skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not a religion in any complete sense, but it's kind of obvious that a gigantic leap of faith is involved (starting with the use of the definite article in the phrase "The Singularity", as was shrewdly pointed out by a recent commentator here), and I do think the leap can fairly be called religious. Why?

First, despite what you and others say about "empiric evidence", Moore's Law doesn't at all imply a concomitant leap in programming power (is our capacity growing exponentially?), and extrapolation from actual achievements to date points in a decidedly more mundane direction.

Second, the "singularity" predictions are the latest in a tradition of extravagant millenarian claims that people have been making about AI for decades. These claims have consistently turned out to be overblown, if not vacuous, in retrospect. Extrapolate from that historical trend and you arrive at quite a different (and rather more plausible) picture.

Third and most interestingly, the emotions and language surrounding the "singularity" are distinctly religious. This really stands out in what I've seen of the discourse. Since many advocates of "singularity" are of an intellectual cast that objects to the more popular religions, it seems to me as if some are directing their religious impulses into technology. As someone brilliantly says in the OP, it's "The Rapture For Nerds". (Notice that definite article again.)

By the way, I don't mean "religious" as a criticism per se. Personally, I think religious impulses are part of being human. What fascinates me about The Singularity discourse is the incongruence between its technological subject matter and its vividly religious emotional language.
ability to follow users
Agreed.

The strange thing is that yours is the only comment here that responds directly to Winer's statement about a ghost town.

Is anyone else wondering what the hell Winer is talking about?
I'm going to reply again just to say: bullshit. Compelling writing doesn't need anything to back it up. You either have a point or you don't. Acting like an asshole just means you don't have much of anything to say.
Warner Music Group Pulls Music from Last.fm
Learning curve is flat but with caltrops...
Sorry, is there that much of a difference? Really?
Yeah but won't that only work for pushing out messages to phones? What if you want two-way communication with your app?
Python has functions as first-class objects, very simple namespaces (files/folders), generators, and a cleaner syntax not to mention a thriving, growing community, much more helpful/intelligent (at least in my experience) than PHP's.

PHP has a lot of coders that are one step about script-copy-pasters.

No questions about it - Python is the way to go.
This is an emotional reaction that comes up frequently. Arguments are answered with "but that's not at all what we said, you just don't understand". (I don't mean "emotional" as a criticism, though I realize it probably sounds that way.) The problem is that it's a moving target. For example, the objection that "exponential advances in hardware are not matched by exponential advances in software, so extrapolation from the former doesn't apply to the latter," is met with something like, "You are uninformed if you think The Singularity has to do with extrapolation from Moore's Law. That's a common misunderstanding." One wonders how the misunderstanding got so common if that's not what the advocates said! Anyway, this moving-targetness is to me an indicator of religious attachment to a concept.
Completely fake. Hilariously so. Seriously, do some calculations on the joule requirements to do this. Simple comparison: think about how a 1000W microwave takes 60 seconds to pop popcorn.
If only she would've not turned poor Albus gay ..

(edit) What I mean is that she should've not gone into elaborating on this subject at all. It would've been equally damaging if she would've called him a "ladies man" or a "sex bomb". It's a type of a character detail that I think is better not to be discussed explicitly. Not for this particular character.

I don't know about other people, but this comment of hers did spoil the reading of the last book for me.
It's interesting that the style of searching you're talking about has remanifested 12 years later in the form of Firefox 3's smart bookmarks. http://ptaff.ca/smart/

What was the name of your program? Does it still work?
I started looking at the free resources at Sitepoint with some success (see http://reference.sitepoint.com/css/css), but I haven't delved deep enough to give it a full-on recommendation. Still, it seems elaborate, and you have the benefit of switching to the HTML and the (forthcoming) Javascript references when you want to color your studies with some context.
I'd say that if you're finding you always have work, or rather, if you have enough work, then you don't need to worry about turning away clients due to being too busy. As a consultant, it's a good thing to have to turn away work.

You should also consider sending clients you turn away to another consultant. The idea is that when you're really busy, you send "overflow" customers to him (or her). And the other consultant would ideally return the favor as necessary.
Here's a good article on why it always seems like the Singularity is just around the corner:

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2006/02/the_singulari...
I would agreee Python really is 'that language'.

Python brought me back from a bored and frustrated programmer using Java to a hacker. I have programmed in Java since then and have been much better as a result of my work with Python.

PHP in my opinion is a very weak option today, and I think you would be crazy choosing it in 2008. I worked extensively in it about 8 years ago, but it's time has passed.

