skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i dont find java to be very friendly.

i find boilerplate and attempts to protect me from myself to be the opposite of friendly. i also find jvm infrastructure to be less easy to deal with than the infrastructure that many other languages have.

i would replace 'friendliness of java' with 'breadth of support for'.
This is key. The number of encounters with women where my technical aptitude was an uninteresting quirk outnumbers those where it was a conversation point by probably 100:1 if not more. With men, that ratio is far lower.

I think this whole situation is a very slowly unraveling catch-22 where women aren't interested in tech because they don't feel welcome, and they aren't welcomed because they aren't interested. These days, tech is so pervasive (even the girliest-of-girls probably has a very powerful computer in their purse by way of their phone), that I think it will work it's way loose over time.

It can't happen fast enough, IMO, it's hard enough already to find talented people, I'd like to see the pool doubled.
I agree that the problem is that web developers don't need funding anymore. Creating a web company is not something "urgent" like it was in the 90s, and it doesn't need large amounts of capital or labor.

The same way small inventors don't need huge amounts of capital, web companies will continue to appear without the need of VC money.
That's the #1 reason I want me and at least one good friend to be awash in FU money.
Did anyone else who read this title think "finger" was referring to the unix command line tool?
Hmmm, the seismic shift from MoreLikelyToIPO to MoreLikelyToGetAcquired happened around the same time as Enron and its ensuing government yoke, Sarbanes-Oxley. Coincidence? I doubt it.

When compliance raises expenses 1%, no big deal. But if that number approaches 50% for small, nimble, well-leveraged tech start-ups, then public markets become closed to them.

SOX is an awfully big variable to not be considered.
I agree it's not the only way but it's by far the majority. More importantly though, most founders don't consider it "work" so I think that's where we have a disconnect. Startups are intense, that doesn't mean it's not enjoyable.

http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html.
Network DDOS incident response cheat sheet
Do you speak Chinese? I'm an American working in China, and I can point you to a number of sites that offer hosting here, though the sites are almost exclusively in Chinese. Feel free to shoot me an email: zachkoch@gmail.com.
I dunno...
If the actor wasn't buff and topless it wouldn't have been as good. If the actor was fat and topless it would have seemed obscene. If it was a busty woman in a tiny bikini top doing exactly the same thing, it would have seemed pretty sexist. Maybe those postmodern body politic semioticians actually do have valuable ideas to contribute to our digital world...
Are you saying that Lilypond is not worthwhile? I don't understand the point of this comment. Or did you just not read the entire article?
This is just noise created by the media. 2 months from now everybody will be happily using the iPhone without changes, as I do now.
For example, about consumer reports... What was the last time you read that publication to decide what phone to buy? Most people wouldn't care less.
Ask HN: Is offline marketing effective?
So I have tried some online ppc campaigns for my startup (adsreloaded.com .... and yes it is ridiculously ironic haha) with ok results but not amazing.

Is offline marketing effective? And if so what are your favorite techniques? Flyers, car magnets, billboards, Google TV ads.... etc?
3 years from now someone's 11 year old kid will be using a technophile uncle's hand me down phone and I'll be asked to repair it when the power connector is worn.

A company that creates a device and directly states "buy something else if you want to modify this" probably didn't make that power connector a replaceable part because it was "easier to just affix it with 2cm of glue."

It's a fundamental issue with the attitude MOTO is presenting.
NPR's Podcast Planet Money has an interesting show on this subject called "The Million Dollar Microsecond":

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/06/08/127563433/the-tues...
I haven't. If I need to do xhtml creation from javascript at some point, I might give it a try. ( Perhaps if I get around to playing with env-js - http://github.com/thatcher/env-js ).
This article is another classic case of confusing the logical schema with the physical implementation. The future of DBs is allowing more separation of the two, not less, and more end-user choice over a physical implementation that matches up well with actual access patterns.
So it's not a derivative work in the sense that the GPL
intends derivative works to be.

That's hardly a settled point, AFAIK. The FSF contend that linking to a bit of code creates a derivative work that is a derivative of the "bit of code" in question. I don't know that this whole issue has ever been tested in court and any strict legal precedents set. From what I've seen though, it appears to be an issue that is still debated and for which there is no definitive answer.

What is a theme actually? It's a look and feel, and this
look and feel is not dependent on wordpress.

But there is linking to Wordpress code, so IF you buy the FSF argument, then the PHP code for the theme would need to be GPLd in order to legally be distributed. But I don't think there's any argument that corresponding icons, images, CSS, javascript, etc. would also fall under the GPL.

As such, I believe that the thesis theme should not be GPLed.

