skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From what I've seen/heard, I think the lack of cheap hosting was one of the biggest things that kept Java from catching on as a preferred platform for the kinds of webapps that you see people building with PHP and/or RoR. That problem has, IMO, been mitigated somewhat by the emergence of cheap VPS providers... now hosting is hosting, and what you run on your server is entirely up to you. But by the time cheap VPS's became commonplace, it had become "cool" to hate Java. And, to be fair, there is a little more of a learning curve to get started with Java and most of the Java based webapp stacks, compared to, say, RoR or whatever.

Also, to be fair, other platforms have "caught up" to what were some of the early advantages of Java. For example, at one time I would have cited JMS and the easy accessibility of async messaging from Java as a big advantage. But now there are a bazillion messaging systems and most (if not all) of the major ones have easy to use client libraries in Perl, Python, Ruby, etc.

OTOH, Groovy/Grails brings a lot of the advantages of a RoR type framework to a JVM based ecosystem, as does Rails on JRuby, so more and more things are evolving to where the various platforms are approaching parity.
Tough to take a step back when all you do is work day and night. This type of post carries extra weight when it's from a man as busy as Mark Suster.
As far as justice goes, I don't have any sympathy for someone who continually stole other people's efforts and took all the money/glory/power. I doubt he'll lose it all, but I wouldn't consider that unfair.

Regardless of what happens, it should prove interesting.
This doesn't solve the problem for the user, this solves the problem for the system.

The user problem is having too many passwords that they need to remember. Using the same password across all sites is a no-no, and due to the site password restrictions, sometimes you need to add extra letters or numbers to your 'standard' passwords that you use and know you'll remember.

If the system is limiting the number of people who can have the same password, how many times am I going to try creating a password that hasn't already been entered into the system?

if my1way is taken, and that is the password I use, then I have to keep guessing until I get one that doesn't exist? Then how will I remember that.

We need human solutions to technical problems, not technical solutions to technical problems.
Dell Ships Infected Motherboards
I second Clause and Effect. (The Little Schemer, too, but CAE doesn't get much attention.)

Sterling and Shapiro's _The Art of Prolog_ is also excellent, though you'll probably be better off reading _Clause and Effect_ first if you've never used Prolog. CAE is all about getting a feel for how Prolog operates, step-by-step* , while TAoP is about the logic programming paradigm, interspersed with project case studies and comparisons between Prolog (as an LP implementation with various compromises) and "pure" LP.

* This is the main thing it has in common with The Little Schemer: both begin by stepping through their respective languages' evaluation at a micro-level, until the semantics feel totally clear. This is especially helpful since Scheme and Prolog are both very different from the typical imperative/OO languages people know.

FWIW, The Little MLer is written in the same style as TLS, and is a good, lightweight introduction to ML's type system / static typing.
Not sure how many languages can do that! :P

At least 21, listed at http://www.paulgraham.com/accgen.html solving a problem that contains this one.
I don't mean to be picky, but could someone correct the title before my OCD brain explodes?
Is it any different from a programmer that creates a product to fill a niche?
> One hurdle facing the digital locker concept is that the retailer collecting money on the sale may not be the one that bears the cost of delivering the movie over set-top boxes or the Internet.
> So far, the necessary web of deals allowing for that complex transaction has not been set up.

That's the major problem with the whole system. If I buy all my content via, say, Amazon, why would Comcast want to deliver it to me for free? Ubiquitous connected DRM has never truly been a technical hurdle. It has always been a business hurdle. Without addressing the rev share issues, UltraViolet appears to be dead in the water.

Not to mention the lack of Apple and their massive installed base of content playback devices.
I'm pretty much a perpetual motion machine of funny iPad typos.

At this point I'm leaning into it. If the word substituted is funny and it doesn't totally ruin the meaning, I am down.
Transparency gives us a sense of control, and control is required for happiness
Too bad it doesn't work outside of the US (unless you somehow map the zip 2100 to a part of Copenhagen, Denmark).

