skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it. The first program to write is the same for all languages:

Print the words

hello, world

This is a bug hurdle; to leap over it you have to be able to create the program text somewhere, compile it successfully, load it, run it, and find out where your output went. With these mechanical details mastered, everything else is comparatively easy.

The C Programming Language [Kernighan, Ritchie]
I don't think I'd use it even if Redis was a bottleneck [1]. With a performance increase of around 11% for SET/GET commands, I don't think there's that much to gain from running redis without an underlying OS. There's quite a bit to lose, too, because if you think about it, the implications here are that you aren't going to (ever) be able to make your data persist. Redis is a better fit for data that doesn't necessarily require persistence anyway, but putting this all on a scale, 11% don't win me over.

That being said (which is specifically about Redis on Xen), though, I think being able to run other server software without an underlying OS is pretty damn neat.

[1] Redis already scales nicely and with the upcoming Redis Cluster it's going to be trivial to run a fault-tolerant scaleable environment.
I realized one day that my friends weren't good friends - they weren't bad friends, they just weren't an asset to me. I realized my job is just a job, I work in construction so it really didn't matter where I am I'll always be able to work. My dream of being a novelist is achievable anywhere, and from a logical perspective I make more money in North America than in the UK thanks to the exchange rates.

I took a chance and started visiting someone I'd met online, it went well so I gave up everything and moved to Canada. I'm now married, I have a good job with good bosses and good coworkers (in the year I've worked there, I haven't seen a single bit of drama).

What made me want to do all this? The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin by P.D. Ouspensky, basically the man made all his decisions wrong in life and is tortured by it at the end of his life as he relives his life unable to make a change for the better.

I realized I could either regret life, or not.
Well, my assumption is that they think they can get better than 10-13% speedups; but even still. I just like the idea and the hackery.
This is true even outside of programming, I occasionally get emails from students at my alma matter asking for advice on getting into investment banking, and in general I'm much more likely to respond if they show they've already put some effort in.
There's a complete lack of detail in this story, and the wikileaks bit almost seems like an aside looking to cash in on some of the wikileaks sympathy.

It's humorous how bitchy people are about PayPal -- do this sort of stuff with your bank and see how that turns out. Long before wikileaks, and before 9/11, banking and financial regulations have been very tight.

Every single payment system on the planet has to abide by the laws of the countries that they are operating in. Anti-money laundering regulations, in particular, apply to every organization that does money transfers of any sort.

Further still, many of the recipients of PayPal cash got paid via credit card. For those who don't know this, when you pay someone with a credit card they normally don't get a penny for 60 days or so. PayPal, in letting you withdraw cash against credit card payments, is essentially fronting you a loan with the CC receipts as the collateral, though obviously they have risk if you have significant fraud or chargebacks. It's that element that so many fail to understand.
Strange Rails ActiveRecord Timestamp Errors (Time =/= Time)
NaCl has nothing to do with offline web apps

But I'd love to run offline native apps with it. All of those photo editing apps NaCl is supposed to make snappy? I definitely want to run those offline.

Gears requires a browser plugin

Google controls the distro!

while HTML5 solutions do not

It doesn't matter how it happens, but mitigating offline pain will be a key factor in hooking the next generation of users on cloud usage patterns.
IMHO what we need is more innovation in publishing. May be an open-access model that allows authors to build research projects as daily/weekly updates with room for "dynamic invited open peer-review" would make an interesting experiment.
There is an old track by The Arsonists called "Frenemies": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxJAnfTDkwU
Wikileaks is an intelligence operation - F. William Engdahl
Ask HN: Project Management Best Practices
What are yours? Any details about the most successful projects you have been part of? Methodologies - Pert / Agile / Scrum? Tools - Gantt Charts / Basecamp / Whiteboard?
A bit OT, but the original, Japanese version of the movie "Shall We Dance" is very enjoyable, and maybe even speaks to the "dance" responses in this thread, a bit.
These don't seem too dissimilar to the myths of hiring for small teams in general, actually.
What kind of "server side" application? As a systems developer many of my applications would be more suited to Go. The biggest problem with Haskell's lazy evaluation system in real world analyses is that performance is unpredictable. While I would strongly consider using Haskell for an academic publication (e.g., my master's thesis), I would be more cautious about using it in a systems capacity. Then again, my assumption for most of HN is that we're not talking about systems development, it's just that Go is directly targeted at systems development.
Madoff son found dead in NYC in apparent suicide ~ A News Fuse
Best way: build something that you know will break, then be prepared to swoop in and fix it. Whenever you fix one bug, add another. Repeat ad infinitum. Some people will be impressed by your resourcefulness. Others will be angry that things break at all, but over time these people will get fed up and leave. Eventually a culture will develop wherein it is accepted that IT systems are just fundamentally unreliable. You will get stable long-term employment, a good salary, and regular (though superficial) praise and deference from everyone around you, including your boss.

