skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Using what you know is smart. Planning to migrate a new language "just because" I would re-think. Rewriting an entire codebase is a TON of work. I'd either just go with PHP or go with Python.

If you really do think you will need to switch languages for some reason in the future, I'd make the switch now. It'll take a little more time up front but the long term benefit will be worth it.

Rewriting a codebase is something your customers can't see. It won't drive in more sales. It'll just take up time when you should be laser focused on adding features, pivoting if need be and driving bottom line growth.

If you do decide to go with Python, contact me if you need help or get stuck and I'll be more than happy to give you a hand. Also, consider using Pylons. It doesn't get the press that Django does, but it's very nice and is my Python framework of choice.
Of course they would say that - they are their competitors.
"Python where I can. C where I have to"
Generators save a lot of time!
I absolutely surf HN and other sites throughout the day. My brain needs a distraction every once in a while. As long as your work gets done, I don't see a problem with this. Intellectual pursuits and positions are not monotonous assembly lines, it is simply not possible to focus 100% of your attention 100% of the time. You need breaks.

While I don't see a problem with this, your boss quite clearly does. Not only that, he's handling his displeasure with you in a demeaning way. And as you say, it all seems to stem from the fact that he doesn't understand your work or what goes into you doing your work.

"I am really ashamed with how I am handling his rants and outbursts."

Have you tried sitting down with him (in private) and expressing your concerns about his expectations and the unhealthy working environment that he's creating for you?

I think that expressing your concerns in a very matter of fact manner is completely reasonable. I would start by focusing the discussion on the value that you bring to the team. Try to get your boss in the frame of mind that you are valuable, you do your work well and on-time. Then shift the conversation to the concerns you have. Use a lot of "I feel .." type sentences. Focus not on what he's doing wrong, but rather on the things that would help you to work better and feel happier. Try to frame it in a positive path. Also ask him what his concerns are. Don't be defensive (or rather try desperately hard not to be). Hear what he's saying to you and then try to say things along the lines of, "I hear what you're saying. I even understand how it might look like that. I can assure you that I'm a team player and I'm always looking to deliver the best that I can. From my perspective, sometimes I need to let the challenge at hand ruminate. That might mean that I need to look for a solution on the internet, or even take 5 mins and think about something else. Just to let it all process. At the end of the day I want to let you know that I enjoy the work here, and I think that I deliver real value to the company."

Keep in mind that your boss (who seems to be woefully inexperienced or at least very poor at managing technical staff) might not appreciate it. But at the very least you come out knowing that you handled the situation in a professional manner (great story for the next interview).

Another option is to get a feed of HN to your terminal (I saw something like this once). It'll blend into your work flow more. Even RSS feeds to your email.
While the offer of application coaching is nice, the headline could use rewording. It seems spammy due to overpromising. "I will coach you on how to get into Y Combinator" or something similar will probably go over better.
Well, yes, I'm sure that is the case for some people. This, however, is my first startup and I don't really have the experience necessary to do everything on my own. I am worried that he will want to meddle and not have the experience or expertise to help in any meaningful way and would most likely cause problems.
"Roughly nine years after walking through that first door, finally get a chance to create your hit sitcom. But it won't really be yours. You have no creative clout. Your employers have lots of clout so, ignoring the priceless lesson, rely on their series premise, their casting choices and their comic instincts. Your hit sitcom is cancelled in five weeks. Your employer calls it a "noble failure", but noble isn't the word used in any of the reviews. The word putrid is used twice."

That was Mike & Molly http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1608180/ 8.4 on IMDb
If you read several of his books, you will understand that he believed in both. Money supply is the most important influence on the systemic level; but his belief in money is largely a belief in trying to keep things steady so the economy is reasonably predictable for individuals participating in it.
Using .NET (C#) at work as well as GWT (Java) and minor bits of JavaScript. We're also using FLEX (ActionScript) for some upcoming projects.

