skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Yeah, the references of Perl sucks. Just has to be learned.

But this is part of the larger point: it doesn't have to be learned. Just use something else that doesn't have this frustrating design flaw.

>The Perl feature is that it is flexible.

As opposed to, say, Lisp? CLOS, the most powerful OO system in existence [1] and it was initially just a library on the language. When people say things like this about perl they're usually talking from '98 or so when perl was the most flexible game in town. A lot has changed since then.

>You'll get more library and language capabilities with CPAN than using anything else I know of.

Java has more libraries, hands down. I'd say most common programming languages cover every use case that 99% of programmers will encounter, so CPAN/Java libs are only the only hope for a small amount of people in a very small amount of situations.

>It is the natural language inspiration shining through

You mean the English inspiration shining through. A lot of the ambiguity problems we have in real life (faithfully replicated in perl for us!) are a bigger problem in English than, say, German.

>This is a choice I made, because it is fun.

To each his own. I would try out some of the more advanced languages though. Lisp has some really cool things like the condition system [2], with Haskell you can easily play with infinite sequences, an incredible type system, etc.

>Or, if the Android competition don't work out, maybe Objective C

I would advise learning Smalltalk first and playing with that. It's a purer implementation of what you'll be doing with Objective C so it will help you learn good behaviors when you are ready to do some iOS programming. The Smalltalk image is also a fascinating concept.

[1] If you disagree, point me to one that is more powerful. And the way I'm judging power is by how many patterns I have to know to use it. In CLOS I don't even have to override a function and then call the base version, I can just use :before/:after methods.

[2] This is probably Lisp's nicest feature that hasn't yet been copied by mainstream languages. Which is a shame, software would be a lot more robust if it used this kind of system as opposed to the crippled exception system we use today.
You think Facebook wouldn't fire an employee who leaked confidential internal company information?
Invisible presence: support to be removed from ejabberd - PlanetErlang
Why was it awkward?
What is an Erlang
More than anything, this video demonstrates the potential power of social media to people who don't understand it's usefulness. It even helped me "get" twitter.
VisitorsCafe - Product Launch (Free Invites)
It's just playing off the old "ball-n-chain"-style of marriage humor often trotted out by stand-up comedians and sit-coms for a laugh. I wouldn't take it too seriously.
uhh wait.. people actually use ruby at work? Perhaps 3% but calling it bread and butter is just plain untrue.

Java/PHP/C# would be more fitting, those make up a huge percent of the jobs.
The same holds true with bytecodes. e.g. TCO on the JVM: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/105834/does-the-jvm-preve...
Jolicloud Confirms "Jolibook" Netbook Coming This Month
The interoperability of social networks
Yes!. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1595472 Nobody wants to be the "sole developer" to an idea guy. So if you have built something show it. I got a couple of bites, tried a few people out. Stuck with 1 great co-founder and we're moving along.

It is incredibly encouraging to see someone else's commits.
Good luck!
Why do you find it depressing?

I'm not saying that there aren't better programming languages than Javascript. I'm just saying that there is a subset of Javascript which is really expressive and elegant.
JavaScript was released in 1995 as part of Netscape Navigator 2.0. Lua was released in 1993. I don't know about a decade.
GitHub is Running Erlang
If by "a little extra firmware", you mean "calling the OS firmware, and burning it into the CPU", then yes.
C is portable assembly, and since assembly will always be the interface to the hardware, C will probably be around for a long time. Everyone should know C and one high level language (be it Lisp, Haskell, Lua, Python, Ruby).
I'd say the "getting lost due to having no 3G bit" was one of the /least/ hyperbolic things - I can imagine that happening to me pretty easily nowadays.
I'm not arguing against for or against that fact. I'm arguing that these "testing" methodologies are flawed. I'm, apparently, doing a very poor job of expressing the distinction.

Let me state in as clearly as I can:

* A good test would ensure that the luminance values for all colors matched exactly throughout the test image.

