skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A Common Lisp variant of "Lisp", ActionScript/Flash, and Android.

Android is the future of computing, Lisp is eternal, and I can't imagine a future without Flash and my beloved ActionScript 3.

Things I want to become more popular: AliceML or Mozart/Oz as LLVM style runtimes and optimizing compilers. Alice is such a beautiful and ambitious language and VM, it's unimaginable that it's not popular.

I would also love to see more pervasive use of "mathematical" and "modeling" tools: R, specially.

More generative audio/visual programming languages; Processing, Pure Data, ChucK, SuperCollider, and live-coding environments.

I want to see Arduino become to "kits" what Android is to mobile OSes.

I want Linux and the BSDs to progress.

I want on going support for my desktop OS of choice: Windows XP. I just love the damn thing.
I was going to ask for a brief overview of the architectural differences between Fennec, Webkit and Opera, but then I found your informative article here:

http://limpet.net/mbrubeck/2010/10/04/why-fennec-is-differen...

That hit most of my questions. Thanks! Are there any other Android browsers that have cropped up since then that might be worth mentioning? I saw an announcement for Opera Mobile -- does that change the landscape?

I'm currently using Dolphin HD, and am mostly satisfied with it. It's recent 4.0 upgrade helped a lot and took care of almost all my irritations with it. If only it were open source so the last remaining few could get fixed. But I'll check out Firefox Mobile soon and see how it compares.
Online video consumption in Asia
For the audience it was written for, I'd say yes.

There are still plenty of shops that score close to zero on the Joel Test. Talk to your non-startup friends working for a big company where software is considered a cost center. They'll tell you about the big battle they had to get the company onto source control, and how deploying a new version of the company website still involves copying files by hand and running some wacky freeware database comparison tool to get the new schema changes across.

Hell, just last year I did a consulting gig for a shop that didn't even make a distinction between dev and production before I got there. Changing the site involved creating "index_new4.php", making your changes, smoke testing, then renaming (or repointing links). No source control, and they didn't even have a backup of the production database.

That's the sort of place that needs to get a copy of the Joel Test forwarded around the dev team, up to management, etc. The things on that list are as important today as they were 10 years ago. If anything, it carries more weight when you show it to management by virtue of being 10 years old.
Fixing bugs versus writing new code

My gut feeling is that this also depends heavily on the (technical) type of software you're writing. Dereferencing a null pointer in a C++ desktop app is a whole lot worse than a null pointer exception in a web app built on most modern frameworks. The latter normally won't take down the whole app, just show a one-off 502. A browser that crashes every 3 minutes is basically never going to cut it.
Or, he really is the French president. But that makes no sense.
Something I am good with now, but want to explore way more and really get better. This is most likely JavaScript.

I am really hoping/expecting non blocking/async coding to go way up in popularity over the next few years. I know every modern language supports this, but I will probably start getting my feet wet by doing this in Javascript. Reason being the syntax and tools that already exist.
If the tea is mostly caffeine: maybe sponsor some hacker event?
Highlights it to whom? Most new users won't realize that the feature existed and no longer works, most current users obviously don't care. The only people who will know about this are people who follow tech news - and we already know that Facebook is closed.
Thanks for the tip, the slowness of the F# compiler under mono was bugging me too.
Fronteers 2010 Conference Videos released
Do you look at fonts and see personalities? Or personalities for tints or shapes?
I sort of feel the same you in that reading that post increased my understanding by close to nothing. I can see 'fun' once you say it, but I never would have thought that on my own nor would I see that there's a font "personality clash".

It's like art or fashion- it is entirely subjective, yet experts can make 'definitive' statements about style and generally agree.

I think each font carries history and connotation that is obvious to the 'experts' but not to everyone else.
Very cool, I definitely foresee using it. Please don't forget to add list export functionality before you sell to Google.
"the intended effect of giving users more control"

Isn't that a side effect? I would've thought that the intended effect was strengthening Google's position?
Why doesn't Google just use YouTube as their social network
What do you guys think?
I stopped reading through the comments and went to your site. Two things:

1. You're being abrasive, defensive and confrontational in your comment responses. This is partly why you're getting downvoted and you're not being taken seriously. It's difficult to take someone seriously when the help being given (in some cases from people who've done a lot more than you have) is being flung back in their face.

2. Nobody knows whether your idea would work or not, but your execution needs a lot of work. Have you researched the market? What's the market for a list of downloadable videos? How will you monetise? What separates you from other torrent or video list sites? How will you stop the MPAA from shutting you down? Why is it that when I go to the front page I get a blog and not the top videos? Why should I stump up money to support this?

Now for number 2, instead of being defensive (and I can tell you're angry about your YC rejection, but it's not all of us that are trying to help you that rejected you) look to answer those questions. You need to work out not just if this is viable but how viable this is and what type of return an investor should expect based on investing X (where X is a range of different amounts of cash that you need) and how that money will be spent.