I'm amazed how many sites completely disregard the international audience.
That. And the fact that ORM usually don't allow to structure your database precisely the way you want, in the good ol' fashioned way.
there's quite a well cited wikipedia article that appears to disagree with you: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly . I'm very open to being shown different sources and proven wrong, however.
This was already posted, debated. It was part of a two week session of people posting about how being smart was a detriment to one's ability to be successful.... I suspect there are many smart / successful people who do not agree.
The scanned document I've seen does have a signature on it and Zuckerberg's history with Ceglia should give some picture of whether that signature is authentic.

The signed contract seems to be the main evidence Ceglia is counting on - earlier in the case he said allusion to surprising people when the evidence comes.

So it seems plausible the signature is valid though this naturally doesn't mean Ceglia's suit will succeed.
If by IT, the author means an actual IT department, then I think the real problem is that no matter what your position in IT is, you are just an (often unknown) extension of the Help Desk.

If by developer, you mean people who write whole (or significant parts of) software applications, you find that you usually never get to do this in IT departments.

This is why skilled software developers often leave IT departments. They don't want 20-30 years of integrating pre-written software. They actually want to write the software themselves.
Love the Concept and layout. I would definitely use it but, alas, I am not in the USA and have nothing I can fit into 'Show near zip'. Any chance you could internationalize it?
The original UI is quite usable. When I started using Stack Over Flow, navigation was a headache as the links weren't clear. I'm accustomed to it now.

Why do you need a good navigation if people just hit the website to lookup the answer? If they want to become active members they'll learn it!

The font and colors choice are quite good for reading. Reading for long hours and long periods with this theme without getting tired or annoyed, I should say it was really well designed.
I don't know this artist, but his name seems strangely appropriate for his approach to art.
Is this a feature ??? Seems a lot more verbose than it needs to be, and would likely be slower too :P
it does, you can add bounties to your own questions as well as others.
Well, he'd have been over 18 at that point (18 years, 11 months, since the contract signature date is 23 Apr 2003), but you're right, he was under the age of majority in the State of New York.
I have a working hypothesis that all of the best (or, at least, most famous) artists in history actually worked this way: they first became a "machine" with well-honed skills, and preferences slowly beaten into shape over decades of experience, into which high concepts could be fed and art would emerge—and then fed in the best of their current culture at the time. Shakespeare, for example, or Bach.

If you take an average journeyman artist and try to "plug and chug" culture, you get, well, pop. But if you take a master, you get classics. (And I do mean to imply the converse: if you give a master an input that isn't popular culture, the result likely won't be a classic—in the way that Star Wars or Dark Side of the Moon is classic. Instead, people will refer to it as a "masterpiece", like Lolita or, lately, Inception.)

The main difference between the two types, is that masterpieces just sit there and accrue attention, while classics actually melt back into the culture that spawned them, inviting parody and pastiche to such a point that it could be said they have invented a genre (ahem, Lord of the Rings.) It is the latter that will "stick" to culture hundreds of years hence, while the former will be relegated to scholars and textbooks.
Google only is taking the FTC to school if they realize they're being taken to school. Good luck with that!
I can't speak for everyone but the reasoning behind my choice of php is 3 fold 1) Ease of set-up 2) I'm simply more comfortable with php 3) Better online resources / documentation

In the end it came down to picking a language I was comfortable in and could start moving forward the fastest with.
It's probably different for different kinds of art, but one of the biggest things I like about art/music/literature/etc. is that I'm getting someone else's reaction to things, vision of how things are, opinions on things should be, etc. So it starts feeling fake and misleading if I realize it's not actually their reactions or vision at all, but was, in the extreme case, something carefully concocted out of market research and focus-group testing. Even if I was the focus group, so it was perfectly targeted, I don't actually want art/music that extracts my own vision/ideas/etc. and reflects them back at me! I want to see someone else's take on things.

