skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: VB6 replacement
I am an old timer VB6 programmer. I am looking for to replace VB6 with newer programming language/tool. I develop Windows (standalone EXE) and CGI programs. Is there any newer programming language/tool that fit my need?

VB.NET seems too complicated, PY looks good but I am not sure if it fit my need.

I also a good javascript (JS) programmer, is JS compiler good enough to develop standalone EXE and CGI? (So I do not have to re-learn new language)

Thanks for your kind help.
Tech Know: Back to basics with BBC Micro computers
If only there was a tool to fix core objects that were tinkered with. Something like... wait. Monkey patching!

But seriously, at his Q&A session on EuRuKo 2010 Matz mentioned that monkey patching issues are going to be addressed in Ruby 2.0. http://nuclearsquid.com/writings/euruko-day2.html
Actually the JVM is slow on startup. It has to decide if it's going to use the full Hotspot optimizer or something for shorter runs (Hotspot wont buy you anything for a short-running app like e.g. cat'ing a file).

Given that many phone apps are going to be started, looked at and shut down within a few seconds I don't think the comment is completely out of line.
This doesn't make sense to me. Why would people not apply to YC just because they now have the option of gaining access to more Facebook APIs?

FWIW, I spoke with Zuckerberg today. He certainly didn't set off my "jerk detector" in any way.
It's a great response; the strange thing is that it is necessary at all.

An aside: am I the only one who thinks Atwood's sandpaper analogy is a bit like Creationism? "Random mutations and natural selection can only smooth out small details, they can't create a whole new species...."
Check out this video from the American Museum of Natural History:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U

- It makes me think that we cannot be the only society in the universe

- But it also makes be think that it is unlikely that we will find them in the near future or vice versa
Matthias At Work
Related: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1632428
If that matches your definition of malicious you've led a protected life style!
Since instant personalization is a pilot program and only open to select sites, anyone applying with this RFS in mind really couldn't have a working demo.
Ever since a facebook widget showed the names of a bunch of people I know on the right-hand side of an unrelated website I've stopped going there. I logged out of facebook and I haven't logged in since then. I'd much prefer it if they stayed within their 'boundaries of expected online territory', and to see them popping up on sites that I normally visit but that I do not associate with facebook at all was enough to push me over the edge.

I'm sure that plenty of people couldn't care less, but I think it's a creepy thing.
I had the exact same comment (see farther down). I went on a quick hunt and turned up this as the actual origins:
http://www.reviewjournal.com/cgi-bin/printable.cgi?/lvrj_hom...
A little light on details of what the miracle was.
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"keyboard! how quaint"

one of my favourite scenes from the movie series :)
Are you sure you're not quoting a Simpsons episode? If I'm not mistaken, he followed that quote with instructions to his thugs to "buy 'em out, boys.", whereby they proceeded to trash the office of the dot-com in question.

I'm not certain it's historically accurate.
Likewise, I only check Facbeook on my phone. There are some exceptions but I always use Incognito mode for those.
FB just bought ChaiLabs who responded by "pausing" their beta API. My first thought (well after thinking "crap, there goes all my work") was that they wanted to absorb the ChaiLabs API into the FB platform. So, while they might seem sensitive to the concern, I'm not quite sure it's mitigating the very real "walled garden"/AOL quagmire.
I'm a young adult. What can I do to start a business?
I'm not here for you to particularly hand hold me. The problem is I'm young and I have no connections. There are opportunities but I don't know that they exist, I don't know that I don't know. I don't even know any entrepreneurs, but I wish I did. I have a fair amount of capital to start with..but I have no skills or ideas that I can think of to make money.

I'd just like to get my foot in a door, or learn a something from someone who owns a business, or perhaps see a successful business and imitate it. I'm not looking for anything amazing, but I just don't know about any opportunities.

How shall I get started?
With all due respect, but you're both not just splitting hairs: you're splitting hairs about something you don't know enough about. There's a whole body of literature on the subject and you're not going to reinvent all of that in the course of this small discussion. If neither of you have heard of, for instance, Carl Hempel, then this discussion is completely pointless.

If you don't standardize your terminology first, then you're just discussing the boundaries of your personal definitions, instead of embarking on actual intellectual discovery of the terrain.
College-Exclusive Social Network Launches
More like, four signs of a marginally passable coder.

To be awesome by any standard you at least have to have attributes that surpass those of the author of the standard.
Hey. That USED to be the case that app engine required substantial rework. However there are now no-sql libraries to make normal Django work. I also think there was a summer of code project that might add no-sql support to the django core eventually.