You have what appears to be an MVP, I'd suggest you work on pitching for investment in order to grow traffic and improve usability and organic SEO.

You need to go out and find investors, they're not going to come to you. Be pushy, be tenacious, ring everyone up in the valley if you have to. Someone will invest in your idea if it has legs. You just have to work on putting your idea into a structure that sells well to an investor.
This is pretty much the great unmentionable of our time.

Everyone knows the current breeding situation is a problem.

Everyone knows they aren't allowed to talk about solutions.
> ... but I have some questions.

There isn't a single question mark in your comment. There's a difference between questions and remarks.
Yes. It is very low. You can expect atleast 4 times higher than that.
YouTube comments are about the worst "social" interaction possible.
Average price of iPhone apps +2.3%, iPad apps +14.5%. Have prices bottomed out?
Apparently if you try to create an open-source driver for this, Microsoft thinks that it's a safety hazard....

> But Microsoft isn't taking kindly to the bounty offer. "Microsoft does not
> condone the modification of its products," a company spokesperson told
> CNET. "With Kinect, Microsoft built in numerous hardware and software
> safeguards designed to reduce the chances of product tampering. Microsoft
> will continue to make advances in these types of safeguards and work
> closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect
> tamper-resistant."

'product safety groups?'

1: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/11/04/2k-bounty-for-freeop.ht...

2: http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/11/04/the-open-kinect-proj...

3: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20021836-52.html
"there was a time not too long ago where important work with millions on the line routinely got done with one copy of the code sitting on a single workstation, and collaboration happening over network shares or email. I worked at one of those places. It sucked. The Joel Test was part of an evangelization movement which changed standard practices in our industry radically, for the better."

I'm all for the Joel Test, and I've definitely seen places without source control, or with terrible or no source control.

But do you really think the Joel Test was on of the real pushers for change? I know Joel is popular, but I'd bet the Joel Test has been read by all of 1-2% of programmers. Moreover, I'd guess that it's the 1-2% who were already using source control.

Don't mean to nitpick, I'm honestly wondering if I'm underestimating the impact of this article. Completely agree with the rest of your comment.
I've tried a few but the ones I liked the most were Krav Maga and Capoeira.

Krav Maga is probably the best multi-assailant self defence martial art you could do. It only takes a few months to learn the basics and after that you should be able to defensively handle yourself sufficiently in a fight against an armed assailant or with multiple unarmed assailants long enough to get away.

Capoeira is great fun but really really works you out. It's set to music and is very athletic. I only did Capoeira a couple of times but enjoyed it (then I did my knee in and haven't been back since, but want to once I've shifted a few pounds).
Both sets of people can be present in the same company. There have been postings in the F# forums of devs wanting to use F# because they know it's good, but being very clear that corporate policy is going to restrict them unless certain conditions are met. Whether IP concerns from open source contribs is one of these, I dunno.

Nitpick: F# is really a multi-paradigm language. It truly does provide OO, functional, scripting and interactive styles.
They all are relevant to someone.
I think even Joel might update number one to "Do you use distributed version control?", not so much for the "distributed" part but for the "branching and merging that just works" part.
At their core, computers are boolean logic, not arithmetic. Ironically, math is one of the things they are bad at, they are just quick.
In 5 years I'd like to be a master Pythonista. I'd say I'm moderately poor at Django and Python in general, I'd like to be able to do all kinds of whizzy things by then.
US$ 2000 Prize For Developing Open Source Microsoft Kinect Drivers
Since so much software development is now web development, and since so much of that lives or dies by keeping customer data safe, something like "Have you practiced restoring from backup lately?" should go on the list.
He means "code drop model"
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=code+drop+model

Most of the 16 results are linkbacks to this announcement
Data Protectionism Begins In Earnest
It was the actions of a single employee who has since apologized and has left the TSA. As much as I dislike the TSA and would relish any bad publicity for them, I don't really see this as reflecting on the TSA as a whole.
Unresponsive script is different then slow script

Well… Browsers use the same thread for UI updates and JS execution, so every time[1] Javascript is executing your UI is blocked—which means that if your script runs for longer than ~0.2s UI becomes noticeably unresponsive. So IE will decide that your script is unresponsive after 5mil statements, Firefox—after 10 seconds, and Safari after 5. Opera seems not to care

[1] Unless your are using webworkers. Those are executed in separate threads.
Go to any fan page on FB and you will see the same thing.
Overcoming Web-App Building Procrastination
Or using the dumping of stuff they don't care about to gain positive press from people who will never use them.
Thanks. I stand corrected. It's good to know Apache is patent-safe.

