skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The Googler (I'll just use the masculine pronoun for convenience's sake) was sitting with his seat back up, while his neighbor's seat was leaned all the way back. This left a huge gap in between the seats, so that merely by looking straight ahead and turning my eyes slightly to one side I could see almost all of his laptop screen."

The author of this article is obviously lying, because if his seat was up and his neighbor's was back there would be no way to see his screen from behind. The author obviously didn't think this through well enough.
This post pissed me off a bit. My comment here, for those that only read comments on HN:

I can imagine that the people that are and have been working hard on Clojure would be dismayed by this odd chunk of unfortunate FUD. As someone that does contribute a little bit of my time to Clojure and the community, I know I am.

This, after:

* three years of absolutely breakneck progress (dare I say innovations) on almost every possible front

* the fabulous success of the first-ever Clojure conference just two months ago (http://first.clojure-conj.org) where a variety of very significant chunks of work by a number of core contributors were first announced

* the "opening up" of the contrib library space (http://dev.clojure.org/display/design/Better+infrastructure+...), with three new separately-managed contrib libraries implementing finger trees, unification, and a common REPL library (https://github.com/clojure).

* the modernization of the project's infrastructure: moving to self-hosted JIRA+confluence, a big push on utilizing hudson maximally, and support for getting all project artifacts (from Clojure itself down into all contributed libraries in the Clojure organization) flowing into Maven central

……and surely more that I'm not aware of.

I can't speak to the cadence of patch application, as I'm not involved in that side of the house. Maybe volunteering to help vet patches would help, maybe not.

In any case, it's an open effort; if you want to see movement on a particular front, step up and do something. Otherwise, idly speculating on things being "stalled" (especially "publicly" vs. just in IRC) is, frankly, bullshit, and could be detrimental to further uptake of the language and enthusiasm of volunteers that are actively contributing.
Not directly but I'd say Erlang and Redis, definitely the most "exotique" technologies I've been in contact this year that made http://mysyncpad.com possible
Oxygen flow problem
1. That depends a lot on you, and it goes without saying that you won't likely be more productive on your first project or two while you're still learning the language and libraries. Web frameworks in general try to do some of the work for you. Rails, in particular takes a lot of the busy work out of writing a "typical" web app. I think I'm probably twice as productive on a big project with Rails than with bare PHP. I haven't used any PHP frameworks.

2. There's a bit of a tradeoff between ease of deployment and cost. Specialized hosting services like Heroku are very easy, but can get pricey, especially as you scale. Setting up and running your own VPS can be very cheap[0], but requires learning basic *nix server administration. You should probably learn that anyway, as a web developer, but it does add to the barrier to entry.

3. Switching could be a distraction from actually getting stuff done. You can expect a significant drop in productivity as you learn, especially if PHP is the only language you know. There's a lot of new stuff in Ruby, and Rails has a decent-size API. You may also want to consider the universality of PHP on cheap web hosts if you're writing code for other people to run on their own servers.

4. Ruby, as a language seems to me like the designers really kept the user experience in mind. It's similar to the advantages often cited for Apple products. I've heard similar things about Python, but I haven't used it nearly as much. Another advantage I've found over PHP is that example code in both Ruby and Python is much more likely to be exemplary. There's a lot of example code for PHP floating around on forums and blogs that would be better used for counterexamples.

[0] prgmr.com starts at $5/month, though that plan isn't enough to handle much traffic.
I think .com.ng kind of domains have been around for a while, the latest news is that they are going to open .ng domains for everyone, really soon.
at least i believe thats whats going to happen.
Reliance on Indirect Evidence Fuels Dark Matter Doubts
Physical/wearable computing: Arduino Lilypad, and the Kinect.
I'm surprised that Yahoo is doing as well as they are.

