skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"In about a year, you'll be able to do Python and Ruby in the browser."

No, in about a year you'll be able to do Python and Ruby in X% of browsers, where X is depressingly small.

Depending on what segment of users you're targeting you're stuck with JavaScript for probably between 2 and 8 years, and that's assuming Mozilla and other actually start putting other languages in the browser immediately.

That's languages that can be compiled to JavaScript and execute relatively efficiently. And Flash, Silverlight, Java, but those are only useful for a certain class of web app.

But JavaScript really isn't that bad. You should learn it.
I'm considering doing a project in Haskell. I've used a functional language before (Standard ML), but that was in university and I didn't really like it much.

Reading "Real World Haskell" makes me understand why Haskell is such a great language, and while it may take me a bit longer to learn it, it will be well worth the effort.
I encouraged Rhett to write it. I hope it helps other people.
To add to enneff's comment: procedural knowledge is at least as important as the end result of a derivation, and in the long run is more useful.

I had several mathematical classes that weren't actually math classes (eg. statistics and physics) where other students would cram to memorize a page full of formulas, and I wouldn't even know the names of most of them going in to the exams - any formula that I could derive in under three minutes wasn't worth memorizing.

When a major outstanding problem in mathematics is finally resolved, it's surprisingly rare for people to care much about the result. Generally, people have checked enough cases or used other methods to be fairly sure what the answer really is. What gets mathematicians excited is the fact that a new proof brings with it new techniques (because if a problem can be solved using existing techniques, it doesn't withstand attack long enough to become legendary).
If the job is to code on whiteboard: definitely don't hire.
We are in the same situation. Though illegal I see many for-profit businesses advertising unpaid intern positions, and I am sure they get hundreds of replies, especially University students.

Between the difficulty in finding a job, and the fact that many students are completely supported by their parents - they can afford, and are eager to work for free in exchange for valuable experience/foot in the door/recommendations.
I should add that when I worked for others then license costs seemed more ok and a little more abstract. Now I pay wages then I'm less keen on those SQL server per processor costs.

I hope what I wrote in the blog didn't come across as visceral anti anything, especially making or spending money.
I've been doing a lot of interviewing recently. When people struggle with a white board problem, I give them a laptop to code on. I have yet to find someone who struggled at the white board, but did fine on the laptop. Maybe they exist, but I tend to think there's a high correlation between white board performance and laptop performance.
IT Analyst Ovum Anticipates Cloud Business Growth In 2011
The e-mail pops out on your desktop pc or whatever you use. You can then copy it to the kindle via usb or whatever you prefer.
Some organizations openly set out the first few weeks or the first month or two as a probationary period for new hires, but you're right about the cost effectiveness to some extent. A six month recruiting process might cost a few hours or days every so often from a few employees, but won't add up to even a single month's pay for a bad employee. Add in a cultural practice of risk-averse hiring (don't hire any B or C players) tilts the scales even further.

That said, I can imagine some cases where opportunity cost and being more concerned about getting good employees than immediately weeding out potentially bad employees would lend one to the probationary thing.
Gccgo is now committed to gcc mainline and will be part of the gcc 4.6 release.
I don't know where you read "visceral dislike" into what he wrote, I thought he laid out a logical reasonable case against them.
I'm implying that a for profit company has no motive to double check the tickets they send out it is to their advantage to send out false tickets because there is no penalty to them for the government eventually loosing the court case.

In this case the ticket was like $80 for a minor speeding infraction, 6 over the limit. I took a half day off my job to dispute that I had to drive to the very heard of down town in a busy metro area to get to the court house. Tell me if I had any common sense and no principles what is it that I should have done?

That isn't to say the government doesn't have the same motive to maximize revenue but I can't imagine the instinct being as strong as for a for profit company.
> Then again, I've never named my case statements after myself.