* Said test would need to be displayed using a device that is calibrated to ensure displayed luminance matches encoded luminance.

* A test that pulls color data from a source image with mixed luminance values in each channel is flawed.

* This statement makes absolutely no claim as to the human ability perceive any of these colors.
What are those magnetic name tags he is talking about?
My favorite part is definitely the signature.
How to tell when you've won Hacker News
WRT to the lottery: it hasn't been so competitive lately: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Quotas_and_changes_in...

E.g. (note that the fun begins on April 1):

FY 2009, quota used up in 7 days before beginning the lottery (and as you allude to, this sort of thing used to be the norm).

FY 2010, quota not used up until December 21, 2009.

FY 2011, quota projected to used up right about now.
Don't read up on how to do more, just do more.
It's relevant because the testing method is flawed. Illustrating a fact using a flawed example/method is bad science.
Can you give us more info on the "Semantically Correct way to list breadcrumbs?"

I'm genuinely curious. Is there an authoritative source some where (w3c, etc)?
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Released
How to Hack Gmail Accounts
Will be interesting to see if PayPal's proposed micropayment system[1] gains traction. With a streamlined purchase approach combined with big partner involvement (Facebook et al), there's a possibility of a shift in attitude towards in-browser payment for microcontent.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/26/paypal-unveils-micropayment...
I don't know if business people do a lot of scripting (if any) in spreadsheets, because it side-steps the ease-of-use GUI of spreadsheet in favour of a programmer's UI...
Which is pretty much daily.
Are you already highly productive, but want to be even more productive? You should read about systems and methodologies, and implement one rigorously.

Recommended: 4 Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank - breaks down the customer development lifecycle into actionable deliverables.

Do you feel like you're not being productive or shipping? You should read about procrastination and then diligently work to fix it, not spend more time studying GTD-type systems.

Recommended: Procrastination by Jane B. Burka and Lenora M. Yuen - the essential book on understanding and correcting your procrastination.
>just because they are heavily influenced by old languages!

They show signs of knowing about older languages but not understanding them. For example perl has dynamic variables (this is a huge win and for me the only good thing I have to say about the whole language)... but they're default. We had already fought this out in Lisp and found out that while they're an incredible concept and should be in any language that favors mutating variables, dynamic variables should not be the default.

Python using crappy one line lambdas instead of real closures. Why? Because Guido seems to not get functional programming. Ruby copies Smalltalk but Katz says Smalltalk "goes to far". What? A lot of the problems that trip people up in Ruby aren't a problem in Smalltalk. The biggest difference between the two is that Ruby isn't image based, but Smalltalk doesn't have to be either.

For me the biggest problem with the scripting languages is that they don't have any need to exist. They usually copy features from existing languages that already did a better job. If the manpower they got had been focused on the source languages the communities could have gotten a lot farther.

>There were two main points (1) Moose is stable, (2) it is modern. "And with modern, I mean the latest research papers".

The papers he was talking about were likely the Traits papers. Traits were done first in Smalltalk and aren't needed in Lisp because CLOS has proper multiple inheritance. Moose does look ok though.
Are you doing Android development? If so, Eclipse 3.6 isn't compatible with the ADT plugin. I had the same slow downs, but moved back to 3.5, and it works fine now.

http://developer.android.com/sdk/eclipse-adt.html
The transaction-fee kills micro-payments.
The percentage-fee kills large payments.

It basically leaves a sweet-spot between the two where the cost of doing business is tolerable to both parties.
Less with the extremely unhelpful 'just ship more' messages....

I'm sure you've read getting real, but anyway: http://gettingreal.37signals.com/toc.php

I've always liked Emerson's 'Self Reliance': http://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm

Otherwise just pick any random productivity technique. I don't think it matters which one, they're all just codifying the things you already know, and stick with that for a while. If it doesn't work, maybe something else is preventing you from shipping things? I find I'm too quick to swap what I'm doing in my personal projects, and thus have lots of prototypes.
How to Hack Yahoo Accounts
Introducing Moncai
Will the freemium model work for non-gaming apps?
I second Steve Blank for the very useful checklists. You can always open it to the back to find a whole task list in bite sized chunks.
It's more structured than text data. That's something.
The fact that a shitty user-experience can be overcome is no excuse to go ahead and build it.
Implement data frames and trellis graphics in Numpy/Scipy and I don't think I'd go back to R for much.
> Instead, put your whole keg inside the fridge, tap and all.