Sorry for those offended by my doubts.
Java isn't just Oracle stack. It's also SAP, IBM, Red Hat(JBoss), VMWare(SpringSource) & Google stack.

The only thing you need from Oracle nowdays is JDK, and with OpenJDK becoming a standard - you need nothing.
Sounds like you might not have been around back at the turn of the century.

Back then, there were no blogs. There were no programmers who wrote stuff. Joel was pretty much the first. And his stuff was really good and actionable.

So if you cared to read about your field, you were reading Joel. If you sent a programming link to your team, chances are it was one of his articles.

Coming into the field today, it's understandable that you might not have heard of the guy. But if you were around in the late 90s and you'd heard of anybody, you'd heard of Joel. If you were on a team in the late 90s and you wanted to improve things, you sent around a copy of the Joel test.

So yes, I do think a lot of the credit for the higher standards we have today goes to him.
I'd say computers are more applied math than pure math
Android Gingerbread UI appears hidden in Google Maps 4.60, looks slick
I've been using F# for a while. The main benefit I've had from having access to the source is being able to figure out exactly how things work. A _lot_ of F#'s "magic" is in libraries written in F#, and the source to those is very clear and easy to navigate and figure out. The compiler is of course more complex, but the few times I've wanted to figure out a specific issue in the compiler that the F# language spec didn't explain, it's come in handy.

This also holds true for the .NET Framework class libraries. Visual Studio can automatically step into the source while debugging. This has saved me tons of time.
I don't believe that climate science is 'settled'.

To clarify I'm neither religiously pro or anti global warming (although I do believe that climate change should happen as a byproduct of a chaotic system with high entropy) - to me the question of whether or not it's solely man made is irrelevant. The questions of importance to me are:

Is it possible to sufficiently geo-engineer the Earth's climate to counteract climate change?

If it is possible where's the cost/benefit analysis (i.e. how much do we spend on geo-engineering to achieve the best 'payoff' in terms of success)?

What's the cost of adaptation (i.e. accepting that the change will happen and adapting ourselves to the changing environment)?

Those questions are relevant regardless of whether or not the world is getting hotter or colder. For me the political muddying of the waters makes it impossible to engage in rational debate with either side. It's become a religion, but unless you're a climate scientist (and I'm not) you realistically only know what you've consumed from others, and there's a lot of people on all sides who are more interested in moulding facts to fit a political argument than identifying what's really happened.
> And, if it really came down to it, Facebook has one other way to get Google’s contact data. Google is going to still allow users to download their contacts in a spreadsheet — Facebook could simply ask users to upload that file.

Is he kidding?! Noone would bother with that.
I don't think twice when a site links to something like
Vimeo. It just works. It's the web.

It does the same for me too. On iPhone. Without Flash. The web, indeed.
Sounds exactly what I'd expect from a big company. Politics and contrary agendas are an inevitable part of a large or even medium-sized company.

I'd always suspected that XBLIG was a battle to get greenlit, and the inevitable result is that once the evangelists move into other positions, you're left with an ecosystem full of people that were convinced to let something happen, who don't really support it.
Surely can't last long. Simply repeatedly accuse public officials of infringement while working at govt. offices.
From my experience the chrome dev-build on linux crashes a lot, whereas the mac dev-build ist really usable.
The question as written works a little better -- it makes it clear it is more like a college essay where you are required to write about one thing (for 1000 words) and do it in a way that makes you look interesting.

"Tell us one thing about the world that you strongly believe is true, but that most people think is not true."

Link to application: http://www.thielfoundation.org/index.php?option=com_content&...
Clicking on "Inbox" to refresh the inbox also takes several seconds - sometimes many seconds.
Thanks, glad you liked it; I had fun doing it.
$x++ doesn't overflow (repeat a value you've already seen), yet produces a value less than the prior $x. This means PHP has two different total orderings over strings, one of which is inaccessible except by brute force. I find that indefensibly wrong. The odds I wanted this are zero, so silently getting it anyway is the kind of ridiculous misbehavior that makes me glad I can avoid the language.
Show HN: A/Bingo for ASP.NET
But simple CSS3 transforms/animations are hardware accelerated and cover a lot of use cases.
>99% chance we are living in a simulation
Questions as in doubt, hesitation, concern: http://thesaurus.com/browse/questions
I am not "anti-Microsoft". I am just old enough. I also worry, considering recent moves (and that's not only from Microsoft), that some companies (Microsoft among them) may be taking strategic positions to disrupt the free and open-source software ecosystems that threaten their dominance of their niches.

Yesterday, for instance, Oracle made a huge PR splash in the MySQL space. One can't ignore it.
Finally. Google is once again doing some good.
Google open sources Szl - compiler and runtime for Sawzall Language
When everyone is a superman, who will clean the toilets?
The "guilty until proven innocent" provision was present in a prior version of the legislation, was dropped after public outcry, and has magically appeared again without notice.