It's easy to attribute the high scores of Live.com, Bing, and MSN to the power of web browser default settings, but Yahoo doesn't make a web browser so people have to consciously choose to go there.
The iPad has changed everything. It's an entirely new type of computer that turned out to be substantially better than anyone imagined. Watch a 5-year-old use an iPad for the first time and you will immediately see and understand why this is a major paradigm shift. It's the first "socially acceptable" computer -- at Christmas I can pull out my iPad, plop it down at the dinner table and share pictures with the family, and it's not at all considered rude.
Don't forget that even when not directly paid by defense contractors and the like, many government officials simply own stock in these and other corporations that stand to benefit for an increased need for security.
More importantly I was making the point that people rarely write websites "in Ruby" or "in Python", they write them in "Rails" or "Django".

People often write websites "in PHP" and that is a big, heavy and sharp double edged sword: it is this flexibility that has contributed largely to PHPs terrible reputation amongst languages.

The OP is looking to "take things more seriously" so that means developing PHP with a framework, hence it's not relevant to compare Python to Ruby to PHP - the language and it's syntax will have far less impact on the OPs experience than will the structure, idioms and deployment requirements of various frameworks written in each of those langauges.
> I was not worried about breaking it again as the changes in this update did not touch anything that had issues before...I must have fumbled in the SVN check in.

Even if this wasn't the case, it's always possible that some new chunk of code you're adding requires a library that doesn't exist on down-level OS versions. Or the new code doesn't properly check existing libraries for the availability of classes or methods (e.g. some UIKit classes only exist in iOS 4.0 and up. To ensure that your app doesn't crash on older versions, you need to test for the existence of the class you want to instantiate). If any of these conditions hold true, crash city.

I own every iPhone that Apple has released, and I keep my original iPhone on 3.1.3 for precisely this kind of scenario. In fact, just yesterday I had to fix a couple iOS 3.1.3-specific bugs, and couldn't have done it without that original iPhone.

Long story short: if you're going to claim you support a particular platform, you better test on it. If you can't or won't test on it, then don't support that platform as a deployment target.
Please, enough with the fear mongering and 1984 predictions of doom. What is happening is not even remotely close to what a police state is (please read up on some history of Eastern Europe) and saying that the "government wants us to be afraid" is right there with the worst unfounded conspiracy theories.

Let's give a hard time to the TSA and try to fix it, but let's not give into easy paranoia in the process.
Clojure. I miss map and reduce already.
If the People's Daily is an official government newspaper, how is the ban "rumored"?
Just seeing this thread now. It's off the main page, so maybe no one's reading it any more, but -

> How incredibly self-obsessed and shallow. I guess this is usual for the kind of material that comes from Sebastian.

Man, you responded 14 times to this thread, mostly all with really nasty stuff like this. I appreciate that a few people replied to you, but I gotta say - man, this can't possibly be the best use of your time, can it?

Okay, you don't like me/my writings. I mean, that's fine, that's your prerogative. But 14 replies? Jeez dude...
The Google Map API v3 is pretty nice.
Protocol Buffers (http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/)

Not what you would call cool technology, but definitely the best technology I have used this year. Protobufs get out of the way so you can get work done.
...or require occasional trashing of nytimes.com cookies.
I'm looking forward to seeing someone combine Backbone.js with Websocket-based persistence. It's a bit out of scope for DocumentCloud to tackle, but the building blocks are there.

One client makes a change to a model -> changes are synced to the server -> other clients that currently reference that model have its attributes updated -> all the UI that displays the model is automatically re-rendered.

It's not critical for most applications, but is a really nice, nice-to-have for any JS app that displays the same editable data to more than one user at a time. Built-in conflict resolution mechanism for bonus points.
I'm surprised by some entries in the list:

Adobe 13, Slideshare 192, Macromedia(!) 199.

And where's Reddit?

Also:

microsoft.com: Software
apple.com: Mac OS

Oh really?
The problem is that Apple deprecates their SDK really quickly. As developers, that makes it really tough to test old versions of iOS when installing an updated SDK REMOVES previous versions!! Even if you select an older "OS Deployment Target", you're out of luck unless you have a device to test it on. The Simulator is always running the latest version.