You should search around stackoverflow.com or hit up the #django on freenode IRC. My advice is you need to look into how the django community is deploying to app engine more closely.

edit: Dug through my bookmarks, this is what you need:
http://www.allbuttonspressed.com/projects/djangoappengine

If you still need assistance email me at dhllndr [at] gmail
Do the Hustle (Obie Fernandez Business Talk)
It seems like the real challenge here is coming up with interesting and useful applications of this that also don't feel like 'Instant Creepoutification'. Weren't there Amazon badges/buttons on third party sites that included your name, some years ago? They seem to have gone out of style, maybe due to their inherent creepiness?
The link to the longer article is a little hidden, but it does go on to explain it in alot more detail:

http://www.economist.com/node/16886442

Their share of the worlds agriculture is honestly staggering. To be #1 in OJ, sugar, coffee, chickens, etc. is unbelievable.
Riak e.g. does also have a REST interface (https://wiki.basho.com/display/RIAK/REST+API). Could you elaborate what else ist part of the "full stack app dev"? Futon?
p.s. please don't use "Rails" when you mean "Ruby". Kittens are dying everytime!
I have a N1 dev phone and an iPhone 4.
The iPhone 4 kicks serious ass until you think like a programmer, then android looks better thought out.

But even with 2.2, apple's ui kicks butt on android.

I also had a g1devphone (gave it to my brother), and every iphone that has been released.
You might want to submit a separate Ask HN post to review your site and post the link in this thread.
I just added the Coding Horror-blog to my feeds. My code will magically get more awesome any minute now.
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Pipe Rehabilitation
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Standford also have an entire semester of lectures on Itunes University

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewiTunes...
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Single words may not be the best way to attack this problem though, multi-word expressions would do a better job. And then you could label the occurrence of 'reported*better business bureau' as a strong negative.

Context is everything in natural language processing, and by dropping all context the problem becomes harder to solve.
Agreed. I think you could substitute a degree if you work through most books required for it.

After dropping out of mathematics, CS and physics studies (big mistake there), I've been working as a programmer for 10 years. But I routinely check out the curriculum at Universities to update my bookshelf. The problem is that while I will gladly work my way through SICP or CLRS, stuff like math books are different.

I often intend to work through math books (meaning: solving the exercises and working through the proofs), but this is a lot more motivational when you know you need to pass an exam in the end.
"Theories should pay rent in anticipated experimental data."
Apple Upgrades iWork, Now Supports ePub
Oxford shire Mailing  Lists and  Email Lists.
Online Publishing Services is a specialized opt-in email list broker providing only permission based email lists for targeted email marketing campaigns. Challenged by sourcing the lesser known lists for its clients, Online Publishing Services is now prominent in niche targeting, supplying both business and consumer ‘boutique’ lists worldwide.
ok, what signs do you look for?
Well, I guess that answers this question:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1172025

;)

Joking aside, this is an interesting development, it means that anybody looking to disrupt FB or something affiliated with FB is now going to avoid applying to YC unless they intend do be acquired.
Learning becomes problematic if you get too complex in your features though, especially if you go up to learning things like regexes. Simple ramping up in complexity, from e.g. word counts to word-pair counts (or other low-n n-grams) does give you gains sometimes, but there've been a number of cases where increasing the space like that gave surprisingly little/no gains, which is one reason the simple models keep being used (besides simplicity and speed).
Badass of the Week: Nikola Tesla
The Turing Omnibus leisurely covers a broad range of important and often forgotten topics. It's a great book. It will give you a good overview of CS, and then you can go deep at your choosing with other books.

I loved the first chapters in Bentley, but then I thought the novelty wore down. Maybe I'll take a new look at it too.
The same risk as installing any not-well-vetted server software. Except, from experience, I trust PHP code much less. Every PHP code base I have ever seen has been full of vulnerabilities. I don't like reading PHP code, so I don't feel like looking over it myself.
If this isn't inspiring to "predict the future by inventing it", I don't know what is.
The long, sordid tale of Sun RPC, abbreviated somewhat...
It pays off to be 'language agnostic', in other words, to realize that programming is more about the programmer than it is about the language.

I've seen BASIC used to power million dollar companies.

To throw out some project simply because it is built in a language you don't like is counter-productive. I know PHP is the language to hate around here but you could do a lot worse in a web environment.

PHP really is the new 'BASIC', it has a very low barrier to get started and that's why plenty of people associate it with crummy code but you don't have to write crummy code in any language.
I wholeheartedly disagree with the recommendation of "Artificial Intelligence, by Elaine Rich". The book was unreadable in a way that made me want to detest the subject.