Ultimately it won't matter what any of us think...if it goes to court, it'll come down to whatever a given court, on a given day, decide. <shrug />

Edit: a poster above asserts that there is case law / precedent concerning all this. Maybe somebody can dig up a link or two that gives some more info on that point?
That is an awesome thing. I love UE on Windows.
A luxury phone people payed good money for. It's like if BMW was selling a car which could only make right turns (ok, not a perfect example, I be more pissed about the car, but bear with me). Obviously this car is defective, but BMW responds by saying, "It's ok, you can still make left turns, because three right turns is the same as a left turn. It's only a car."

I think people might be a tad bit outraged, less so about the problem, more so about the response. "it's just a car? You've been telling me in all your advertisements that it is the pinnacle of german engineering. If I wanted to deal with problems in the design and live with them, I would have gone with your much cheaper competitors."

However, we shall see what they say tomorrow.
http://clojure.org/rationale
based on my using seaside and clojure, mainstream obviously isn't an issue for me.

i haven't done anything beyond toy projects with clojure so far. mostly lurking on the mailing list for quite a while. i assume by 'our world', you meant the clojure world. if yes, can you give some insight into the fresh air that people coming from ruby brought to the clojure community?
He's one of my blogging heroes as well. He inspired me to get out of my C/C++/Java comfort zone and embark on a strange and mind-expanding journey through Ruby, Haskell, Scala, culminating in Clojure. When I got to Clojure, I immediately thought, "by golly, this looks like the Lisp Steve Yegge was searching for!" Can't wait to see his thoughts on Clojure.
The performance would depend on how you interface with the library. I envision a setup where the entire piece is first written using a nice interface, that frontend then generates the text file that is passed to Lilypond, Lilypond does its magic (one time!), and then the user has an opportunity to make minor tweaks to the layout or start the cycle anew to fix mistakes.
The author is not talking about average women though. She is talking about professional women attending technology conferences.

Also, I am not sure why you feel particularly pressured not to talk shop in front of women. As a female programmer I shut up about technology when talking to an average guy just as much as I would talking to a woman, or for that matter, just as much as anyone in any field avoids talking shop to people of any gender outside their particular knowledge domain. I really feel that you are being a bit disingenuous when you say that you can't "magically intuit for which few it becomes prerequisite" to talk about techie stuff. Surely it's pretty easy to intuit a person's interest at a technology event.
He wasn't really offered a compelling argument to do that, so that's no surprise.
I meant colocation - the costs of which I assume to be too high for individuals - and flash orders - which I did not know were no longer operating.

My general point was just that the playing field is not exactly level - the banks have resources the individual does not have, if speed is the game you're playing. I didn't mean anything at all to do with personal relationships.
The funny thing is that as an HTML page gets increasingly large and complicated, I frequently see developers add HTML comments demarcating precisely which element was just closed, so that in the future it's easier to insert elements at the right level of nesting. Example:

</div><!-- End of #section-nav -->

Would it be a horrible thing if HTML supported an optional id or class attribute in the closing tag?

</div id="section-nav">

Of course it would have to match to validate. Probably not realistic in that my guess is this wouldn't be SGML-backwards compatible.
It's an interesting question. I imagine a lot of it has to do with our current world view. I think a lot of people have a tacit understanding of how fragile it is.

The psychedelics for example aren't illegal because of any harmful physical effects - they're some of the safest drugs we know of, physically. They're illegal because of the world dissolving experience you might have on one. For a people like us who have built up an elaborately abstract way of viewing our world, this is quite threatening.

I think it can also speak about why something like marijuana is still illegal yet caffeine is a daily sacrament for us - one makes you go even faster and work even more, the other makes you fairly uninterested in such things.
Note that this year, instead of 30 consecutive days, they are doing 7 times 7 days, with a week off in between each 7 day run.
I don't believe anybody can be "in complete control" of ones self. That just is not in our nature.
If I had to use a Mac, I'd be all over that. Love it on windows, but I'm still using Codewright as my primary editor.
This situation is definitely most analogous to what happened with the Nintendo Wii Remotes going through TV screens (as opposed to Toyota's acceleration issue).

- Both happened when products were used without cases or safety straps

- Both are hard for experienced users to reproduce (well, it's easy to toss a Wii Remote, but I doubt any hardcore players lost a TV to it)

- Both rely on anecdotal evidence (I own a Wii, as do my friends, and nobody has sent a Wii Remote sailing through anything)

- Both are annoying but not a deal-breaker in the use of the product

- Both can be alleviated by holding the product a different way

- Both have hilarious class action lawsuits against the parent company

- Most importantly, both were discovered shortly after the launch of a highly desirable product and nobody returned theirs because of this issue

The last point is what annoys me the most. It's not reasonable to say "if this antenna is such a big deal, why isn't everyone returning their iPhone 4?" A problem doesn't have to be some titanic issue to need to be addressed. Nintendo did the right thing and packaged the Wii Remote with $0.50 of plastic, even without anyone beating down Gamestop's return desk. We shouldn't accept anything less from Apple.
White pages, perhaps?
Great article. Even with these tips in mind, it's not always easy. I've seen:

- environment variables changing the behavior of the program

- load-dependent pthreads issues (can't reproduce on unloaded dev machine)

- shell scripts silently failing to do important things (liking kill off the old processes; but there's a check to not spawn if it's already running)

- config files that looked fine (realize that there's a case sensitivity issue in 1 out of 5 of the config files)
I loved UE in 2000 when it was the best text editor on Windows. Now I use Textmate and honestly UE on Mac looks like it hasn't evolved much in the last 10 years.
I wonder if this will catch on faster domestically or internationally. I'm thinking of the curious divide in Japan between the domestic use of the 円 kanji for Yen and the international ¥ symbol.
I wanted to learn a Lisp so I started with Clojure thinking it would be the more practical choice. Unfortunately, I found that for every 1 part lisp I was learning I had to learn 2 parts Java, which kinda defeated the purpose of my goal of learning a lisp in the first place.

I switched to Common Lisp and have been happy. There are some really great books for it and it's helped my overall programming skill. If I had to work with Java I would consider Clojure, but I didn't find it a particularly enlightening language, at least if you're trying to learn Lisp.
Building a Princess Saving App: Mixing Games and Applications
To others in a similar position: if you want to learn a lisp, I think racket ( aka plt scheme ) would be the easiest introduction.
Critics have always and easily posited that Apple makes shiny devices that are easily scratched up in your pocket or through day to day use. Critics have always pointed out the need for a case to "properly use" an Apple product...going as far back as the original 5GB Firewire only, Mac only iPod.
same thing happened to Ruby as well. and to Python. and to Java. .net is a different thing, lot people were just forced into it.

before the vast majority really accepts some technology, early adopters come in. they figure out better ways of doing stuff. until someone has a success story, people doubt new technologies. Ruby brought us a great object model and introduced a lot of perl / php people, or simply web developers shifting from anything else to metaprogramming. probably, until i faced Ruby, coming from .net / java background, i didn't know (that much) about it. neither about dynamic typing.

closure is - yet - another language, that's quite true. we don't speak much of a performance here (even though it seems to be great), hence it does introduce us to functional programming and makes us think differently about objects and persistence. it doesn't mean that you have to quit your job and start looking for haskel / closure / scheme / lisp job. it means that you _may_ benefit just from knowing how stuff works there.

remember s-expressions in Lisp? they nicely fit into .net expression trees, no surprise. smalltalk object model did work for Ruby. you may benefit from traits from scala in your Ruby code. and so on.

so, until there's some success story and bunch of libraries / great codebase / frameworks for development, most of people will stay aside. though you have a chance to get into the crowd :)
SaaS and Cloud questions of the week 15/07
A partner and I used to have a used medical equipment business. Cold calling, unfortunately, was a big part of it.

One trick we learned was to pitch the OPPOSITE of what we were trying to sell. That is, we asked if the medical office was interested in SELLING the equipment we were offering.

So the typical call script (yes it was a script) was like this: "Good Morning, this is XXX from YYY. We're the largest purchaser of ZZZ in the country. I wanted to find out if you might be replacing any of your ZZZ over the next 12 months."

Now we became somebody interesting to talk with because we could solve their problem, namely take some of their old equipment off their hands. Of course, anybody who might be "replacing" something could also potentially be interested in buying something.
Or like BMW selling a car with an extra hand operated lever and an extra foot pedal. And if you don't operate them correctly the car will barely move and maybe even stall...

Apple could have handled this much better saying it is a high-performance, tuned antenna. If you choose to operate it correctly you get superior performance; or you can ignore it and get the same performance as any other hidden antenna.
Lisp-style languages give you homoiconicity and macros which allow you to build complex abstractions. For example you can write (with-resource x (do....)) where with-resource handles resource allocation and cleanup. That particular example can of course be done with decorators in Python or blocks in Ruby but lisp macros go further by letting you rewrite code at compile time.

Clojure itself has better solutions to common shared-state concurrency patterns than other lisps (and most languages in general!): efficient persistent data structures, STM, various atomic reference types, etc.

And of course running on the JVM has many benefits: performance via the excellent JIT and GC, high quality libraries, great development and operations tools, and so on.
Hmm, I thought we were talking about technical conferences, not "normal life".
It feels like the external antenna was just a gimmick to sell phones because a new screen + another camera isn't enough to warrant a new phone. I have never had reception issues with the dozens of internal-antenna phones I've owned.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
Symphony CMS Review
High Frequency trading, is really meant for people or companies that have their servers in the same network as the exchange they are HF'ing on. In fact, true HF'ers buy and sell in fractions of a second, some lasting seconds, or minutes.

