skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, 10 or 11 hour programming days are feasible. They can even be productive, and not lead to burnout. HOWEVER for that to happen, it has to be programming that the programmers want to do, and they need to be given a lot of freedom in how they accomplish it.

Think of it this way--if a programmer won the lottery and retired, what would he do? Many would spend 12 hours a day programming on personal projects. If you can make work line up with those interests, then they might spend that kind of time on work.

This is hard to accomplish. All of the times I've seen it happen were spontaneous. That is, the programmers worked 10 or 12 hours a day without having been asked to do so.
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to me that sounds like a major case of a company cashing out before the bubble bursts. They don't need the money, and they definitely don't need the regulatory oversight that the IPO brings. They just raised close to a billion for a supposedly massively profitable business. They have plenty of cash on hand.

It's a massive ponzi scheme where the businesses have been convinced to take massive losses with the hopes of making them up later. Very few actually get the results they are promised by the sales people.

On the buyer side...it's just lame...it's the same type of deals over and over again, and I wouldn't be surprised if their customers only last a few months before they internally label Groupon as spam.

don't get me wrong, Groupon is a massively profitable business, but I think they want to cash out while everyone thinks they are worth 20-30 times more than they actually are.
The Social Engineering Toolkit v1.1
Not sure if that was ment to be a joke - but it's pretty funny. I wonder if MSFT would agree? :-)
The Czech Republic and Slovakia only recently (1993) split up.

Because of that, a reason could be that it is hard to split the statistics between those states because many Slovaks will use a Czechian search engine.

the other engines have only one site for the two countries, so that already have data for the Czech Republic and Slovakia combined. They should have mentioned it.

They do mention the following, though: It beats the aggregate share of Seznam.cz and two other Seznam sites, so it seems that comparison at least is/may be fair.
I'm not sure this will happen.
The only users who are unable to watch WebM are iPhone/iPad/Safari users. You can use WebM in IE9 (when you install the codec).

So as a webdeveloper the path of the least resistance for me will be WebM. You'll get support in Chrome, Firefox, Opera and IE9.
I agree with you about the verbosity of Java, it's driving me nuts. Also, overuse of XML in java-related frameworks/platforms etc. I mean, when it gets to the point where you have to use complex logic to perform a task, you have to start wondering whether xml is the way to go...

As for overuse of patterns - well, to be honest, I sometimes actually wish that my colleagues would learn some (at least basic) patterns. Quite a large number of them wouldn't know how to implement Strategy, for example.

As for your other points.. I don't know. I think this is debatable. What does too much global state mean? Is having singletons in your application inherently wrong, because they introduce global state? I don't think so. Overuse of singletons (and overuse of any pattern for that matter) is certainly a code smell, but there are simply some situations where singletons are appropriate. Or would you argue that this is true for Java simply because of bad design of the language itself?

What I, personally, dislike about Java is it's really bad handling of lists. You see, as somebody working on Java enterprise projects, I constantly have to do something with lists, I fetch them, sort them, filter them, perform operations on certain elements of the lists etc. And it's incredible how verbose and ugly and littered with for-ifs the code gets. Yes, members of JCP EC, we need those closures, and we need them now.
I'm intrigued by the EditDistance idea. Right away I started trying to think of how I could implement it. It seems like in order for this to work, the edit distance would have to be based on something more averaged than a single pixel color due to the various types of image compression (jpeg being particularly troublesome for this task, I would imagine). Perhaps the image can be split up into four-pixel blocks whose constituent parts can all be averaged together to form a new color which can then be used as part of the matching.

I must admit however that I have doubts that an edit distance for images would yield interesting results unless the pixels were split into a grid, or maybe something like a quad-tree. Then the edit distance could be applied to each portion of the grid to see how many adjacent sections of the grid are also found to be adjacent in other images.
With a left, and then a right...

you were both Zuckerpunched.
emveepee.ly
Managing multiple web app configs in .NET
Three Design Hacks from Apple
I figure that you need to do some filtering first.

I'd love to go and spend a few months on building a prototype of 'spindisp', if I had the time right now I'd do it.
Does Groupon own any patents?
> all you need is a requirement "reduce the number of steps a user needs to place a purchase order", and that's the logical conclusion.

That's it - my new goal is to invent and patent the Zero-Click Purchase.