I found the Patrick Winston text a lot nicer.
That's true. I built a 'chatbot' long ago that used simple regexes (words+wildcards) to match incoming patterns. It worked well because at the higher levels of the conversation you'd use single words to guide to a portion of the conversation tree, and lower down you could make decisions on very specific differences in the input.

For a classifier that's a less useful approach, but I think single words is too narrow. 3-grams is probably the sweet spot for something like this.
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This seems to be a perennial (50-year-long) debate in design / HCI / user-interface circles. The hardcore extremes are a branch that comes out of traditional design and architecture, which is radically against anything that reeks of "focus groups"; and the branch that instead comes out of industrial psychology, which won't do anything unless it has a p-value. In practice most designers actually building things seem to do something in between. You can't make every design decision using an A/B test unless you're prepared to run hundreds of thousands of them, because designing something non-trivial (say, a new IDE) requires quite a lot of design decisions. But you can use A/B testing (or quantitative user studies more generally) to get data on specific groups of alternatives, or to hone in on a particular subset of the design space. A lot of the argument is over the relevant proportions, and which other methods to use to supplement quantitative A/B-type testing.

One school, for example, is that you should generally aim to understand your design and audience, via things like ethnographic interviews, examination of existing designs, qualitative user studies, thought about why stuff worked/didn't, theories about user interaction and design in certain areas, etc., and then use quantitative tests as more of a sanity-checking tool (are users reacting in line with how we were expecting them to?). That's somewhat more in line with a traditional scientific view of theory formation followed by testing the predictions that theory makes. Other approaches have the quantitative tests taking a much more active, central role in the design process, more akin to the machine-learning view of induction from data, where you're agnostic about "why" something works, and just follow where the data takes you. I think that latter gets towards the approach some designers find stifling to creativity, particularly in how it's applied in e.g. metrics-based game design.
It's not really amazing, either.
It'd be trivial to modify js behavior before the FB JS file loads.

For example...

window.confirm = function(m) { return true; }
Anything but pinax, please...

I had a really good look at that and I did not like much what I saw (that was a while ago, but still). Do you have a specific reason for suggesting that over appleseed (mentioned elsewhere in this thread), which I think would be a far better fit?
You can't run them on ScummVM?
I'm actually really happy to hear they did that, even though I can't see any of the results (they're far too secretive about what's going on behind the scenes, besides these blog postings).

It means they have a clear idea of what they can do, and more importantly about what they can't do. So blowing some money on an expert in a field for which they don't have expertise is actually a really good sign.
That's actually good to hear and I meant Mark although obviously Mark != Facebook.

When I say "not a jerk" I'm thinking a strong respect for liberty (individual rights / respect for the rights of others). However, and a lot of this is influenced by allegations, Mark has done the following wrong by my reckoning, enough to question whether he is safely "not a jerk":

1. Been trusted with source code and market insight from a group he worked with, told them it was useless and then used it to develop his own site.

2. Shown little respect for privacy or IP concerns of users until market pressure forced him.

3. Been dishonest with users by changing terms and using the data of users for Facebook business purposes without explicit permission (now largely rectified).

4. Copied the look, feel and features of early competitors while litigating those who attempt the same with Facebook.

5. Allegedly (unlikely perhaps) given away a share of the company as part of overdue project complications and not advised future investors.

While a lot of this is probably untrue, it's enough for me to question the man's integrity, honesty and ability to be trusted.
"The " is not as linkbaity though.
NoScript isn't a good solution and certainly not a scalable one - most people don't want to browse without js.

It'd be better for browser makers to simply detect clickjacking and block it.

If an element isn't visible to the user (either partially visible or behind other elements), that's probably a good sign it shouldn't be able to receive user actions such as clicks. Especially if it's an iframe.

I hope firefox+chrome do some work on this soon.
It's good to hear he's a nice guy, but the "jerk" concern is about his (perhaps underserved) reputation for exploitation and dishonesty.
He kind of gets close to it in the "metric of quality" section, but I think he forgot the most important one, excuse me if it's cliché: gets shit done. Too many people love that "starting a new project" feeling, and too few are awesome enough to actually execute and complete a project (because they give up when it gets hard - not awesome).
This story inspired me tonight: reading about how he didn't know if it would work or not, and how he fixed bugs as they arose is true hacking style. And it's definitely a way to get things done. So that's what I did tonight, and made a ton of progress; just hounding down and stomping on bugs mercilessly.