The brother of a friend is in a local brew club. Also very technical and (selectively) a perfectionist. That's how he/they do it.

Just be ready to take a few shelves out of the refrigerator. He has a second one in the basement devoted to this.

Once a year, they have a big Oktoberfest fund-raiser for charity. Everyone gets to bring and share their brews with the crowd, and it all goes to a good cause.
True - but you only know that at the end of the puzzle.
The point of the exercise is to maximize their strategy of winning. There is no "winning" strategy - but there is one that is significantly better than what immediately comes to mind.
No one is as focused on "shipping it out the door" as a news editor, according to Paul Ford in this essay (http://www.ftrain.com/editors-ship-dammit.html) posted to HN yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1891392

Merlin Mann at http://www.43folders.com/ started out writing about David Allen's GTD system, but then turned away from "productivity porn" and started writing more focused essays about creativity.

This isn't necessarily related to shipping products, but I love this Jeff Atwood quote: "If you can’t come up with at least one interesting thing to talk about every day, you’re not trying hard enough! The world is just full of fascinating stuff." from this interview: http://community.devexpress.com/blogs/aspnet/archive/2010/10...
If you read the article you'll see he mentioned that he wrote the blog software too... so no, it's not wordpress.
Excellent point. It is so useful for a lean startup situation - the objective is to find a scalable business model. Rejections are great to pivot to the right path!
It meant running as a plugin, which was (at the time) incredibly slow.
http://image.made-in-china.com/2f0j00gMKtuIrnhDoe/Magnetic-N...

Stick badge on one side, hold to lapel with magnet.
Lupa integrates the LuaJIT2 runtime into CPython
Have you not done the [java applet DOM] Google search, or is every link on the first SERP wrong in some way?
Happy: Ruby, javascript
Hacky: Ruby, bash
BnB: php, javascript, java
"The senz° umbrella has been awarded all major design awards in the world."

We have all your awards. If you want them back, you will have to pay us one MILLION dollars!

But seriously, what a strange thing to put in your marketing. Surely you haven't won every design award there is.
Just finished with a conference where the name badge had holes on both ends of the top edge of the badge. The lanyard part went through both. This doesn't completely stop the "flipping around" problem but does mitigate it.
Lars Bak (author of V8) talks about this quite a bit in this video with Erik Meijer.

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Expert-to-Expert-E...

summary version - there's not a lot to be gained by doing that(at least from a Goog perspective).
Was hoping for an interesting read from that title, instead it was "here's a few tips you wouldn't need me to give you if you ever bothered to read the 'Settings' page", advice not to care about who's following you, and advice not to try and say anything that takes more than 140 characters.

Inspired!
My wife has them for work: similar to a pinned nametag but with a magnetic backing that goes under your shirt/lapel that the name tag sticks to. This way you can put it where ever you want without punching pinholes in your clothes. The magnets are quite strong too as my wife fastens her name tag to her visor brim without falling off.
I think this is quite a bit different than the standard lite and full version model. The reason why is because, through in-app purchases, a developer has the potential to realize a lot more revenue per user.

If all you're trying to do is to get someone to upgrade from lite to full, that can only happen once. In-app purchases can happen several times. In Restaurant Story (one of the games mentioned in the article), you buy gems to speed up the process with which you make food. I'd bet that most people who purchase those gems do it more than once, because they're directly tied in to your success at that game. In short, there's the potential here for recurring revenue.