You read it here first.
Business Blog Management Tips
I don't know if this is the proper place (if not, sorry), but there's a device I've been dreaming about and that I would gladly pay for: a home router / service that would also do antivirus, content filter and VPN in a user-friendly, turn-key way.

There are products that address some of these features (and yes it can be custom built "by hand"), but I'm not aware of something that does it all out of the box? Here's a more detailed description.

1. Antivirus

1.1 At the gate

Since the only way to get something on my computers is via the Web, it doesn't seem efficient to run an AV on each one; this device would check all incoming traffic.

1.2 "AV DMZ"

Ideally, this device would also be able to do an AV check on hard disks and such when connected to it via USB, so that if someone comes to my house with a USB drive I can check it there without having any other machine with an antivirus installed.

2. Proxy / filter

2.1 AdBlock

This is currently worse than antivirus software (except that it's free): one needs one AV per computer, but one AdBlock per browser (and some browsers can't have any, except by using a proxy). Having it centralized would be so much simpler.

2.2 Content filter / blocker

Most home routers have some sort of white list / black list mechanisms, but they have to be edited manually; this device would filter content based on crowd-sourced lists; there could be different lists of differing strength (cf. all the recent talk about content farms).

3. VPN

Content is being more and more controlled, either at the source (Hulu) or by governments, even in the West (France, Australia and others -- cf. Wikileaks).

A VPN service that would a/ encrypt traffic and b/ make it originate from different places in the world (user-selectable among different solutions offered by the service, maybe for different prices) would alleviate all those problems.
If I click "Create Code" I get an error.
I don't doubt that you've tinkered with this idea in your head as well, and where I went with it is the immediately obvious first place to start. ;)

RE: wishing you had more time -- I feel you on that one. It's taking a lot of personal restraint to keep myself from deviating towards each interesting project that springs up in my head. I never thought that time would end up being such a valuable asset.
And it turned out that the nanoparticles produced by combustion are pretty cancerous. That's the main reason why there are limits on their concentration in the air. The smaller the particles are, the more dangerous. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particulate#Health_effects
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Watch Jersey Shore Season 3 Episode 2 Megavideo It’s Gonna Be An Interesting Summer Months. MTV responded in direction of the controversies by signifies within just your press discharge which talked about that “the Italian-American cast will convey pride in their ethnicity.
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You can always tell there is a bubble when people are trying to convince themselves and each other that their isn't.

I predict Groupon will be a 'venture math' win and an epic failure as a sustainable business. (Especially once that anyone who would give a damn has cash)
What sort of barriers to entry does Groupon have against a local online version of itself, one that would know the city better, since its the people that live there work for that entity?

What about angieslist.com?
"My problem with Java is the way it's currently being used"

That is a good point. However, comparing the way things are done in Java and they way things are done in Ruby is a really bad comparison. Those languages live in different problem domains and were grown to solve totally different problems.
Do we want some sort of Hacker News only half-bakery?
China does not want to see euro “disappear”
Best Android Applications for Media Players | InfoMov.Com
No no no...lisp is crap because it has too many parens not brackets. ;-)
Yes, that was a good point where preorder, inorder and postorder might have been introduced briefly. I liked big time this explanation as to how to mechanize your thoughts when keeping track of a recursive process.
I think the key question here is this guy's relationship to his boss, which can't be determined from the brief amount of data provided. There's also the issue of whether more features make a difference, so this entire thread is a bike-shed-painting exercise.

Everybody is saying "no", and I'm the PM who usually tells his team to take more time off, but I'm also a contrarian, so for purposes of this comment I'll say "yes"

Here's the deal: work is somewhat arbitrary. Yes, there are those of us who are working on curing cancer, building the next space transport system, or curing world hunger. But most of us are doing something a lot more mundane, like getting some random project finished.

Given a situation like that, there are two types of thinking. Type 1 says that since none of it matters, you might as well look out after yourself: make sure you are well-cared for. Have plenty of time off. Do fun stuff to alleviate the boredom. Pick up a video game in the evenings to spend ten thousand hours playing it over the next year.

Type 2 says that since none of it matters, it's up to you to make it matter. Pick a goal, find something to push yourself to. Make it into a game. Do something, anything, to keep making yourself learn. Life is about stress, and if you are not externally stressed you must learn to create your own internal stress if you are to grow and learn and do more cool stuff.