Why wasn't I doing that already? I'd been reading too much Dijkstra, that the "competent" programmer can show whether his code will work or not. It's definitely possible to do it that way, but it's (very sadly) too high a standard for me to reach in reasonable time (or maybe at all), for more than toy problems. Dijkstra used this approach to write a multitasking operating system. I'm pretty sure I couldn't do that.
...in either scenario. During code review, however, I'd expect that the good programmers would reach much more strongly to the rogue commits than the mediocre programmers would.
I'd try C# - it isn't all that complicated.
> the guy wrote a multitasking operating system with this approach. I'm pretty sure I couldn't do that.

You'd be surprised at how doable that is if you actually tried. It's the same as every other problem in programming: break it down in to two pieces, figure out which one is the easier, if it is trivial solve it, otherwise recurse.

You'd need an overall sketch of the architecture before you began but once you have that worked out it's 'just programming' to get you to the finish line.

The hardest part to get right is security, especially if you go multi-user, but since you just specify 'multitasking operating system' that one is somewhat limited in scope.

(such thinking probably gave us windows ;) )...
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thanks for pointing that out, I added a 3.5 section.
Facebook's Bootcamp: how they scale their engineering team.
It was surprising to me when I worked at stupidBigCo how many programmers just churn out crap and never actually test it. They just kinda hope it works. Then when it doesn't, they kinda guess at what's wrong and churn out some more crap.

Management sees them as hard working drones, and don't see any issue.

Maybe I just worked with some incredibly bad programmers...
Ruby and Python are so similar, in fact, that I'm really surprised that there is no ongoing effort to merge them together. They could really use one another's libraries and various VM implementations, for example; even the parsers are almost identical.

The only things that are really "different" between Python and Ruby are topical features of the grammars of each, that mostly disappear once the code has been AST-transformed. These could likely be expressed more succinctly in terms of a simple common base grammar, and two small, modular sets of reader macros.
http://www.snpp.com/episodes/5F11
My theory is that the CPA was high because iAd is a new and captivating ad-platform.

Users who see AdMob (or other older-platform) ads are less likely to click on ads.

However, most users haven't seen iAds and so they may click on the ad just to explore it further - this means that a lot of users may click on iAds even though they may have no interest in the product being advertised.
Awesome products tend to come from enthusiastic developers. If the GP couldn't believe in his idea he was not wrong to discard it.
I'm trying to think what your business might be. An herbal facial treatment? a spice delivery service? A culinary motivational product exhorting people to confront their spice racks? None of them sound very profitable
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Strange, Linear Algebra and Formal Logic were part of my CS curriculum.
Emergent collusion due to groups of people sharing a goal is not equivalent to a conspiracy. There is no such thing as an implicit conspiracy: that's a contradiction in terminis.

Similarly, a group of men conspiring to do something is not equivalent to a conspiracy for male domination. It's usually a conspiracy for their domination; their maleness is incidental.
Second that, this is excellent advice.

If you have a stake in the outcome, and you're emotionally involved do not negotiate directly, place someone in between you and the other party. That gives you a bit of perspective and time to think things over before responding.

This is especially important if you are easy to 'read'.

The way to improve your negotiation skills is to be the negotiator for others in small stakes situations, then build it up over time to higher stakes.
Thanks, I appreciate the support, but my opps, you caught my initial phrasing before I clarified to disambiguate: I didn't mean to write an operating system; but to write one in Dijkstra's way (ie by showing - proving - that it works before you write it). ugghh I shudder just saying it.
Background job processing is so essential to any app that I've ever built, that the lack of suitable free background processing (whether via cron or DJ) effectively makes Heroku not have a free option for me. Even if I'm writing a little toy app, it will probably involve DJ and cron, so it will need to be hosted somewhere else than Heroku.

(as for bigger apps, let's not get started... Heroku is pretty expensive at scale, not sure what they have that justifies it)
If you have __len__() implemented on the object, why not call it directly? If you are dealing with object X, that is of classes A,B,C or D (that all implement __len__), I don't see the fundamental difference between len(X) and X.__len__().
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It's only creepy if the personalization is tacked on and out of place. If integration were done in a meaningful manner, for example if you were on a site and you wished you could see the site in the context of your social circle, then such integration probably wouldn't be creepy. It would done in such a way where the integration is part of the core value offer.

But say I'm reading an article and it says "your mother likes this too," well to me it doesn't add much to the site. So what's left is the creepy factor naked and exposed. I guess that's why there's the RFS: so we can find more useful integration of facebook. But as soon as it's useful no one will think creepy. Creepy is the ugly girl who stares at you, but the pretty one who does it isn't.
This current generation of youth has diluted the meaning of the word awesome so that even eating a snickers bar is awesome. He wrote awesome 23 times in that article alone, never mind the other articles he's written. Perhaps "awesome" is correct even as you redefine it.