At home I have some unfinished projects in JavaScript (a Chrome Extension), Java (an Android app) and C# (a WP7 app). All my website side-projects at .NET (C#) as well, but I've been tinkering with .NET MVC a little bit too. I guess I'm just a fan of the Microsoft Stack or I don't want to switch because I'm unsure of my ability to juggle more server-side languages and .NET keeps me employed.

I voted accordingly.
Thanks a lot! This is really helpful. You are right, I will definitely look into the 1024x768 scrollbar issue I did not know about that one. All of the other issues are also now on my to-do list. Thanks for the great advice. Cheers to better conversion rates!
physical intrusion? lame.. get a parabolic or yagi antenna
Nope, just got the work done faster.
For windows based web development:
How would you create a web page that said "Hello World"?

It the answer is not start notepad (I'll accept Notepad+), type in Hello World and save it as .htm or .html and put it on a webserver then for most of the places I have done interviewing for over the years they have missed the first requirement, get it done as easily and quickly as you can.

I fully appreciate that this varies massively by company, and I would want to know that the person can answer certain levels of technical questions but finding people who don't overcomplicate problems is hard, finding people who learnt recursion at university or as another commentator mentioned, can define polymorphism is actually not that hard.
well, lack of that is why I left slicehost, but even EC2 allows custom kernels now. So a bit late, but glad people are seeing this as the important feature it is -- for quick security response if nothing else.
Early blog architect Chris Gulker dies of cancer
That doesn't matter. When I hire I don't even look for a degree, I look for code, I look for things you've built, and built well. Then I look for a person who I will like and get along with.
HereIsMyStuff : Personal Inventory Manager
HereIsMyStuff is Personal Inventory Manager! You can Signup using twitter, describe your stuffs, track them via simple comments.You can mark your stuff public and show it to your friends.
Offer HN: Free hosted bug tracking and DVCS
This is also great advice -- thank you so much. These are things I did not realize when I designed the site. I do feel as if shipping costs are a real killer, I just cannot afford to ship for any less. I actually had someone email me telling me that my shipping was a rip-off and that I should do $1.99 flat rate or free shipping. Truth is, I sometimes lose money on shipping if I'm sending priority across country. Thanks again, I'm going to make these changes and watch my abandonment rate.
If I want to go into site security, web malware detection and protection, is there a book or blog you can recommend to read?
should be renamed 'A Script Kiddie's Story'
Adapting an Interface for Touch Devices
The talk of late when it comes to adapting a web application for a mobile platform has been all about CSS media queries or server-side detection. But, as Tim shows, those two techniques alone are insufficient to account for the full range of devices out there, and their specific interface requirements.
I think your arguments ignore many of the actual economic costs of a solar panel installation. The mounting framework is the cheapest part of the structure. The solar panels themselves are expensive, but the major issue with your idea to re-install them every few years would be the labor costs. It takes a few hours and a few men to install the panels, so throwing in $1000 every 2-3 years would make this type of quick-replace plan non-cost effective.

I'm not an expert in solar panels by any stretch, but my understanding that the two major breakthroughs we need are a) how to make the solar panels themselves more efficient over a long life-span. Typically they lose 2-4% of their efficiency every year, meaning 20 years down the road, they've lost 50% of their energy power. b) a more efficient converter from the DC generated by the solar cells to the AC we put back into the grid.
You should probably (if it's possible to edit) add Objective C for people doing iPhone development.

Also, Actionscript/ Flash might be nice to include since it would be interesting to see how its usage compares to Javascript.
Note that that is the ACM link to the citation; the paper itself is published in an Elsevier journal, and is not available to ACM Digital Library subscribers (like myself.)
c# for one, php for the other
I don't know how the programming climate in UK, but here in west coast US, I am almost always the only one who have computer science degree in the team.

But, most of my coworkers (who don't have degree) are fantastic hackers, wielding /usr/bin like magician, appending to fifo as hack-around, compiling xen kernel from source, etc.