Not only that, but the prices on in-app purchases can be startling! Going back to Restaurant Story, I think the smallest batch of gems you can buy is $5 and it goes all the way to $99. That's a lot more revenue per user, potentially, than on an upgrade from lite to full.
Without going into the whole debacle, it seems to me at least that together with TechCrunch, they managed to build a product. Just that when it came close to launch, they royally messed things up (or whatever, let's let the courts decide).

But somewhere there is a team that can build a touch screen tablet. Whether they can build a compelling offering that competes with the rest with their plans for an Android tablet, remains to be seen.

I do agree though, it seems like they are leaving, according to them, not unsubstantial number of customers in the lurch. Let's see whether they continue to provide decent support to existing Joojoo customers.

Although, having said that, no noise from customers for lack of support, could be there are no customers to make noise. :-)
Aren't most hang tags sponsored? I know at most of the conferences I go to there is some company logo on them. This seems to be a good way to offset the costs of the name tags, so I don't see hanging tags going away any time soon.
What you're saying makes no sense. A corporation is there to make money. Full stop. It's a thing, not a person. It doesn't care because it can't care, it has no feeling only a purpose.

If you get in an accident and lose both arms are they going to pay you to sit around because they care? Of course not. They will (hopefully) try to soften your landing, but that's less because they care and more about moral of existing and future employees.

Life is going to be a painful experience until you learn to only give the amount of loyalty that is given to you. No matter what a company says or does, they are going to drop you the second you don't make sense on paper (including if they find someone who can do what you do cheaper). If you behave any other way you've been brain washed [1].

[1] This doesn't mean that if you get an offer for $1/yr more you have to drop your current company. You have to keep the short and long term in view.
That elegant, expressive subset is basically Lua. It's been able to jettison most cruft over the years.

I'm not a web developer, but every time I read/use Javascript, it feels like a broken fork of my favorite language. Javascript could have been that good, too. I like where Eich was going with it, but the browser wars etc. meant that shipping an early version made the most business sense, and design errors (which would have shaken out) got frozen in the spec.
I'm familiar with the MIT license, but thanks. So if the copyrights to new code aren't important, why would Joyent seek to change that and want to "own" the code now?
Top 30 failed technology predictions
I'm not an expert, but I'd suggest having your own limited firm which can invoice the US company (and avoid income tax because it's a b2b transaction) and then taking the money out of your company as dividends to avoid NI.

SJD and Nixon Williams are the two main accountancy firms that tech contractors use in the UK, I'd suggest giving them both a call and describing your situation and go with whichever one seems better setup to handle it.
Kudos for posting the source code as well.
Davis Square in Somerville is nice. It is on the Red Line of the T, so can pop into Boston without driving.
You could integrate Java applets into the DOM. Now you have two problems. (Keep in mind that back when this was popular IE 4 was busy kicking the pants off of Netscape Navigator. Fancy programming against IE 4?)
Java Applets never were a first class citizens in the browser. Same as Flash.
I think it's a really good idea to have some LLVM-type of bytecode standard.
Could be. For hard numbers, the dot.com/fiber-telecom bust caused MIT's EECS enrollment to crash from 400 students per class, a number that had been stable for more than 2 decades, to less than 200. It's now gotten a bit better (a bit over 200), but no one expects a return to the glory days. As I recall reading somewhere recently, overall nationally the effect was the same, from 20,000 to 10,000 majors annually granted.

I'd also add one big factor: despite the poo-pooing by some of age discrimination, it's very real and when your parents or friends of your parents tell you from harsh experience that your career will be over when you reach 35-40 years of age, you listen if you have any sense.

Of course, now the name of the game is to get a good starting job, period. I suspect that has more than a little to do with the slight recent upturn.
Spam has no worth, this is actually content of (subjectively) decent quality. Yes it is an SEO/SEM play, but there's only dishonor in that if it ads no value.

Like it or not search is how a LOT of information gets found these days. I'm an agency-employed Online Marketing Manger and in my book SEO should be baked into all online development, especially the quality content.