I guess they assume everyone will upgrade, but a lot of people don't or can't.
Done by Google, are they still #1 above Facebook?
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

I have the utmost respect for Ben Franklin, but this quote is not his best work. You might not be realizing it, but you are giving up liberty every day in exchange of something you find more valuable. Examples include signing up for credit, giving your address or social security in exchange of discounts, using a card at your grocery store or local mall, etc...

There is really nothing wrong with giving up some liberty just as long as 1) you're clear on what you're getting in exchange and 2) you agree that the deal is fair.
I did code reviews at Google for four years and it never felt like a burden, more like a part of my job that feels gratifying and useful. I also loved knowing that every single line of code I wrote was going to be reviewed.

Pair programming is not used at all at Google, mostly for all the bad reasons cited in the article. And also because code reviews really do work (admittedly, Google has a fantastic infrastructure to support it).
You seem to be making a joke, but my local grocery store has already replaced a few cashiers with machines.
I think the concept of lending someone an ebook is ridiculous and is a serious detriment to an increasingly digital society.

I want to be able to give my books away. Same as I can with a physical book. But the idiotic idea that I'm somehow licensing the digital version prevents that. When I'm done with an ebook it has zero value to me. These publishers are saving money selling ebooks and then taking away what rights consumers used to have.

If I license content for my kindle I am not a book owner.
I've taken a different approach switching to ruby(on rails). I was eager to learn a framework to simplify stuff in php, so I learned CakePHP. This MVC experience eventually led me to the bigger brother ruby on rails and from there, I bought the pickaxe book and learned ruby. Was this the best way? definitely not :)

So my advice is:
First, work a weekend with bare ruby, there are lots of good and extensive resources on the web.
Second, if you enjoyed working with ruby, try another weekend learning basic MVC Rails. Good resource is rails for zombies (http://railsforzombies.org/), where the basics are well shown, and you can work through this on one weekend.
Third, try converting one of your small projects to rails. There will be a lot of hiccups and frustration, but once the first project is done, you will simply love ruby.

I hope this helped you a bit, although I have not directly answered your questions (mostly because the given answers are the ones I would write, too).
> Skype's encryption has been a heated issue to governments who cannot wiretap Skype for various reasons law enforcement or otherwise.

China has a customize Skype build called TOM-Skype. It has a built-in "sensitive words" filter and backdoor keylogger.
I really miss Pownce for this. I loved it because I could share anything I wanted with my friends. :)
CoffeeScript, Raphael.JS, and Django (not new this year, but new to me) were definitely my favorite tools of 2010. I've just started playing with Tropo as well, which is better for my purposes than Twilio.
I remember watching his TED talk [http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y...]. It was mind-blowing. I'm excited to see what else he has to show us.
For both Adobe and Macromedia the requirements for updating software can be used to explain a large portion of their traffic, 96% (I think that was the figure) of web browsers have Flash, the majority don't come with it installed and sometimes require updates, so it's not that out there to suggest maybe 90% of the internet visit their sites at least once... macromedia from out of date "update @ macromedia.com..." links maybe?

As an un-related side note, two of the sites I started have higher traffic (uniques and page views) that some of these sites (when the sites traffic is combined, as they cater to the same audience, I count them as a single site in stats anyway :p) -- awesome :-)
According to Alexa, yes. However about 1/3 more sites link to Facebook.
What is r/e'd?
You can get them. They aren't especially pleasant to use.
faceboook graph/api, always learning :)
If this is the same list that showed up a few months ago, I had extracted some header information from all of the sites and placed it in a usable format for some analysis:

http://openmymind.net/top1000data.txt
Losethos is finished. The only route forward would be to pick a few pieces of hardware and support them, instead of a universal-on-modern-PC approach.

USB cannot be fully covered.

Graphics cards cannot be fully covered.

Networking cannot be fully covered.