I feel it's fairly hard to get particularly innovative and deep stuff that way as well. The optimization-based approach to making art can only really optimize surface-level, but rarely gets you a totally new vision, which needs more of a strong creator's imagination behind it. For example, supermarket-romance book publishers using focus groups and metrics could never have invented cyberpunk.
The difference is that SO is not a forum, it's a question and answer site. A key distinction. I think SO's current design serves its purpose well.
On the low end, I've always thought java has a significant disadvantage: memory footprint. In particular, this is compared to PHP/Perl/RoR/etc.

When you start your java app you pre-allocate all the memory you're going to need for the process' lifetime. This could be 512MB, this could be 2GB+, but it's never small. And this is unaffected by your initial traffic volume. It's the same for 0.001 hits/sec or 5 hits/sec.

On the other hand, if you drop a bunch of PHP scripts on a server, Apache only uses the memory it needs. Sure, you may have some pain scaling it later, but to get up and running you can get a cheap server and run your code.

Also, while I have your attention, have you ever tried installing an enterprise java webapp? It's not like you can pile a bunch of them into one JVM on a machine. I run confluence/jira/bamboo. Each has it's own requirements and basically need to run in their own tomcat servers tuned with their own settings. It's a huge PITA and eats up a ton of memory.
Most nimble startups will run away from the regulated aspects of Wall Street. Really none of the functions list escape regulation.

To disrupt Wall Street you would have to get legislation passed and regulators on board. The time scale for change is a different order of magnitude than most startups can handle.

These people generally come from or are connected to the industry and will fear change. Also, what type of disruption would actually benefit society? Not saying nothing is needed. It's just that the arguments would have to be strong to even get an audience in Congress, and they think they just fixed everything.
Just to set up one of the Java frameworks you list is already a lot of work and a lot of wrangling of XML.

Without frameworks, it is probably OK if you already have a working web.xml. I used to just copy my working web.xml and modify it. Good luck if you want to create a working web.xml from scratch, though. The specification for a proper web.xml is a PDF with several 100 pages (last time I looked, a couple of years ago), and to parse it you basically need a scanner for XML specification files in your brain.

That is only for creating the working web.xml. Specifications for JSP and JSTL are several hundred pages on top of that.
As a member of the class of 2009, I heartily agree. I like to think I'm pretty good, but I've been waiting for this ASP page I just wrote to finish with its DB interactions and load for five minutes. Anyone else would have avoided the need for the optimizations I'm about to go figure out.
Does hunger affect risk aversion?
I worked for a "startup" in LA that did something like this. They had big funding, and big names, but were kind of incompetently run.

I'll just say this: the government / military was verrry interested in the honeypot angle.
Also works in Safari 5, at least.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currying
Hah, I built one of those right around that time! A few years later, I went to design school and gradually came to understand the horrors I had wrought.
Showing appreciation by putting them between us and the beef is a bit like tipping a waiter with the cash of the people that ate with you, without asking them.
It gets even more frustrating when they find out you are more skilled than they are. They won't improve their skills to try and match your ability, they'll just ask you to do it for them every time from now on until you leave. What's even sadder is that your boss will likely condone and encourage this behavior.
That's fine as long as it's either Vim or Emacs.
Predicting College Drop Outs
Why would it be unlikely? Is it just because programmers have more college degrees than average? Isn't that more a measure of opportunity and background than it is of ability? In fact, don't you need to come from a relatively affluent background (read: can afford computers and resources needed for development) to even be exposed to programming?

I'm not trying to incite anything, but having worked in a couple of very different roles in my short career thus far, development being one of them, the proportion of mediocre programmers seems empirically equal to the proportion of medicore marketers, sales people, and so forth.

Programmers can do special things, but the mere act of programming itself doesn't make us special, better than average, or superior to anybody else. Programmer bigotry goes both ways.
Crash Spurs Interest in Real-Time Flight Data
You didn't read my post. Monads are just refactoring with a funny name. That's it.