So, don't get discouraged. If your situation is agile (being single or without children), move to big city, embrace its big-cityness, and enjoy its salary.
The second one is a typo on my part :-/
10 days here. Sick day is vacation. Plus 5 observed federal days. Ugh. And my day was going so well.
Objective C(iphone)
Not to be a jerk but once you get going. You wont end up switching to python+django. It'll stay php because you'll be focusing on other things like maintaining the existing code and adding functionality.

If you, at one point, want to go with python, i suggest doing that now.
Obama: Philosopher president
Off topic, but if you're doing spatial stuff you should really be using PostgreSQL and PostGIS. Much better feature set and performance for those types of queries.
Show HN: readTHERE: a tool to move hyperlinks quickly from one device to another
Everyone is showing off their weekend projects, I thought I'd share my mid-week project. I hope this is appropriate.

It happens quite often that I'm reading some website on my phone while I'm on the go. Usually, it's some link I found browsing, starting at HN. When I then get to a spot where I have a PC or my iPad, I'd like to continue reading on the bigger screen, but finding that same URL again may not be trivial. Or alternatively, sometimes I want to take some page that I'm reading on my desktop computer with me to read while I'm underway.

There's not really a comfortable way to get the link to my other machine. I could mail the link to myself, or use some bookmark-synchronizing service, but that all seems rather heavy-handed for what should be a disposable "copy and paste" action. There's no way to conveniently do that right now, at least not that I'm aware of. I very much hope there isn't because otherwise my work would be wasted... :).

Enfin, to scratch my own itch, I created readTHERE. You add a single bookmarklet to all of your browsers. When you want to transfer a page to another machine, you simply activate the bookmarklet to copy the page you're viewing at that moment to some invisible centralized clipboard, and again on another machine to retrieve it.

I figure there's probably other people having the same issue, so I thought I'd share: feel free to use it (keeping the Privacy Disclaimer in mind -- that is to say, you have none). Also, if you have comments or suggestions, I'm always very interested in honest feedback (technical, conceptual or otherwise).

http://readthere.rix0r.nl/
Actionscript/Flash
Except that in order to live somewhere he could afford on a London bus-driver's salary, he'd need to be somewhere awful (actually, I don't know whether London has awful-and-cheap bits these days) or way out of town with a horrible commute.

None the less: yes, there are more and better jobs in cities. There's also more competition for those jobs, though. I'll hazard a guess that although there's a lot of unemployment where the OP lives now, the unemployed people there are probably mostly not software developers.
>Very religiously with almost no exceptions. When I make an exception it is usually a sign of problems in the code, and I'll revisit it later on / improve my tools.

Thats one of the things that turned me of TDD for good - I find it a crime to write code that I know won't work, just to write a more comprehensive test and then rewriting it, wasting a ton of time.

The other was constantly switching between code/test/code - even if it only takes 5 seconds, that essentially means that each statement now costs 10 seconds(time to confirm the test failed plus time to confirm that it has now passed) + the time to write the test.

This is also the reason I tend to stick to statically checked languages.
Thanks. Noted.
Added. The nice alphabatization is lost now... oh well...
How do you test something which requires browser interaction like oauth authentication?

Edit: I know this may not be applicable in transloadit's case. I'm asking for a general strategy
A group of students from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and Washington State University is working on a programming language for the blind:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC1mOSdmzFc
Its definitely possible.

My 2nd child was born just months before I quit my job to work full-time on my startup. My co-founder also had his first kid at the same time. We worked like crazy this last summer and just recently closed our first round of funding.

Perhaps we were crazy (our wives definitely thought so) but we pulled it off. We're also only in our late 20's :)
Web Scraping .
Frontend: PHP/Drupal Custom Modules

Backend: Java/POJOs
Fooling Fingerprint Scanners with Gummi Bears (2002)
Where is Lisp? I think it would still be a popular choice.
Is it really a unit test if you make a call to a REST service? Is that not now an integration test?
I'm pretty sure I asked for clarification several times... It's possible I suppose.