If it was not suitable before, why is it suitable now?

Sometimes I hate politicians.
I just tried to send an e-mail. After a few seconds I got tired looking at the "Loading" label, so I switched to html mode. I personally wouldn't say it's slow. I'd rather call it broken.
The rights and wrongs of digital books
Sorry if I sounds rude but have you ever tried to get a job in this market? To get a job, or seed capital, you need to work. A lot.

It's a full-time job itself to get a job. Call people. Start blogging and be active in forums like HN so people see how smart you are. Search every little possible job you ever can get. If you're not famous noone will ever GIVE you a job. It's something you need to work for.

If you don't have neither a job neither seed capital for your startup, you have some serious work to do. Search 5 or 10 jobs a day minimum, every single day. Call every angel in the Valley and see if they are interested in meeting you. Go to free parties and events to meet more interesting people. Ask your existing network for tips, help and recommendations. A comment on your own site was a start but don't think it solves your problem. Hard work do.

Be awesome. Work hard. Don't give up.
cool..... but wouldn't this be worth significantly more than $2k?
The notion that automation is somehow reducing the number of jobs is a flawed one. Did automating farm work have the same impact?

The amount of skills and capital equipment, including robotic systems, a society has determines how wealthy it is.

If you can produce with a machine what ten men could produce ten years ago, and no one else has this advantage, all this means is that YOU get to spend those nine saved salaries on extra things nine other people will be paid to provide.

Or you can save those nine salaries in the bank where they can be loaned out to hire 9 people on some new venture.

But if everybody has access to the same technology, the price of the thing you're making will just drop 90%. You'll only get those extra 9 salaries while you have a technological advantage over your competitors.

And history bears this out. Automobiles were very costly until mass production, then costs were slashed and the average middle class person could afford them.

And automakers armed with the technology were not able to rest on their laurels. If they did not continue to chase technological advantage successfully, they eventually fail. Unless bailed out by government, of course.

So there's nothing to fear from technology. It is the source of middle class well-being, not its scourge.
The Big Bang didn't happen.

Climate change is natural.

The top rate of income tax should be 90%.

Root is a design fault.
I'll just leave this here: http://goosh.org/
ghc is the only industrially viable choice at the moment, though.
Samsung Galaxy S now #1 in Japan, displacing iPhone 4
"So if you cared to read about your field, you were reading Joel. If you sent a programming link to your team, chances are it was one of his articles."

I think this is where it fails - most people don't read about their field, at all. At least in my experience.

I was only programming professionally in 2004, though, for what it's worth.
Here are two things I believe are true that most well-educated people think are untrue. Among those who think one of these is true, a large percentage think the other is false.

-----

Most people (who accept evolution) claim there's a definitive evolutionary tree for all species.

I believe there is no single, definitive tree, but rather, several trees. Depending on which feature or gene sequence you're studying, and what method you use to construct a tree, you'll get slightly different trees. Sometimes this is just statistical noise, but other times it's due to different traits actually having different lineages, as a result of events like recombination (say, when a virus injects a fragment of DNA into another creature's genome) or horizontal gene transfer [0]. If you build a phylogenetic tree that covers whole genomes for multiple species, it will typically end up being a phylogenetic network [1] rather than a simple tree.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetic_network

-----

I also believe the original language text of the Bible has been very reliably preserved since antiquity. There's a surprising amount of crossover between the subject of textual criticism [2] and phylogenetics -- comparing manuscript variants (between millions of pages across several centuries) is not that different from comparing DNA mutations. There are very few parts of the Biblical text that are seriously disputed by the legitimately well-informed.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_Criticism
I've been using this for the past 6 months for S3stat, Twiddla and FairTutor, with some pretty impressive results. Since it's "November Sprint" time, I finally motivated myself to package it up and release it as Open Source.

It's essentially a simplified version of patio's A/Bingo, with one major departure in that participation data is stored in the users' browser rather than a local database. That helps it scale out better and means that you can pretty much just drop the code into your project and have it start working without having to configure anything.

Let me know what you think!
17 Sure Signs That Your Freelancing Rates Really Are Too Low
But why refresh them at all? Once a page is open in a background tab, surely Chrome won't just refresh it in a loop for the hell of it?
It's mostly KAVA.

It does the opposite of what caffeine does.

http://www.hippydirt.com
Someone ought to show him the wonders of embedding. http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/
I doubt it. The leap between proper version control and excellent version control (distributed being the peak) is significant but not the same as the leap between no version control and any version control. That transition is as significant as coming to use structured programming languages (over raw machine code and assembly), or the invention of fire.
How to balance an MMO
Plus, as it was pointed out, the patent grant prevents them from coming after you later.