Unless the deepest abstraction you are capable of understanding is cut-n-paste, this is not particularly far-fetched. I don't have a PhD in math, and I don't have any trouble writing "real applications" in Haskell.
While the FreeBSD people didn't have their momentum to market themselves in a way Linux community had, they still manage to produce better system.

The other thing is that most people, even who consider themselves OS hackers, don't need such sophisticated and cohesive system. Or they don't have an opportunity to really dive in to see the difference.
On PCs it's common to have hundreds of processes sleeping, but rare to have more than one or two threads runnable.
Another page linked from that, http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html tries to use lambda with Python and gets it almost-but-not-quite right both times - maybe it's because it was written in 2002 :-)
It isn't just the ratio of growth, it is also the scale. 60% growth in a multibillion dollar company is much harder than going from 100k to 160k in revenue.
I have a much simpler idea that does not provide so much functionality but it prevents sql injections.

We should have datatype for SQL, and special literal for it. Functions that execute queries should take only parameters of type SQL (never strings). There should be almost no way to construct SQL from string. There should be 'formatting' operator that allows you to put values in SQL and it should do default escaping on them.

As for XSS attack I'd suggest HTML datatype with its own literals. Output functions should only accept HTML (not strings). Similarly there should be almost no way to convert string (or any value) to HTML without escaping it.
I've taken some time lapses at hackathons...

But it's less amazing when it's a soft hack than it is when it's a hard hack.

Hackerspaces.org has a monthly synchronous hackathon that happens at spaces across the globe as well.

Details here: http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Synchronous_Hackathon
How many different things can a human being think about at once? Maybe 5? 10? probably not an order of magnitude more than that. Maybe part of the problem is that we are running into some limitations of the human brain. Education may help, but maybe we should also take care that we aren't trying to jam round pegs into square holes.
Or learn to live with a lot less.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asceticism
It's ironic that you use Mozart as an example since he A) died poor and alone and B) would probably be long forgotten by now if he'd gone out of his way to create music that created value for others.
if n < 0:
n = -n
x = 1.0 / x

Dead giveaway.
I think part of it is also that designers and developers have come to see each other less as the "other" and collaborate more closely.

An increase in the number of designers learning CSS and developers learning rules of composition certainly hasn't hurt, either.
I'd believe more users have heard of Firefox than have heard of Linux.
Or someone, hint hint, could build skynet into Mongrel2.

I'm just say'in.
I can't speak for PHP but if you follow the usual Rails conventions for db structure, URL layouts, etc then it takes significantly less time to build (and maintain) a Rails site vs Java EE.

Simply collecting all of your Java libraries, frameworks, dependencies, etc and getting them running in your app server can take days. Minor changes like adding a db column can end up touching nearly every layer.

All these costs do have benefits. Java ORMs generate much more efficient queries than ActiveRecord, have more flexible querying, and better fit into existing schemas; JSP engines can render tens of thousands of pages per second; Java app servers are easily clustered; and much more. But most of that isn't something small or medium web apps use, so why pay the price?
re: Apache, I don't believe that most people understand the scope of the current Apache Foundation. From a recent members meeting:

Projects: 84
Incubating: 36
Labs: 30
Committers: 2359
Members: 298
iCLAs on file: 3583
SVN Revisions: r962795

While some of those 84 Top Level Projects aren't well known, many of them are the standard implementation used in their respective places -- and many of them have strong communities years after their project started.

I think Apache is important in this sense, because its building up new projects with similar community expectations, rather than just being held up as a 'good way' to do things.
Actually I am afraid to host a RoR app on my server, which runs several Java apps. I think the server has only 256MB of RAM (it is old, but cheap), or maybe 512 - not a lot, in any case.

I am much more worried about memory consumption of RoR. Never really launched it in production, but wasn't it the case that you have to load balance between several Mongrels, each consuming > 100MB of RAM?