I've researched this, and tried doing the same, but, in the end, trade fee's, and commissions kill the idea dead. In fact, HF Trading falls under Day Trading, which required that you must have the legal minimum $25,000 in equity on hand to day trade... that is the main thing that killed it for me... read for yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_trading

If you'd like to try it out before you trade live (here comes the shameless plug), you can use the trade simulation I made (buy/sell/sell short) and set your trade fee's and commissions totally free at https://algxchange.com
Digital Drugs
Nah, doing nothing is the ultimate slap in the face. It's like buying a watch only to find out it stops when it contacts your wrist. The guy that sells it says "It's just a watch and look it still shows correct time twice a day. Just wear it differently." Recall is most likely, but I can see the option of a recall or a case being a smart business decision. Many people would take the free case option reducing the actual cost of the recall.
I don't think any of Steve's critics is imploring him to stop writing altogether — they're asking him to start writing well.
These database discussions are becoming more and more lame.

Folks: simply because you can write SQL does not mean that you have something insightful to say about ACID
CodePlex Guru Weighs in on Open Core Debate
Usability issues on the bbc.co.uk home page
Is that actually allowed? I remember my old HTML books when I was a kid said you couldn't do that.
Anyone see any resemblances to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_and_hammer ?

Not that I mind at all.
Well, maybe you think the guy's toplessness was a minor point because you're not in the target group, i.e. women. I forwarded that link to a few of my colleagues (was that a sexist thing to do?) and they absolutely swooned over the guy, so it was a major thing for them. The bottom line: for a lot of products, sex sells. The only question is how tactfully it is done.
I haven't personally observed hate for lifestyle businesses, only a prevailing opinion that lifestyle businesses aren't "startups." The distinction is probably imprecise in some cases, but growth is probably one of the key differentiators. Where a profitable lifestyle business might be happy to grow a few percept per year indefinitely, startups will tend to have a much more ambitious growth plan.

In any case, the result is that discussion, comments and advice for startups will sometimes be different than for a lifestyle business, funding being one of the obvious topics. Another is that yes, size of the business is important. Profit is not just the bottom line, the other is influence or power.
Black Hat: Talk on China Cyber Army pulled after pressure
You should use the included headset or get a car dock. Either solution would give you the controls you need to use it as either a phone or music player without needing to look at the screen.
(now curious:) Why do you feel Racket is a good introduction to Lisp?
And according to at least two black boxes recovered from totaled Toyotas, there was a measurable and reproducible problem with Toyotas.
It's a modern lisp with exceptionally good concurrency primitives. Unless you're an Erlang programmer, you will be hard-pressed to find a library that gives you such effortless multiple-core options.

While this is more opinion than strict fact, characterizing Lisp as "just another language" is a terrible mistake. Lisp's utterly malleable syntax and exceptionally good semantics make it a very powerful language, one of the few that has managed to keep reviving over and over despite massive change in our industry.

It's very unfortunate that modern programmer culture has taken so long in America to catch up with what Academia has been arguing for years: functional programming matters. Lisp has an even more obscure thesis: semantic customization matters. Clojure strikes a good balance in this regard; it does not ask the programmer to do much macro programming and many of the things you need are already written.
Classic example of longevity: http://www.stevenhumour.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/xbox-...
Android Market passes a billion downloads
AFAIK, recently that was just one incident like that at OSCON. Do you have many more examples of BBS being hired from "strip clubs near the conference"? If so, I'll create another user and downvote myself.
UltraEdit is popular on Windows because most other text editors for Windows are quite bad. Why would anyone want to use UltraEdit on a Mac?
We're talking about the boot code here, that's all. They didn't embed C4 or toxic nerve gases inside the case if you want to fix Junior's phone years from now.

In all likelihood, Junior is going to throw the phone away and get an ad-subsidized Droid 7 for free. Let's face it, all of this hardware is disposable now. Ask your local VCR repairman.
Absolutely agree. Admitting that the iPhone 4 requires a bumper would be disastrous.

I expect them to offer a thirty day money back guarantee. That admits nothing but instills lots of confidence.
I think the magazine is more widely read than you think. Their mobile phone coverage is actually quite good, and very in-depth - including quite a bit of consumer polling along with their own testing.
but will they fire Jobs?
"He still hasn't changed one bit on his opinion of plugins/themes and the GPL."

Well, matt wasn't offering a compelling argument for chris to release under the GPL either, so I guess they are even.
>> "Nor do I expect developers to understand SQL."

I do not agree. I expect all of my developers to be proficient in both C# and SQL. I expect them to be able to properly design object oriented solutions and entity relations. And I expect them to know better than to use HTML tables for general purpose layout. There is no such thing as "one's natural paradigm".
Новая поставка LaCie / Elgato / Macally / Griffin
So you don't mind that they lock down the bootloader so you can't actually install anything else, but you do mind when they lock it just a little bit more to make sure you don't install anything else?

That really doesn't make any sense.