Not to get off into the semantic weeds, but this is actually SEM. Search optimization generally happens on-site and gets you indexed for the right thing. Search marketing (aka link building) generally happens off-site and gets you to rank for those terms. They are completely intertwined, but separate disciplines involving different skill sets and techniques.

My feeling is this content in particular is not spam, but will appeal to a lot of people. In fact, on first glance I thought it was funny, so I tweeted it right after reading the infographic. I only saw the embed code on a second-look after coming here and reading this glib comment.
Lua has been able to make major, reverses-compatibility breaking changes to improve its design in ways Javascript hasn't. Where Javascript has "The Good Parts" and incrementally improving implementations, Lua has been able to fix things and evolve.

"One thing Mike [Pall] didn't highlight: get a simpler language. Lua is much simpler than JS." - Brendan Eich (http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3851#comment-57671)
From the first hit: "Java applets may need to perform Java to JavaScript communication to access the Document Object Model (DOM)..."

So it seems that it is hardly an alternative.

> ...or is every link on the first SERP wrong in some way?

What I don't expect to find quickly is exactly how long this has been possible in which browsers since when. Was it possible back in the days of IE4 and Netscape 4 or 4.5 or whatever it was?
Windows Phone 7: The good and the bad, 3 days out
Furthermore, if Google is capable of automatically inferring breadcrumbs, why shouldn't a screenreader software be able to do the same?
let me give the humor police one more to downvote lol
Discussions of technical feasibility aside, getting a sufficiently large installed base to make this interesting is (as usual) the "fun" part; your plan for getting to critical mass against an available and "good enough" solution.

As for previous bytecode approaches to consider, there are the Lisp Machines, or the Burroughs B5000 Algol box, or the EFI byte code (EBC) interpreter and the EBC I/O drivers, or UCSD pCode, or all the gonzo things you could do with the VAX User Writable Control Store, the JITs underneath Java and Lua and other languages, or...

And HTTP is printable, which means you're working within character-encoding constraints or with escapements.

There are the not-inconsequential security requirements.

And then there's the question of how a provider might make money with this, if you're not undertaking this effort for free.

Have at...
And lose the links.
Women in Tech need to stop whining
I'm a woman in tech. A PhD student, working in crisis informatics, and startup founder. And I'm sick of hearing all about the Women in Tech issues when the truth is there are many fantastic opportunities out there. Everyone has issues, not just women. So I finally spat it out. Would love your thoughts too. http://www.mediamum.net/2010/11/10/why-women-in-tech-need-to-stop-whining-and-start-to-nurture-our-own/
The pv_ops patches are just starting to make it into mainline now, KVM's had quite a head start.
Sure. It's highly effective for web-based business apps. No reason to think it wouldn't work on the mobile platform as well if the free version is compelling enough to encourage the initial install and the upsell provides additional value. This is particularly true if your app is a consumer of information entered by your users, as then they may have some level of reliance to your solution.
Apple TV is meant to be a media browsing and consumption device, whereas Google TV includes Chrome(with Flash).

You can use an Android phone to control Google TV anyway.

I would love to see Apple solving the problem with typing using a remote(especially things like URLs) without using resorting to an iPhone or iPod Touch.
Right, it's same reason we still have ARM despite the success of x86. Or why some hardware vendors bundle FPGAs rather than rely on GPUs or custom ASICs. The instruction set is absolutely vital for a given domain's performance.
A quick review of btrfs
There are some extremely impressive changes being made within redhat 6. This distro I assume will be what represents redhat for the next 4-5 years.
And that makes an excellent case for why JavaScript should simply be the bytecode of the future. x86 is gaudy and unsuited for many tasks--but it's where most of the speed innovation happens, thus it's the best platform for compiling other languages too.

I'll propose an alternative, fix JavaScript by adding APIs like ByteArrays and shorts and a proper int to the language. Over time, JS could become an excellent IL. We can standardize on intermediate bytecode, but like all things in web adoption, it will probably be the path of least resistance that works. (Who would ever give HTML graphic, multimedia, and threading abilities?)