Java is just unpleasant to use - other than that, it is very fast and memory consumption is ok.
Why is this on the top page?
Was this before the concept of "filing out"?
I agree that recalled college classes aren't the sturdiest reference. Here is a better cited source:

"Frequently Forgotten Fundamental Facts about Software Engineering" by Robert L. Glass at the IEEE Computer Society website:

http://www.computer.org/portal/web/buildyourcareer/fa035

"P2. Good programmers are up to 30 times better than mediocre programmers, according to "individual differences" research. Given that their pay is never commensurate, they are the biggest bargains in the software field."

He also has a wonderful published book, "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering"

I believe the number there is "28 times" as mentioned on Jeff Atwoods blog:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/03/revisiting-the-fact...

"2. The best programmers are up to 28 times better than the worst programmers."

I believe the source studies are cited in the book.

I would add that the book is a great and thought provoking discussion of exactly this sort of 'old wives tale' about software engineering.

Edit: I found the page with citations on google books.

http://books.google.com/books?id=3Ntz-UJzZN0C&lpg=PA14&#...
A lot of languages do that. Even "enterprise languages" such as C#:

Func<int, int> Sum(int x)
{
return (Func<int, int>)((y) => x + y);
}

var z = Sum(4)(5);
Read books. Tinkered with machines.
Extreme Hobbyists Put Satellites Into Orbit With $8,000 Kits
The rise of a startup infographic
This reminds me of 2 pieces of advice I received from 2 early mentors, both 3 words, and diametrically opposed.

1. "Scratch an itch."

2. "Find a customer."

#1 comes naturally to a hacker. I'm always building things for myself. Then I think, "If I need it, someone else probably does, too."

#2 does not come naturally at all. I have to work at it. Frankly, I'd rather build stuff than talk to people (although that has changed quite a bit over the years).

FWIW, I have found very little success with #1 (one big exception: a program generator I wrote for myself was very well received by others).

#2 has worked beautifully. Every time I have ever found and satisfied a first customer, the second, third, fourth, etc. were much easier to find and satisfy because they needed the same thing. What great advice. I wish I had listened much earlier.
It's not clear to me that Perl 6 should be regarded as a prime mover in this: in addition to the old standby Lisp, which you mentioned, there are more recent little-language builders like XMF (http://itcentre.tvu.ac.uk/~clark/xmf.html), XLR (http://xlr.sourceforge.net), Katahdin (http://www.chrisseaton.com/katahdin), and Converge (http://convergepl.org) (in reverse alphabetical order, because that's how I happened to remember them).

Actually, although it's fashionable to sneer at it, I think that TeX (http://www.tug.org) provides perhaps the most compelling example of a little-language maker. The languages that one can make on top of it are perhaps rather specialised to text markup, but I think it's telling that LaTeX (http://www.latex-project.org) was designed, not by fiddling with the source, but rather as a macro layer on top of TeX. LaTeX's not little by any means, but I think it would be hard to find many other examples of such successful languages implemented literally on top of existing languages.

Finally, I'm not really familiar with Perl 6, but I'm pretty sure it's still dynamically typed. (After all, it targets Parrot, which is specifically advertised as being a low-level target for dynamically typed languages.) As such, I don't see it solving people's problems with lack of compile-time guarantees from Lisp. (Of course, there's no denying that Perl, in every version, does offer gobs and gobs of syntax. :-) )
I know of one company in particular that raised $1 million for their entire seed from a VC. 1 year in the VC partnership decided things weren't going well enough to invest more, and they shut down when they couldn't raise money. I can't name specific names publicly here, but it was a clear situation where the VC was not acting maliciously - he literally told me friend (the entrepreneur) that the partnership decided the company was no longer worth partner time.
this is something that I wish would change - not being completely tied to MySQL. Concrete5 is tied to MySQL ...

Webvanta looks like Ruby (http://www.webvanta.com/technology), so should work fine with PG

Not sure about Zotonic.
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