I bet you created a half-assed linked-list implementation and prefixed the class name with your initial, though ;)
Ok, I think I might understand what you are getting at. I seem to be confusing two different forms of knowledge: reasoning and memory (where reasoning can be used to produce other truths).
Fascinating. I'm going through sort of the same thing myself. I'm writing ASP.NET MVC and C# at work. I like C#. I think ASP.NET MVC is a good framework.

That being said, I've been doing .NET stuff for a good 9 years now (2001, when the first public beta was released). I'm kind of tired of it. I don't feel I'm learning a whole lot of new stuff and it doesn't excite me anymore. I've been dabbling in Ruby and Rails recently and playing with node.js. This stuff is interesting.

Good luck with your journey.
What don't you like about Ringo's programming model? I've found the community to be very helpful, despite it's relatively small size.
The best book I have ever read (and continue to re-read) on writing is "On Writing Well" by William K. Zinsser. Mostly the first half of the book - it's incredibly valuable.
This is from IIT JEE 1999. If i remember this was one of the most difficult Math paper in those years.check out question 11 at the end , nice one.
Trivia: Check out JEE 1998 paper on physics & try out subjective questions at the end.Boy was that paper hard.
Of course you can average times of day, as well as wind directions. Express them as vectors on a 2-D plane, then separately average the components in each dimension. Although this is somewhat obvious in the case of wind measurements, it works for times of day as well if you think of them as points on a 24-hour clock face.

Your medical friend was not checked out. She was busy stifling impolite laughter at your unfamiliarity with Cartesian coordinate systems.
VL2: A Scalable and Flexible Data Center Network
Yes, I myself improved my English by reading good books. I started with Sherlock Holmes as it was interesting as well very well written. Dickens is a very good example to get going. Also as you start reading more and more you should try short stories by Edgar Allan Poe.
The point is now how much they are _worth_ but how much people will be willing to _pay_.
I'm fairly new around here (lurked for a couple months, finally made an account last week) but one of the things that I really like about HN is the no frills approach. It would be extremely easy for a community of hackers to get carried away with adding features to a site (as the plethora of HN-based "Hello Worlds" demonstrate) but I enjoy that the site itself has remained "raw". I don't think either of your ideas are bad, but I personally would vote for the "if it ain't broke..." approach in this case.

EDIT:typos
Many people use too many words. To shorten your post:

"Can anyone recommend good books for improving English writing? I've tried Jason Fried's technique of writing an essay in five versions: three pages, one page, three paragraphs, one paragraph, and one sentence. It worked really well, but I've now become more critical about... ... ..."

Two golden rules: practice, and feedback from others. I'm certainly still learning.
Amazon Announces Free Monitoring for Amazon EC2 Instances
Agreed, see Weber's focus on government legitimacy. In particular, government's role is to hold a monopoly on the use of force.
ZombieHarmony - One of the Best Free Dating Sites for Zombies
Mmm Niche Dating
To be fair, this letter followed soon afterwards :

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7677819

Tai's formula is the trapezoidal rule.

Monaco JH, Anderson RL.

Comment on:

* Diabetes Care. 1994 Feb;17(2):152-4.
This is as good as any place to say prediction; number 2-2 is also on my mind. I believe possible motive is to begin justification of military action/expansion vs Iran. I wager by Q3-4 2011 or Q1 2012 considerable military action thus begins.
The Future of Journalism (and Everything) is Data
http://twitter.com/jasonfried/statuses/13919731160
Where to find a good hightech businessmentor in Amsterdam, the Netherlands?
Hey guys,

I'm looking for a hightech businessmentor who knows what he - and I - are talking about.

Unfortunately, I have yet to meet someone capable enough here in Amsterdam.

Any tips?
> Why do people have such a visceral dislike of licensing costs?

They don't; what they dislike is the hassle of managing license keys, not being able to fix broken software themselves. The problem is not to be free as beer, but free as speech. And this is why RMS is true :)
The reality of buying work from consultants (with cute cat pics)
This comes into my mind: "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth." :)
This is why I don't ask candidates to code. I ask them to describe concepts, articulate trade-offs, and/or walk me through their process of solving a real problem (usually something I've just solved so that I'm intimately familiar with the space).
Do you also have some another suggestion that might be on Kindle store? "On Writing Well" only seems to have a CD audio collection.
> So learn OOP from multiple perspectives.