Here's the problem it started from:

Eleven lily pads are numbered from 0 to 10. A frog starts on pad 0 and wants to get to pad 10. At each jump, the frog can move forward by one or two pads, so there are many ways it can get to pad 10. For example, it can make 10 jumps of one pad, 1111111111, or five jumps of two pads, 22222, or go 221212 or 221122, and so on. We'll call each of these ways different, even if the frog takes the same jumps in a different order. How many different ways are there of getting from 0 to 10?

(source: http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/admissions/ugrad/Sample_interview...)
I decided early on when I built Appleseed that I wanted it to be a commodity platform, so I went with a very basic LAMP stack. I'm even shying away from PHP 5.3 because so many hosts still don't support it.

It hasn't always been easy, but part of the way I see distributed open-source social networking catching on is by encouraging communities to set up their own social networks (churches, schools, niche communities, etc.), and the best way to make that happen is to make it as easy and streamlined as possible.

Overall, it hasn't been terrible. Once I built a solid MVC framework and plugged in some good libraries (I cannot say enough good things about simple_html_dom), I was able to forget about the language, and focus on the logic, which is where I'm happiest.
The choice of language and framework often seems like a big one, but how often do people regret their decision? If you do, what was your choice and what's wrong with it?

I suspect most people don't care in the end.
Ask HN: How do you balance between gaining knowledge and applying knowledge?
Earlier I used spend an hour or so every morning to go thru my Google Reader.

Then I joined Twitter. It was difficult to keep up with all the tweets.

Then I joined Hacker News. There's so much useful info posted here but now I restrict myself to only go thru posts on HN's home page and my submissions (if somebody has commented anything. I wish there was a way to get notified via email when somebody comments on your post / question).

Now there's one more - Quora. Again a very good source of info.

It seems I almost spend half of my day on all these. There's hardly any time left to apply these knowledge.

I'm sure few others might also be facing the same problem.

How do you guys manage this?
There are more reasons that speak against dating sites in general. I didn't know OKCupid, so I just spent the last hour trying it out ;-) Here's the deal:

Everybody, really everybody who's a member has something seriously wrong with them. Sometimes, it takes a while to figure out but I couldn't find ONE compatible person (the experience was similar with other dating sites I tried in the past). I'm certainly no exception myself: I'm fat and ugly, and this is no self-deprecating crap, I mean it. And the girls on there are all either fat and ugly as well, or they're religious fanatics, gold diggers, trolls, creepy athlete stalkers or other kinds of groupies, future axe murderers, offensive and off-putting in their profile text, not looking for anyone right now, or (the funniest kind) their profile is one big stream of complaints about how everybody wants her sooooo much and would people please stop sending her those yucky messages already.

Hey, I might get nothing in real life, but at least RL is not as degrading as working the fruitless treadmills that are dating sites. Interesting and hot people can get dates anytime and anywhere, no online presence needed. The rest of us are just screwed.
I'd love to see a follow-up on this poll about which frameworks are used with each language. E.g. jQuery or prototype for JavaScript? Cake or Zend for PHP?
Where's Groovy? :-(
I was just thinking, before reading your response, that python would suck for the blind, because of its strong preference of "beautification" of the code. So your response actually surprises me.

Do you think having braces over indentation would have helped for accessibility. Any other issues with the language syntax?
I use Haskell.
Poll: OkCupid stories 
What has your experience been with OkCupid and online dating?

Bases off of the discussion from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1842557
A member of OkCupid not yet in a relationship.
In a relationship with someone met through OkCupid.
Married to someone met through OkCupid.
Member of a pay dating site not yet in a reationship.
In a relationship with someone met through a pay dating site.
Not in a relationship.
In a relationship with some not met online.
Married to someone not met online.
The secret ingredient is the bribes! ;)
John Hughes, (author of Why FP Matter) is mitigating some of the problems of TDD with QuickCheck (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickCheck).