Neither one of these types of thinking is worth a hoot by themselves, but I'll only work with people who have type 2 thinking and have to force themselves back to type 1. I've found there are way too many type 1 folks who have long forgotten how to work as a type 2, and those are folks who are just filling up seats and waiting for the end of the day. Those are also the types of folks who sit around wondering if it's "feasible" to work 11-hour programming days. The rest of us are just doing it.

So yes, you can, but it should be something special, and you need a system where you break off and do cool stuff. This is a long run, not a sprint, but even in a long run you need a kick -- a long sprint at the end. It's actually one of the better parts of a long run. Don't be a sucker for an abusive boss, but learning to push yourself and getting in the habit of applying internal stress is a critical factor in moving your life and career forward.
Interesting. Have you considered having links on the page to the equivalent items for other people?
Here's the problem - how do you 1. define SEO spam, 2. detect SEO spam. It's not as simple as saying "deindex anything that has optimized title tags or lots of links or shows adsense" because plenty of useful websites optimise for search engines, show ads and have lots of links. What you'd end up with is the dregs of the web, because although you'd reduce the number of spam sites in the results, you'd likely also reduce the number of useful sites in the results because you're specifically targeting and removing the sites that optimise for search engines, which is 99% of the most successful sites on the web today.

SEO is not an inherently bad thing, it's valueless, spammy content that's bad. The real challenge is in determining whether a page is useful, original and relevant to the search query, and that's where Google et al are falling down at the moment.
Groupon to me is just the social version of ValPak.
I keep hearing this, but never with any figures.

Presuming Apple contributes a couple of patents to the pool, it doesn't seem likely that any income from MPEG LA would have any significance for them. Especially since they have to pay as a distributor of H.264 decoders anyway.
I think there are about two classes roughly. The mathematically pure functions crowd with emphasis on correctness and the expressive power camp (which also helps with correctness indirectly).

I fall in the latter camp where functional programming is an approach, a style if you would. Where there are first order functions and the ability to easily manipulate them (C# fails here via verbosity), partial function application (often mislabelled currying), closures, recursion is forefront and immutability is the default. Terseness, algebraic types, tuples and pattern matching are optional but highly recommended (in my opinion Scala and Erlang are not terse relatively, Haskell/F#/Clojure are). I also find inference with static typing to be useful. [edit: by terse I don't mean by lines of code but vaguely, how busy each line is].

This combination leads to an extremely powerful and different way of thinking about and writing code that gives extensibility, composability and isolation for free. A style built around passing and assigning functions - treating functions the way most people treat variables. It also allows you to easily render abstractions of your problems without fussing with boiler plates. In terms of organizing and encapsulation it falls short but these new hybrids are shoring things up.
A great suggestion of course. I do admit that it didn't immediately spring to mind (or rather, didn't spring to mind at all until I read your response). Honest question: is it possible that you might run into difficulties getting your low-level OS to function properly in a virtualization, or has the tech come along enough to where this is essentially a non-issue?
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> My main problem with Java isn't the language itself. I think it's a pretty ok language as far as statically typed ones go.

Really? Which statically typed languages have you written in? I think Java (together with C and C++, lets not let Java take all the blame here) is pretty much the bottom of the barrel as far as statically typed languages go.

Compare some of the type examples in the threads here with Haskell's type system...

(Is this post meaningless functional programming propaganda? Probably. But for the love of god stop the myth that Java/C/C++ are good examples of static typing...)
The Goatse image is named hello.jpg so that isn't quite as weird as it first seems.
Review: HP eStation All-In-One Printer With An Android Tablet
The initial problem I see with something like this would be encryption.

All the attacker would have to do is encrypt their virus which would get it past the antivirus gate keeper, then when it was decrypted on the local PCs there would be nothing to recognise it.

The same problem would exist for anything running over https.

That would be the first problem to solve, although I'm sure there would be ways of resolving this.
Spooky! I feel an "I'm Spartacus!" moment coming on ...

No, I'm not the Colin Wright referenced, I'm a different Colin Wright altogether.
Perhaps the standard is most aptly defined in a language other than English; maybe it is best to define it in code.
"We ended up with detailed plans to create a JavaScript-based cross-platform data model framework with Git-inspired sync built in. This strategy required substantial portions of all versions of Things to be rewritten. It was clearly the most ambitious project we ever took on. Dissatisfied with our previous attempts, we didn’t want to settle with anything short of perfection."