This is key. Even if you end up never using the less traditional OOP models, learning them will let you write better software in the conventional languages. I can say with certainty that my basis in Smalltalk and (albeit limited) knowledge of Lisp makes me a far better Java programmer.
No matter how brilliant one is, its ridiculously hard to know what you don't know.

This cannot be overstated. And when ego is the cause...oy vey! I believe that one of the greatest intellectual challenges to overcome when one over identifies as being "brilliant" is the, oft youthful, focus on pedantry. How embarrassingly ironic to display one's ignorance as a result of flaunting one's intellect. As a recovering pendant well in to those years that separate true youth from "decidedly middle-aged" let me sincerely recommend to some of our (mostly) younger members that they put down the Bertrand Russell long enough to pick up some William Blake.

When used properly, I have found that one of the most powerful phrases I can use to build confidence, trust, and credibility with a client is "I don't know."
because the authorities have no control over the supply of cash, would never try to outlaw cash, or never require banks to report the withdrawal or deposit of cash.
"There is a $50 publishing fee for making a prediction."

No thanks, not willing to pay that overhead. I'd put $50 on the bet, though :)
Filmmaker tells his story from journeyman to master
Very interesting.

Although I have problems understanding how "building a more sustainable future" falls in line with Google's business direction. I noticed that this is a .org thing but still seems like it requires a lot of resources. So I guess my question is, what's in it for Google?

I have a growing data set of environmental data that combined with the historical imagery and analysis will make for a very nice paper.
MySQL: delay_key_write is good
Or, as your Engineering professors used to say:

"A week in the lab will save you an hour in the library every time."
To be clear, this is Debian/BSD not Debian/Linux. ZFS is released under the Sun CDDL which is compliant with the BSD license but not the GNU GPL.
Yep, exactly. I expect that as node.js rises in popularity in general, JavaScript's use as an embedded game scripting language will rise (possibly at the expense of Lua and Python).

Actually now that I write this, I wonder about the possibility of JavaScript game scripting combined with something capability-aware like Caja for hosted game mods. Could be an interesting area to explore.
I think it's fair to speculate a language's future market share as this allows us to anticipate demand. I think most modern languages are "good languages", but the application of JS is skyrocketing. I use javascript as a storage medium , web server, in the browser, native mobile apps (appcelerator) and more.
thank god he suggested #2. I suggested the same thing here on HN and got downvoted a grip. Funny thing I was upvoted until about 3-4 then I was swiftly downvoted to -3 or whatnot.
Ohhh Wow, Amazon is clearly not doing this because the government said so, they are just rejecting Wikileaks for the same reason.

For all I know those documents could be fake, and I don't really know how did they determine that they could put the life of people in danger...

This whole thing is like a death sentence without a trial, I can't really blame Amazon though, the government must be really stepping on their toes.
You can already do 'Python in a browser' for a long time. With the Python to JS converter: http://pyjs.org/
Maybe a more useful question would be what language will land me a job.
20+ Best CSS3 Tutorials
CSS3 now changes the way we using to design websites. Because it include so many new features and functions. Most of CSS3 exciting features are compatible for cross browser usability of famous internet browsers like Internet Explorer 7 & 8, Firefox, Safari and chrome, they all supports new CSS3 properties. Keeping in mind importance of CSS3 in web today i compiled 20+ best tutorials of CSS3 available on Web. Enjoy!
Not important? Look around it had heavy influence on Java, C#, PHP and C++
Wikileaks DNS killed
Sorry. Not a Wikileaks fan. Been through the reasons why before on HN. Don't blame other people for liking Wikileaks. Have lots of friends who do. Simply don't believe it's a free speech issue with implications for everyone.