Just look at my HD Audio support -- useless because only a few machines have HD Audio.

I've done what can be done. I might explore FPGA's just for fun. Everything is pointless.

God says...
high_five basket_case Im_God_and_youre_not absetively_posilutely
itd_take_a_miracle just_between_us fucken reverse_engineer
joy atheist au_revoir dignity thats_just_wrong what_a_nightmare
endure wrath bickering rockstar petty battle

God talks and you're doubting an operating system?

God says...
colours hindered Brought Interrupt remedies Led water imitated
eagerly mass vouchsafedst disgraceful Rejoiceth aged compendiously
instantly enlarge UNDER base straightening trembled inexperienced
had acts commencement bore sit shoes veiled terrors disposition
glorious excursive obtain Go overcast pause corrected
respite marry girded game chains caresses crudities bibber
weigheth otherwise Ambrose censured talent pricked seasonably
searching Angels encouraged taunted begin reasoning stolidity
undergo estimation er Notwithstanding A instance liftedst
base forgotten bloody superfluously soever Praetorian
abundant restricted Seraphim patience spokest joyful ruinous
disclaims inwardly unanxious purity reconciled lived reform
impressed zeal stands Professor later WHICH supereminent
Still subduing burnt ebb Israel ARE lack duller uncertainty
adopted rais clasp
I started work on this a little while ago, and shared a starter template on https://github.com/datapimp/backbone-express-mongoose-socket.... I am starting a new job in 2011 where we will be using this template heavily, so expect major updates in the first couple weeks of January.
It might work if the writer was one row back and two seats to the side of the Googler, and the person in front of the writer had their seat back up.
A free, integrated photo service would not appease a lot of people.

Except for people who aren't web developers (aka Real Users®)
Exactly. In this case, the developer should've either tested prior to release (on 3.0), or specified a 4.0 build.
Am i the only one holding the fork in my right hand? I thought that was normal.
Cannabalt for iOS now open source
1. MongoDB / Mongoid have blown me away this year. Is now my default database for new rails projects.

2. CoffeeScript language is an amazing replacement for Javascript. I can't see myself going back to pure JS at any point in the future.

3. Rails 3 finally feels like a stable and maintainable web framework. All the web frameworks now all seem to work together using Rack. The ruby web development world is really a nice place to be at the moment.

4. Bundler really nailed the gem dependency management issue (though the journey to 1.0 was very painful)

5. Sass / SCSS / Compass got really good. It feels unimaginable to go back to regular CSS.

Wow, now that I think about it, way too many great technologies to list. 2010 was an insanely good year for ruby web developers.
I am a huge fan of Vagrant ( http://vagrantup.com ) which is virtualized development environments, package-able. Works with chef and virtualbox. I don't know if I can state just how game changing this is for me.

DocumentCloud really dropped some bombs this year. backbone.js, underscore.js are really great.

Socket.io saved my ass. I promised some big clients that I could make websockets driven apps for the iPad and then apple pulled websockets support without saying anything. So I was able to get socket.io for the win.
Wait because the software is busy. E.g. OS X's spinning beach ball.

(Emacs is single-threaded, but so is a Unix shell.)
"Keep in mind that the list excludes adult sites, ad networks, domains that don't have publicly visible content or don't load properly, and certain Google sites."

This list may be less interesting / useful than you might think. It is tailored toward (non-adult) advertisers, and will be most relevant to them.
But, in this case, the weaker member was the senior--seniority in the company, anyway--and kept the stronger member from getting anything done.
It's tricky. I wish they made it easy to downgrade to other iOS versions as well.
i guess nobody knows what myspace is for anymore.
Short version:
I'm in the same boat. I have a lot of experience in PHP (personal + professional) projects. I invested my time in learning frameworks (Symfony, Doctrine + Propel) and have tons of plugins and utilities classes.
Feel free to investigate languages and learn tricks. But, don't switch unless the return on investment is high enough.