Like you mentioned, consider using MVC with Python. The separation between business logic and display code is priceless, and I guarantee if you do not clearly break apart these two you will run into huge problems.
I was recently asked to sign a non-compete by a New Jersey based company that stated I couldn't go work for or have a financial interest in, "any company that does product demonstrations".

That's a quote from the contract and it's not a joke. Taken at face value I wouldn't be able to work for pretty much any high tech company. I hired a lawyer who got this bone headed clause along with a couple of other pieces of junk tossed out. Cost $1000 in fees, but I sleep good knowing I can leave and go work for who ever I fancy anytime.

GET A LAWYER.

All the best
> What is the challenge to make open source software successful in terms of making revenue?

Acceptance in enterprise.
The point is that the logo font face was very intentionally chosen. It was not created by happenstance and eventually adopted as good just because it was old. If it's getting them into trouble now, it's not because it was a poorly designed logo, just that it was poorly designed for the purpose of being a favicon.

I won't speak to whether or not Ruth Kedar would qualify as a great designer in everyone's eyes, but I would say being anything other than a Google engineer with a passing interest in logo design would be enough to support my point.
I agree that web apps that try to be desktop apps seem destined to come out the loser in that comparison. The interesting things in web apps are those that leverage the web itself. (Not, as you said, to take away from the impressive technical achievement here.)

Re fast vs. sluggish: which browser did you use? The next generation of browsers (e.g. Safari 3) is so much more responsive that the answer to this question would be revealing.
I have used Django at a well known web company and then at a startup and many other projects.

Django is fantastic, and 'it runs you' would only hold true if you used the basic features and built in admin system and nothing else.
I've met the 280North team, and I was blown away when they showed me a demo of their stuff. However, while it visually looks like a desktop app, it still runs sluggish enough that I wouldn't mistake it for one. Fast computer and network btw.
The post has a great quote: "The gap between [her brand] and its potential is far greater than the gap between [her brand] and it's competitors."

Unfortunately, the title is terrible. It has nothing to do with the quote.
NPR story about some students not being pleased with the choice of speaker: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9123254...
Apple updates DTrace and removes limitations
My email is in my profile

That part isn't visible publicly - could you put it in the "about me" section, please?

Thanks for the advice. The company is an "e-commerce portal", which rates products based on their environmental friendliness. What worries me, in particular, is that I "[may not work on anything] engaged in any manner in the Business of the Company in any market (including the Internet market)".

Edit: apparently, things that are capitalized like "Business" is here are defined elsewhere in the document.
If you're hiring candidates that wouldn't consider learning a new language to join an interesting startup -- well, good luck!
I learned directly from http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/ and loved it. Familiarize yourself with the content, read the chapters that look interesting, and then use CSS in your projects, reading on the relevant material as you go. And then a bit of reading on the more advanced chapters and you'll be pretty expert.
According to this site, California non-competes may not be enforceable at all:

http://labor-employment-law.lawyers.com/employment-contracts...
Programming salaries based on language
How Apple has kept a lid on the latest version of iPhone
A second introduction to Unicode
My take is that they have a boiler plate under a glass table.
You hit that one out of the ballpark mrblowhart.

I've talked several high school grads with scholarship offers out of attending this pathetic excuse for an institution of higher learning.
Ok I updated it.
"It's like her stupid, self-serving claim that Dumbledore was gay. She wants credit for being very up-to-date and politically correct - but she didn't have the guts to put that supposed "fact" into the actual novels, knowing that it might hurt sales. What a pretentious, puffed-up coward. When I have a gay character in my fiction, I say so right in the book. I don't wait until after it has had all its initial sales to mention it."

-- Orson Scott Card, <http://www.linearpublishing.com/RhinoStory.html>;
(1) Don't trust a internet discussion thread for reliable legal advice. Talk to a lawyer, even at a university or public-service law clinic, if you need the real info for your jurisdiction(s). So take anything here, including the below, with a grain of salt.

(2) Here in California, I have been given the impression California law prevents most non-compete clauses from being enforceable, on the theory everyone has a right to earn a living using their acquired (and often market-specific) skills. I have heard NY law is similar.
A blanket statement like "non-compete agreements last 1 year" isn't really accurate -- they can often be shorter or longer than that. Additionally, the California legal status is irrelevant for this poster, as he's in New York.
sour grapes much?
it's just another circle jerk inside of academia
<h1>ARF!</h1>
"Any thoughts on PHP frameworks?"

CakePHP is a powerful, popular one. It gives you Ruby/Django's famed MVC in PHP.
Wow ... I like how Tcl/Tk is high on this list, I love Tcl.

I just wonder if higher on list means greater demand or just smaller supply!