All I can say is, the vehemence of the tech crowd's response to WL is entirely predictable. It's an underdog story, tech vs. the establishment, &c &c. Amazon could have extricated themselves from this situation without putting a stake in the ground. I respect them for making a principled decision. I share the principle, but I hope I'd feel the same if I didn't. >shrug<
I use google sheets and doc. Doc for more detailed notes about a topic, tools, etc. Sheets for 1-liner per day journal -- 3 columns:
1 for summary of main work/proj ,
1 for eurekas (this column is 80%+ empty, by design so they stand out)
1 for non-work, more of a diary.
Online free fighting strategy games
Writing with Style - the best book I've ever read on writing.

http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Style-Conversations-Art-2nd/dp...
Neat site, but I'm mostly curious how they implemented any sort of security software for iOS. I didn't think iOS provided APIs for doing anything interesting in that respect.

"Protecting your passwords, photos, contacts
and other sensitive stuff on your iPhone® or iPod touch®"
The license cost point is a good one. I actually think it is kind of sad that software as a profession is all becoming enterprise software. No offense, but look at almost all of the YC projects... they're all things that I frankly would have had virtually no interest in coding as a kid. It all looks CRUD apps with the word "social" in the pitch.

Yeah, this was actually a point of contention when OSS started getting big, I think. But it was inevitable--things that are fun to write, people will write for fun.

I think there's some fun stuff left. Low level code tied to specific hardware and code that very few people need and can be held as a competitive advantage, for instance.
"There have been reports that a government inquiry prompted us not to serve WikiLeaks any longer. That is inaccurate."

More like:

We got another government inquiry that told us to state that we never got an inquiry in the first place.
png and jpg are now working :)
It's a pretty damn fundamental skill; even so fundamental that I'm not sure if it even deserves a specific name.

As a linked list is nothing else but pointers and blocks of memory that are the nodes, and setting the pointers of nodes to point to other nodes. This is something any programmer worth his salt would soon deduce on his own even if he, for some mysterious reason, didn't know linked lists.

Many probably have in their younger days. And when they finally read about linked lists they go "ha, what I have written actually has a name". If you just merely keep doing allocations of similar structs or objects that you want to stash some place, you're implementing a singly linked list the minute you think of a "next" member in your struct.
Like so many complaints about coding in interviews, this is talking about coding for a bad interviewer. Listening to both sides of the argument I've come to the following conclusion. Just as the unthinking mantra is now "90% of applicants for programming jobs can't program," equally often we hear "99% of interviewers can't interview."

Interviewing is a two way street, and programming jobs require more than just programming wizardry. You will need to work with a team, you will need to communicate with management, and you will need to understand people who aren't programmers.