This strategy is extremely reliable. I have seen it used successfully at every company I've ever worked at, large and small, in multiple industries.

Another approach is to develop an internal professional ethic and pursue it irrespective of office politics. It's not as good for career stability but you sleep better.
My version is much worse. Without the context of Joel's post, it'd bounce right off you, like all the rest of the banal platitudes you hear about your career. Joel's has a narrative with a protagonist. It doesn't simply say "placating bosses is an ineffective career strategy"; rather, it takes you to the end of the story and begs you to come up with underlying point. That's smart; smarter than I could have done.
> Personally I'd find learning Haskell entertaining, but not very applicable to my day-to-day enterprise software gig.

I'm interested in Haskell - what exactly is lacking about it? Is its design fundamentally flawed, or does it just lack a community and all the things that come with that (libraries, support websites, etc.)?
Avoid a “specialist” culture at your company

While I agree with the fact that an organization should be generalist heavy. There are some areas that I think there is no substitute for specialist, security and HCI are two areas that we rely on specialist to helm the direction, there is so much domain knowledge in both that it is money well spent to carry specialist in these areas. It looks like the author implied this by using the word culture, but I felt that it is probably worth expanding on so that the avoidance would not be taken to the extreem by a reader.
I'm in the European Union where you're free to travel from one country to another as you like, so it isn't a problem. Theoretically I could be borded by a customs boat, but I've never had it happen and suspect it's quite rare. I'm not sure how it would work if I went to a country with stricter control of their borders.

You'd do well to keep your VHF radio open on channel 16 though(this is where boats communicate with each other when at sea). I've had customs call med up when passing the border from the Netherlands to Germany to hear who I was and where I was going. Once they got a satisfactory answer we never heard from them again.
You'll dissipate most of your energy by the time you reach the thick air of the lower atmosphere.

This speaks to my point. In launch accelerator mode, you want to dissipate as little energy as possible. In reentry mode, you want to dump the majority of a big honking chunk of kinetic energy.

I'm sure there are all sorts of optimizations to consider. How about a mostly vertical trajectory, with most of the horizontal velocity provided by lasers heating a heat-exchanger?

By keeping the trajectory mostly vertical, one can avoid most of the lower atmosphere by stationing the opening to the atmosphere miles above the surface. This also limits the downrange danger-zone for falling malfunctioning cargo pods. Additionally, it makes the cargo pods easier to target with the lasers, since the powered flight would be entirely in the upper atmosphere. It would also make the rocket nozzles easier to design.
These articles tilt me to no end. Who cares if teenagers don't tweet, really. My parent's don't like Kanye - so what. It certainly doesn't mean they won't ever tweet, if that's the underlying concern.
Ouch . . . but thanks, I always welcome sound criticism and I don't think I disagree with your points. The piece probably is more directed to what might be called "principles of good lawyering as they incidentally touch on writing." There is a short section in which I do touch directly on writing principles (recounting "good writing rules" and then bringing up my pet peeve about how they are not to be applied mechanically) but that is the only direct discussion of that topic. Concerning lawyering principles, I don't think there is anything I would edit or change and so maybe it is an issue of a poor title for the piece (and a theme that needs to be recast a bit).

Thanks again for the honest criticism. That is one of the great benefits of putting one's work out there. It definitely helps you sharpen and refine it as it is appraised by smart people.
I lived in Grand Rapids for 5 years (4 of them were college). Not going back. EVER. Most claustrophobia inducing environment I've ever lived in (the trees man, the trees, you can't get out of the trees). But the beaches are nice.
Ask HN: Could "Show HN" be shooting your site in the foot?
What is the purpose of showing your site to other entrepreneurs?

To show off your technical accomplishments to other techies even if that means handing your idea on a silver platter to other capable would-be entrepreneurs to work on?

"Ideas are a dime a dozen", I hear you say.

"Only execution matters."

Well, regardless, your execution is now or imminently in competition with that of other developers who read about you right here.

It seems to me a lot of "Show HN" is a cheap excuse for claiming you've done your part to drive traffic to your site, even if that traffic does not feed your bottom line and could run against your self-interest.
I run a software business out of a small town in central Japan which, despite having a local tech incubator (the original reason why I started living here -- long story), will not be confused with a startup hub any time soon.

My frustrations with living here:

1) Most events I want to go to are Way The Heck Over There. Going over to Tokyo for an HN meetup takes a total of six hours of train rides and $200. Going to the US for a conference takes, ugh, don't get me started.

2) To the limited extent that my life requires that someone who is not my customer understand what I do for a living, my life is needlessly complicated. My landlord, my bank manager, and the local tax office/city hall think my situation is very "exotic" relative to what they are used to. It is nothing that I haven't been able to finesse, but nuisances are nuisances. Similarly, the selection of lawyers/accountants/etc who are prepared to deal with me is more limited than it would be in e.g. San Francisco (or Tokyo or Chicago, for that matter).