I can bet that RPG AS/400 developers are paid a lot more than C# .Net developers
I love Eric Meyer's books.
An acute and trenchant point. Something about that bothered me too, but I wasn't sure what. He put his finger on it - or rather, his foot.
PC Software Upgrade Shuts Down Nuclear Power Plant
For real time, reliable two way messaging you'll either want to peer with the carriers you support (using SMPP) or use an aggregator. There are a lot of aggregator options and you'll want to shop around to get the best price.

Using SMPP I've seen round trip times as low as 10 seconds.

If you want media (pictures or video), you'll want an MM7 connection.

I'd link to wikipedia but I'm on a mobile phone, sorry.
Unit tests for Google App Engine apps
Here are some links suggested by a friend/ great designer.

http://senthil.homelinux.com/2008/06/08/six-cool-css-links/
I wonder what Cobol guys are making... sooo much legacy code and yet so few people who are proficient in it.
Lisaac - prototype OO for systems programming. C-like performance.
while completely ignoring the right hand side, i can tell they are all scalars.

Looking at the right hand side, I can tell the type of the value in that scalar type! ... the value type is a different thing than the variable type

We can really debate and argue about the value of typeful variables ... the value seem to be that it allow a combination of syntactic sugar and availability of the reference type!

So basically, if you want a reference type, you need syntax to dereference the reference.

And if you have that, you will eventually need syntax sugar for when you dont want to use the dereferencing syntax.

This is probably why in Perl things are the way they are!

I am not sure thought if the reference type is at all needed, it some occasions I see it clarify cases when values are passed by reference vs passed by value, because a reference in Perl is a real value, not something that is implied! ... but this i would say is largly subjective
Some notes:

-It's built in tandem with a OS, Isaac, that is using the OO features as a central part of the design.

-It's not complete yet. It's a few years into the project, but the specification may still change. So it's more interesting toy than production-ready right now.

-It compiles to C code and can directly inline C statements with a simple backquote syntax so it has good compatibility with existing systems, even though it's meant for a research OS.
Benjamin Franklin the trickster
Strange. Objective-C takes up one of the highest positions on this list, yet Cocoa takes up the very lowest.
The whole references thing is the biggest pain in the ass in Perl syntax. List flattening, and the fact that arrays and hashes can only store scalars (or a reference to something else), etc. just expands into every nook and cranny of the language.

I still have a hard time with this aspect of the language after 10 years of Perl coding (with a three year break where I mostly worked with Python). And given how strong the tools in Perl are for working with hashes and arrays (grep, map, join, splice/unsplice, shift/unshift, sort, etc.) it really is a pain point. Perl 6 fixes many of the painful bits but not all.

But, nonetheless, I'm more productive in Perl than any other language. Partly because of the massive library of excellent pre-existing code, and partly because my problem domain almost always involves text parsing/processing and dealing with system-level data which are things for which Perl was designed.
You don't notice the rapture of the nerds themes in 'the singularity'? Or the 'god like powers' themes of the singularity? That is totally a religious pattern of thought.
Come on. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds
The title is a bit of clickbait. He means to say "Don't just be better than the competition - solve the user's problem"
I come from a Perl background and I'm definitely not more comfortable with PHP, despite having used it quite a bit over the past year or so for our company website, forums, store, etc. Python at least has first-class functions, and I had no problem using it for a few years when I was working in a Python shop (and I still miss IPython which rocks so hard...Devel::REPL is not quite an acceptable substitute). But, I find Ruby the most palatable of the currently trendy languages (though I do almost all of my work in Perl)...I was able to sit down and write working Ruby code with fewer bugs than I can with Perl, and I've been using Perl for 10 years. Python, after three years, I found my bug count was roughly the same as I write in Perl.
Most Ridiculous Site Ever? Upgrading Entire Internet To Web 2.0 in One Click
I thought this article would be interesting. Instead it was pompous and arrogant. Too bad.
Or just Apache. Apache serves static content faster than the vast majority of us will ever need, and dynamic content as fast as Lighttpd or nginx, in general (because the slow part is the code in Python, or PHP, or Ruby, or Perl). Run WSGI or mod_fcgid or mod_rails, or whatever, so your interpreter only spawns once, configure Apache appropriately, and you'll be fine for all but the most insane loads.
I Am Not A Part Of This Program. You Can Only View The Site With a Referral Id Entered. Just DONT Join, ONLY View

Is this not the most ridiculous shit ever? Full Internet Upgrade?!?!? WTF

It's 3 AM, and I had to share this with everyone. I don't even know wtf to say.
If he signs a 24 month non-compete in New York and then takes a competing job in California within this period, is it legal? If he takes a similar job in Europe, is it legal? Can it be enforced?
Had to add in the number one quote from the site:

"
REMEMBER: We are upgrading the Entire Internet for FREE! Who wouldn't want to upgrade from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 for FREE?
"
a link to his stupid cashblastpro.com domain is all he wanted - and he got it :-(
REMEMBER: We are upgrading the Entire Internet for FREE! Who wouldn't want to upgrade from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 for FREE?
no no, look at my karma. I'm pretty sure the rest of the community here will:

a) Find this f'ing hilarious
b) Be smart enough to NOT sign up or do anything worthwhile.
http://cashblasterpro.com/index.php?c='DROP%20pages;

==

Query failed : You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'DROP%20pages;','','208.70.96.115','Array ( ) ','20080608031219','Mozilla/5.0 (Ma' at line 1
My karma as well. I just find this funny as hell.
try sending a text message to an email address. I think this works. Ill test it out.

Nm, cannot do it on iPhone. By that's because I can't type an @ in the recipient field.

Pretty sure I did it with my last phone.
http://cashblasterpro.com/index.php?c=');SHOW%20tables;

Query failed : You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ';SHOW%20tables;','','71.174.101.126','Array ( [language] => english ) ','200' at line 1

Looks like they learned how to sanitize spaces right. How about that apostrophe now?
vNES FAQ
The only reasonable conclusion from this data is that career programmers may expect about a $70k/yr salary on average. The data is much too vague and biased to draw any other meaningful conclusions.
Apress books on CSS are good. Go from beginner -> expert.
Noncompetes are unenforceable in California. In New York they are enforceable. This particular agreement would not hold up, but that won't prevent you from ending up in court. It isn't boilerplate, either, it is particularly egregious.
I like the Script-fu generated text all over the place. We could all learn a thing or two about web design from this guy. I also like the brilliant use of testimonials. Extremely convincing, and not at all as though they were written by the same person:

"Thanks for allowing me to be a part of something that will be just as big Google!"

"I believe, hold up a minute. I mean I know web 2.0 is the future of the internet, thanks!!!"

"Wow! the prototype site of Web 2.0 technology is FANTASTIC. Can't afford to be left behind. It's real!"

I'm sold! Sign me up! Amazing!
The Man Who Couldn't Read "California"
That is completely unreasonable. It's also of very dubious legality.

If they are giving this sort of crap, you might want to take a pause to think about whether or not you really want to work with them.

If you still want to try working with them, feel free to rewrite the agreement with wording that you think is reasonable. If they don't like it, that will tell you something important, IMHO.

Note that some people will sign these sorts of outrageous contracts on the belief that, since it's not likely to be pursued even for the clauses that are enforceable, they'll just ignore it. Personally, I think that's dishonest and disingenuous.

Also, think about what this sort of clause hanging over your head is going to look like to your next (potential) job/funding-source/etc.? Whether it's enforceable or not, this kind of thing can throw a monkey wrench into your future endeavors and how you are perceived by them.

IANAL. Get competent legal counsel.
The right scale
Why don't you do a small prototype in both, and see where each one takes you? I'm not really a programmer, but I've got a dating web app running on around 50 pages of php.
Since it's a start-up, it's most likely that their lawyers just drafted this up for them, and the founders don't really know any better. Lawyers tend to be overly cautious this way, but entrepreneurs usually realize that running a business takes some risk. If they really want to hire you, it's likely that they'll be willing to change the terms. If they're not, then this is what should raise the red flag for you...

In any case, if the contract doesn't feel right to you (as it should) and regardless of whether it's enforceable or not, don't sign. Why put yourself in a position where you are likely to have legal issues in the future?
http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/03/htc-touch-diamond-shots-a...
Twitter-like dating web app running on 50 pages of php
Really! www.TalkAboutADate.com
Before you get a lawyer, have you tried telling them you don't like the clause? You're about the partner up with these people for (hopefully) many years. Start on the right foot and have a frank discussion with them and politely ask them to remove it from the agreement.

It's kind of a stupid clause, but it's likely their because they hired a lawyer and a lawyer is going to hand them boilerplate stuff that protects their clients... Not necessarily what's fair/normal.
And given how strong the tools in Perl are for working with hashes and arrays (grep, map, join, splice/unsplice, shift/unshift, sort, etc.) it really is a pain point.

Not really:

my $ref = [qw/foo bar baz/];
my $ref2 = [map { uc } @$ref]; # [qw/FOO BAR BAZ/]

References, if anything, are just slightly ugly. I could live without non-reference values, however. They're basically useless, but sometimes they make the program more concise.

I think everyone realizes this mistake, however, and Perl6 only has types that behave like references:

my @foo = split '/', "foo/bar/baz";
function(@foo, 'hello');

sub function(@foo, $string){ ... }
How The Grid will Revolutionize Computing