know about the business, and applies all of his past experiences, the growth stops."

I never worked anywhere where anyone could "learns all that there is to know about the business".

Challenges change over time, what you need to know (and therefore learn) various hugely with each new challenge.

"Value Apex" sounds like a pseudo scientific term justified with a few invented graphs.
My opinion. It's partly because teams who do webapps tend to be small, young and agile. First, prejudices: they prefer new things (Java is old); they dislike the environment that is Java's home (big enterprise) and the practices and personalities types that go with it (perfectionistic, professional, conservative).

Second, real reasons: Java is verbose and statically typed, and therefore it takes more work to make changes - it is slower to develop in and less flexible/agile. These things really count when you want to try out an idea; and when you need to adapt it. There's also a community effect, where all those early adopters are working with Ruby/Python, that's the platform cool stuff gets developed for (eg. sinatra, github, haml).

Technically, it's possible to write a sinatra in Java (I have; using annotations for urls); but who would use it? I actually love Java myself, including its static typing, and use it in my startup. But when I've played with Ruby - even as a novice without knowing the tricks - I found it much quicker to develop in, and the code easier to understand because less cluttered. It's probably not as reliable; and the code doesn't run as fast; but these things just don't matter for prototypes and early versions.