3) There is one programmer in this town I'd consider hiring.

Now, does that matter? Meh, not so much. I launched a multinational telephony company from here this week. We are living in the future. The Internet is the greatest geographical leveler ever, and the situation keeps getting better. APIs keep getting better, enabling you to do more and more sophisticated things with less and less investment. Hosting keeps getting better: in all probability, I'll never own a server, and that is a viable option now. Options for extracting money from paying customers keep getting better. The funding environment is even getting better, although that is slower (not too relevant for me at present, but nice to have options).

There are some compensating advantages:

1) This town is my home.

2) While Japan is not exact a low-price country, a modest apartment in San Francisco costs about what I need to live comfortably here.

3) Being ramen profitable here is delicious.
Anal Axe Rapist. Or, Penis à la Ax Art.
I would try and expand my Haskell knowledge; Go is too similar to languages I already know. I would take this as an opportunity to learn. Erlang would be the other choice.
Because people will pay for it which attracts developers to build on it which in turn builds a richer ecosystem for their platform.
Qwop download - Qwop Game Strategy | #2Tagnl
Unlimited Blog
Slow assimilation works best
Oldie but goodie.
Ask HN: How do you effectively manage remote/telecommuting programmers?
We are planning to expand our hiring for full-timme developers to accomodate remote programmers. Having been freelancers for a couple of years, we have some ideas on how to manage remote work (namely asynchronous task management, im/email/sms, etc.) But i am curious to know other interesting setup others have employed and found very effective.
Panel discussion with the guys who will buy your company
OT, but I recently updated my credit card information in PayPal. New information is valid and verified. Bank account information remains unchanged and is the first choice as a source of funds.

My couple of crappy little subscription payments start failing. "No secondary source of funds specified."

I look through all the configuration settings -- which it turns out are not at all clear about funding sources for existing subscriptions. About three times. It all looks fine / as good as I can set it.

I email PayPal. It's like talking to a blank wall. Customer support? Buwahahaha! (That would be their response, not mine.)

Fuck them. I wouldn't trust them to buy a lollipop.

(Which reminds me, I should probably just close my account, though I've kept it up to this point for the occasional crappy little payment.)

CORRECTION: I recall now, I used their own web site form to 'report a problem / as a question', not email.
Angry Birds is coming soon to a PC near you
There is no reason that deleting the post necessarily revokes the license granted under "Your License to Quora".
It is most likely something else going on with the account. You need to remember the brilliant creation of Max Levchin was actually the fraud detection algorithms. The easy way to think about it is, any "uncommon" or "uncharacteristic" account activity will generate some degree of weight towards flagging or even locking the account.

If donations, or even transfers, of size X are uncommon for the account, then the fraud detection algorithms try to limit the risks. This might result in a call from paypal (happened to me), a lock on the account, the account being completely frozen or any of a number of different risk mitigation methods.

In short, this one example proves nothing about wikileaks.
For the "real world" applications I think you should at least consider Scala and Clojure also. Because they're both JVM based you can rely on the Java infrastructure that's been built up over the past 15 years.

If you're doing web development, or network applications, NodeJS is also notable, there's a reason it's getting a lot of attention lately, the fun-factor is just off the charts.
No Jobs? Young Graduates Make Their Own
prgmr.com is based on availability. there are times when they have no space, so they dont allow you to order.
Oldie but goodie. Certainly true in my experience.
I like the Socratic method, but don't always feel I have enough energy or time to do things that way. When somebody asks me for help with math homework and I'm tired or in a hurry I'm much more likely to quickly sketch an answer than behave in a teacherly manner.
Definitely Haskell
What will you do with files in Chrome OS?
Ask HN: IN App-Purchasing
If you are a iphone, android, or FaceBook or MySpace app developer you know the choice of an in-app-purchasing service can be daunting.

Has anyone run across a good guide that compares
them all and explains the advantages and disadvantages?

Yes, its somewhat for a startup..baby steps now as I collect the seed capital via some offsite dev contracts.

Thanks HN Guys and Gals..you are probably the best startup education out there thus far.
It is very relevant for total novices. When someone has no concept about programming, this is the fastest way to "here are the barest basics, and you have already written a program."

Quick sort means nothing to someone who does not yet grok compiling and output, much less sorting as an algorithmic process.