Video: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/The-Joy-of-Testing

I've been using it for the last couple of days. You'll have to excuse not being able to see the demo properly. InfoQ fail. Stick with it, there's some really cool stuff at the end.

Another video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4655369445141008672#
Mothers' Brains Are Bigger
I doubt the BBC is talking about developers. You have skills which are in strong demand.

It sounds like you are reasonably experienced and that MAY make up for the lack of a degree. Also, in web dev a degree is really not necessary and there are plenty of people in the industry who are self taught.

If you would like to improve your CV, contribute to some open source projects on github on a few weekends. I guarantee that will put your CV on top of the pile if are a decent coder.

Many places will be able to do a first round interview over the phone, which should cut down on travel hassle. Also, if London is too far away there are plenty of good employers in Bristol which should be a bit easier for you.

Anyway, if you need any more help / advice drop me an email on d.grabov@gmail.com
Their blog is pretty good: http://blog.sucuri.net.

I also like: http://taosecurity.blogspot.com and http://scheneier.com
Updated localtodos.com to reflect the changes + some additional styling.
STOP. MAKING. EXCUSES.

You're a poster child for Stockholm Syndrome. You are completely and utterly playing by their rules. Just start looking for a new job, that is something you can do when not at work, and if things progress as far as you getting an interview, take the day off from your job and deal with that problem then. Call in "sick". Say you've got a funeral. Take a vacation day anyway. When you get there, you'll realize you don't actually care about your current workplace that much after all.

But by leaping to the problem first and then declaring that you can't solve it right now, you're setting yourself up for failure. You're just manufacturing excuses for staying in the position you're currently in. STOP. IT.
Seriously missing a lot of languages here. Where's Objective C? Visual Basic?
this made me happy :)

It's proof positive again of why I love HN. I read and felt for you with your post then in no time, you may have found a light at the end of the tunnel.

Great news :D I can't wait to hear that it's worked out for you!
'Stranger Danger' and the Decline of Halloween
The core of our service is a REST API, so we don't have to deal with that much. For browser interaction we would probably use a combination of Selenium (for system tests), and maybe qunit for the frontend testing.

But anyway, I am no expert on this so I can't give you solid advice.
How many 100% recyclable products that we use end up being 100% recycled? I'm all for cheap solar but you can't just wave your arms and say "it can be recycled" without considering the costs of an effective recycling program.
I think that the languages used by people who voted for "Other" are the most interesting to see in this context.

Could you please post what language you're using in your project if you use a language that is not listed?

I use Erlang.
Do what Tim Ferriss says: Go on an "information diet". You don't need to have all the news. If it's really important you'll hear it anyway.

Relax.

Also for Twitter: Follow real people only and only those that don't tweet 100 times per day.
Statically checked language have certain advantages and disadvantages.

As far as speeding up the process goes, I always have test and code in a vim splitscreen, along with a keybinding that allows me to run a test from within vim. It takes me << 1 second to witch between the two and execute a test.
TIBCO: The Facebook/Groupon of 1997. Q&A with founder Vivek Ranadive
You didn't list Erlang, Lua, Scheme, Common Lisp, OCaml, Prolog, or Haskell. (Also, loads of other languages, but I actually know people who use each of those.)

Also, adding options to a poll that's already in progress is going to skew the accuracy by quite a bit, but self-selecting polls aren't that scientifically rigorous anyway.
The original post doesn't appear to misuse the technical term holographic. If a journalist twists their story into "reality is virtual" or "we might live in the matrix" then they would be reporting their sensationalist (perhaps intentional) misunderstanding, and this guy would be right. But I don't see how it applies to this article. It could be better explained, but it doesn't completely misrepresent the science. The holographic principle is legit physics.

Did you post this for the comments that explain the difference between the holographic principle and Star Trek?