Start by understanding interviewers.
That's an excellent book, and relevant, but I wouldn't say it directly answers the question: it's more about coding-in-the-small than object orientation. (Those subjects can shade into each other, it's true.)
New Features for Amazon CloudWatch
Wow! Amazon just keeps getting better and better (and cheaper and cheaper). Hmmm...what are they up to?
Tai's model? Naming things after oneself is +20 points in The Crackpot Index.
Elements of Style is full of little nuggets of good writing. Start a blog/journal to continuously practice the techniques in the book
I think the point was that in C(89) you need to declare all variables at the beginning of the scope block.
Business appraisal New York | valuation Chicago
Hetsler Mediation and Valuation, Inc. is a forensic and investigative CPA firm specializing in business valuation, Business appraisal and forensic accountant in various places such as jacksonville, Orlando, Miami and Tampa.for details visit forensiccpafirm.com/
I thought that book was very well done, in terms of getting its lessons into your head -- but the lessons gave poor advice on the subject. (I don't remember specifics, it's been years.)
You can get to wikileaks at http://46.59.1.2/
They weren't meant to. The purpose of Roman numerals was to be a convenient notation that you would read on and off of an abacus. All actual calculations were done on an abacus.
It's a linked list. It is a small segment of code.
This is a really good point. They talk about this in "A Beautiful Mind". It was a big divider between places like Harvard and Princeton, and places like MIT and Carnegie Mellon. The latter would take in Jews and other immigrant populations. This pissed off Nash (an undergrad from CM and a Phd at Princeton) to no end.
I agree that it seemed to have this "I'm smarter than you" vibe, but the only reason I half-agreed is that I feel like it takes some nerve to try to name your discovery after yourself. It wouldn't be so bad if she called it the "curve-approximation method" or something like that; but coming up with something and deciding to name it after yourself feels kind of presumptuous and not exceptionally helpful to boot. (As far as I know, most concepts and ideas named after people weren't self-named; Dijkstra, arrogant as he was, published "A note on two problems in connexion with graphs," and never mentioned "Dijkstra's algorithm.")
I have never received an email that could have benefited from additional decorations.
In retrospect, this is priceless...
Perhaps I'm being naive here, but doesn't an uptime-service like Pingdom do the job? They basically ping the site every 5 minutes which should keep the instance alive.
Medical Transcriptions
We are a HIPAA compliant medical transcription service company offering either digital toll-free call-in dictation or digital medical transcription services using digital recorders and FTP.
Why are people always writing these types of posts? .NET/VS.NET is one of the best programming environments ever engineered, no need to bash Microsoft on that. And what's the deal with licensing? We, as software developers and entrepreneurs, eventually want to charge money for some product/service and I personally find it much easier to do in .NET/Corporate settings - Microsoft has just managed to educate people that software costs money.

I find it much, much harder to charge money (I'm in the developer tools space) in the "FREE", open source, free is beer, as... whatever, and all that crap world, where people would just expect you to work full-time several years with $0 revenue - I just do not understand all that crap.

So massive respect to Microsoft - these guys are doing us a huge favor by educating people that software costs money.
read paul graham's essays, he specifically has an essay on writing. assuming you're a hacker yourself, should'nt be difficult to understand them.
try rewriting them, helps immensely.
Maybe I'm misrepresenting Graham's remark concerning averageness of languages, but I the 'average' attribute was not assigned to the capabilities of the individual programmer. The point was (among others) that languages with a good "market position" attracts all kind of programmers, from challenged to geek. On the other side you have languages who attract more geeks because the i-have-to-pay-my-mortgage-which-language-should-i-learn group is underrepresented. Which makes for a good filter if you want to hire people. Just like "participating in open source projects" can be a discriminating factor.

The last point could be argued about, but I don't recall language bashing in said essay.
and you, you're just too f*cking, blond!!!

blond = old.
Chasing down the source of the information, calling it into question, relating it to other things in the world-- these just weren't things she seemed to find pleasurable.

Do you really want your doctor to be that sort of person? Do you want the person treating your kid for rickets to stand up and challenge the establishment and test a new hypothesis on the disease?

I don't know about you, but I'd prefer it if the medical researchers did the challenging, questioning and validating, and the practicing doctors (in general) went with the established knowledge. In my opinion practice and research (of most any subject) are fundamentally divided, and so long as a person can maintain perspective I think no worse of them for preferring one side to the other.
As a reference point:

Our service (getmetricmail.com) which is running on GAE had an uptime of 99.97% in November.
What used to be the mantra of gangsters "It's nothing personal, just business", is now taken as an excuse for everything. Nothing to see here, look the other way, it just business, it's how things are run.

Which is a bit sad, but being amoral is a sign of the times. But if you're amoral then be amoral on everything. For example, don't be enraged to Wikileaks about deaths supposedly (and unproven) caused by things they revealed, while ignoring all the (proven) deaths caused by wars.

It's just the way things go, just business... Now go to sleep.
I've been a Rackspace Cloud customer for years, and happily so, but it's this constant drumbeat of innovation and forward momentum at Amazon that makes me seriously reconsider my choice.

I really want to see Rackspace step up its game over the next year, if for no other reason than to keep Amazon on its toes.