Question isn't whether "hello world" is obsolete, it's the level of knowledge of the author. A rank noob needs to see the simplest possible program, not the highest density functionality.
WordPress set fetch_feed to update sooner
FlowNx - an HTML5 based expression evaluator
CIA hosting wikileaks (NOT)
Haskell with a cleaned up library and eager evaluation would be a dream. Alternatively, adding type classes to OCaml (and removing the object system) would yield a similarly awesome language.
Yeah, that is the 1 case, and ActiveSupport has had a BasicObject for a while now. This is another case where proponents would say it is great that you can undefine a method, but I would say that is a hack for lack of any namespace management. Now that there is a BasicObject I am not sure that there is any practical use for undefining a method- probably only for dealing with namespace collisions, which again seems to point out a language flaw, not a feature of dynamism.
From a tourist's perspective, the problem with the NY subway system (compared with other subway systems) is that multiple stations have the same name, but may be in very different locations. Usually it's on the same street, but not always; e.g. Fulton St, in both Brooklyn and Manhattan.

As to the map itself, the current one is far too crowded in spots because it hews too closely to physical geography, leading to difficulty making out the association between labels, lines and stations until one is familiar with it.
I often show ideas to my techy friends prior to releasing them, including on HN. People are often kind enough to give feedback. Some of that feedback has to be taken with a grain of salt, but I've definitely picked up an idea or thirty here that were big wins for my business. It is also enormously motivational for me to be able to share with people who understand where I'm coming from -- indeed, I really doubt I would have a business were it not for my Internet sanity outlets.

I am fairly open about my business, down to publishing sales stats, and every product I've ever released has been cloned. That is not a significant problem for my business. There is no beautician in the United States who is currently not using Appointment Reminder because it was cloned. There is a metric truckload who are not using it because my marketing is, to a first approximation, terrible. I optimize my efforts to improving the marketing rather than avoiding clones.

I'm with you on "driving traffic" being a value-destroying mindset, but do not agree that most people participate on HN to drive traffic.
I agree, the SSN/fake birth cert is the riskiest most dangerous proposition .. I have interacted with people who have done this some 15 years ago and they are still around, they have a family, a US passport and a steady decent paying job. What I don't know is how many got busted and landed in deep stuff.
Agreed. There's obviously trolling for karma going on, but then again, there's the other side of it, namely, the author trying to use the reddit post as leverage when trying to sort things out with paypal.
Most subway maps in Europe are diagrams because the urban fabric of the city evolved in a chaotic patchwork fashion; you can't easily explain London on a diagram. The urban fabric of New York is a grid. New York developed on top of a diagram. This is such a crucial part of how you understand the city that it doesn't make sense to me that you wouldn't acknowledge this in a diagram which is explaining a system which is laid out to serve another diagram: the city grid. One of the fundamental principals of modernism is that form follows function; the second guys map is more functional.
They finally let me close mine today. Had an "instant" payment pending for the past week for some reason. Good riddance.
Does this mean Google won the suit?
Off topic a bit, but for help on legal writing I think the work by Bryan Garner is the best I've seen. Simple, direct, full of great advice and examples. Great stuff:

http://www.lawprose.org/bryan_garner/books.php
I don't get it. What am I supposed to see there that proves this was trolling?
Haskel is beautiful language, but I voted Go because side effects in Haskel are pain and if you want language to the server I suppose it is because of doing side effects (like working with db or files, changing memory, serving webpages etc).

Plus Go has easy conurrency via message passing, which is nice to have these days.
That's a great point. I meant what's important to the company, which hopefully is the same thing as what's important to management.

It's funny how thought provoking your question is, though. Because a lot of developers, as you point out, care about far different things for their own reasons. One developer I knew, cared more about everything being 100% as "efficient" as possible before releasing it. She didn't care if things ever got released, really, that didn't matter as much as whether it fit her personal ideas of what's aesthetically ideal. To show you how extreme that was, she spent a week writing a caching layer (in python) using a hashtable + list for a least-recently-used algorithm. When I mentioned she could do this in 2 lines of code talking to memcached, she refused, pointing out how silly it is to talk to an external process with a context switch to look up some data.

Who's right and who's wrong? Hard to say. I guess it depends on the context, and what the company is trying to do. I think the answers are different if you're trying to show good, sustainable results for customers without muddying up the code base, versus if you're writing software for lunar rovers.
Art and code are definitely compatible, and there is certainly a market for digitally curated / created art.

If you want to create art, spend time exploring and educating yourself. Learn what you like, what you find interesting and what you feel is worth exploring.

There are quite a few people who seem to be making money in these fields, via commissioned works - one that spring to mind is Robert Hodgin [1]/[2].

There are also galleries which specialise in 'digital art'. I know of one in particular in Berlin [3].

There are blogs which cover digital and emerging forms of art. [4] [5]

I've only just scratched the surface .. there's a LOT that's definitely worth exploring.

[1] http://www.flight404.com/

[2] http://roberthodgin.com/

[3] http://dam-berlin.de/

[4] http://www.vvork.com/

[5] http://we-make-money-not-art.com/