Personally, I ended up switching for my personal projects only. I look at my PHP code and despite my skills the language is simply limiting me. It's limiting my approach to problems, the readability/flexiblity of my code and the solutions I implement.
Even if I have a saying in which technology I implement my solutions with, most of the web dev stuff is fairly well done in PHP _especially_ if you're using sophisticated frameworks. That's why, for clients, I'm still using PHP (for now)

Long version:

1) Ruby and Python are excellent languages. Elegant, readable, dynamic and in general well implemented.
Personally, I prefer Ruby because I find it well designed and more intuitive than Python.
Ruby is full OOP where Python has those built-in functions and I never know if the call to open and close a file is built-in or part of the File class. In general, Ruby tries to put things together in classes/modules and avoid "lost" functions.

Also, you can fully customize stuff in Ruby. To me, that's an advantage because after a couple of layers in your business model, if your want to do something like Product < Product2 instead of Product.function < Product2.function.
Some people abuse it but it really helps simplifying your code when you have a lot of abstraction in your model.

3) Why shouldn't you switch?
Like I said, it depends on the kind of dev you're doing. Most PHP programmers are enthusiastic hobbyists and PHP is more than enough to satisfy their needs. So, if you don't see a net return on switching to Ruby, don't. It's worth investigating languages but rarely worth switching e.g Haskell taught me a lot about modularity and gave me a new perspective on programming but I'm not gonna implement my next web app in Haskell

About the transition:

In my case, I like to experiment with languages using a problem. For example, I have a couple of batches in PHP and I needed threading. Guess what my first Ruby app was?
So, find a project or something you'd like to build and ideally it's something you can't do with your current language or maybe something that is easier to build with Ruby.

Anyway, I enjoyed writing this stuff down. Hope it helps.
What If Groupon and Facebook Had IPOs the Same Day?
Remember that all employers hire based on imperfect information. Being employed signals that you can add value to at least one organization, which is a pretty strong indication that you can add value to them.
> The Simulator is always running the latest version.

Actually this appears to be false now. I just fired up my iOS Simulator, and in the "Hardware" menu I can select which OS version I want, either 3.2, 4.0.2, 4.1, or 4.2.
I never heard it, either; but, from context, it seems to mean "reverse engineered".
Want to make money on a mobile app? Make a game
OpenInvo: A Marketplace For Innovation
Seems like many of the top pages are just what browsers default to when they start up.
Jobs board too.
clickable: http://iddhis.com/
My external hard drive was made in the US.
Ah, great one! Vagrant is amazing. Probably has a lot to do with VirtualBox getting really good as well.
People should probably stop voting this story up; the .ng domains are not currently on sale anywhere I can see, and there's no sign that they will be generally available any time soon.
In case anyone was wondering, Ebay's partnership with Tom-Skype is simply to give the Chinese government a back door through Skype's security. If you are using Skype in China, DO NOT use Tom-Skype. Find a way to get the real thing.

An old blog post of mine:

http://blog.stacktrace.com/2008/10/02/chinese-monitor-tom-sk...
To simply change the look of a button in Android, I had to spend far too long creating .9png files or w/e they are called.

Yes, so please don't do that. No user wants an app that looks different from every other app on the platform.
For the third time, we get it.
For the record I mostly agree with this; I think it's fully appropriate for Rich and co. to have time to let ideas brew, and there's nothing wrong with a lull in their coding output. My comments in TFA taken out of context seem to imply that his is some kind of crisis--it is not.

On the other hand, if core people are going to slow down for a time, they would be wise to delegate responsibility to those who do want to continue coding on it in the mean time; having simple patches linger for six months (http://www.assembla.com/spaces/clojure/tickets/315) chills the enthusiasm of contributors. Having every single patch need approval of a single person is a policy Clojure has outgrown; somehow I don't think Rich is going to find something wrong with this substring patch that a lesser mind wouldn't have caught. (http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ-688)

tl;dr: Clojure isn't dying; it's growing, and the patch submission process needs to be revised.