Wow, this reads like a textbook case of over-engineering. I'd have thought that experienced developers like Cultured Code, with a shipping and successful product, would know a little bit better than that...

Seriously, in all this time, nobody ever thought of just hacking something together that's good enough until a better solution is found?
Your definition also clearly differentiate between "Common Lisp as is taught on universities" and "Common Lisp as it's actually used", which might or might not be a good sign.
History of the English language
Here we go: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1843083
Verizon May Build $6 Billion Server Farm in Wyoming
Almost missed this, but I'll be there.
I'm only implying friendly competition, though MIT does have a little "not made here" syndrome.
Style vs Substance : an informal experiment.
Thanks for this description.

An extra logic gate (A20) was added to the keyboard controller that would enable or disable access to memory above 1MB.

Yes, the fact that it's on the keyboard controller is the single biggest WTF about the whole thing.

This still happens, even on your top of the range 64-bit quad core behemoth if you're running a 32-bit Operating System. I'm not sure whether this still applies to 64-bit Operating Systems as they were after my time, but if anyone here can tell me I'd love to know.

As far as I know, yes it's still part of the boot process even for operating systems that run in long mode (i.e, x86-64).

Personally I've always felt that the A20 part wasn't that hard - perhaps it's the wrong term but the hardest thing for me was all the checks for the right hardware, I kept finding stuff that works fine in bochs or qemu then barfs on real kit.

It's not so much that it's hard... if you're like me, you spend a good half an hour trying to make sense of what it is, then copy-paste some code to do it. I was just using it as an example of a seriously weird 'feature' of the architecture.
You can get all his old articles from Dexterity software on the wayback machine.

This is actually great news, because it means that stuff like that can be brought back and polished.
Clickable: http://Codr.cc

Linking to the site is neither an implication nor statement of endorsement.
I keep forgetting that site exists. Had to Google it to be reminded of what it is. That isn't a bad idea at all -- just don't make it a public Google doc. Then again, maybe we could just post all these ideas to half-bakery. I can't resist the allure of consolidation.
I've got a small job, PSD to CSS if anyone is interested (need it done today), email in profile.
> I can't resist the allure of consolidation.

Neither can I that's why I posted this on HN :)

So many sites to keep track of...
Please change the title of the submission, this isn't editorialization but downright insult.

Meanwhile: flag.
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Thank you. Glad to see Python at the top of the list, since that's my preferred choice as well.
Java is the COBOL of the 21st century. It's every bit as elegant and exciting.
Please, do find!
I don't know about this dude. "living the happiest (and therefore philosophically aligned) life you can"

Living philosophically aligned will not necessarily make you happy. Sometimes deontic action sucks. hard.
Suggestion: get a competent web developer on the team.

Problem solved.

The problem is far easier to resolve than they seem to think. I'm pretty sure that even with a million active users, you could run something like this on a few hundred dollars a month of AWS hardware at the most. Compare that to the two years of software engineering time they've wasted on this so far.
I would point out the biggest 3 scripting languages around and their Web frameworks

Ruby + Ruby On Rails ( Twitter, Group On, BaseCamp, Scribd, Hulu, Justin.TV, SlideShare etc..)
The Web Framework is designed for Fast coding for Web, really nice design and easy to use.

Python + Django ( Washington Post, http://www.djangosites.org/most-comments/ )
Django is also a Web FW designed to help in fast coding, but as far as I can see it strong point is the admin console which is very rich.

Scala + Lift ( http://lift.poweredsites.org/ )
I am not very familiar with it, I only know that it's a son of Java language, it uses the Java JVM to work, and it's sintaxe looks more like java then the to above.

I myself am learning Ruby because I liked the Web Framework more( I am a Java programmer, java sucks a bit for Web, too complex I think) Python has the appeal to be useful for more stuff like doing linux stuff or getting a job on Google :D

Cheers from Brazil !
Corotwine is exactly alike. Personally, I prefer inlineCallbacks. Explicit is better than implicit... Basically I can say, okay, so, here something slow is going to happen, and I'm willing to yield (hey look it even uses an appropriate keyword) control over to the reactor. My main point is still this: okay, yes, sometimes callback code can get ugly (with the apparent implicit assumption plain old "blocking" code is always pretty...), but that has nothing to do with the async backing.
HTTPS will get in the way of most of these. If someone on your network decides to search for content you have blocked, all they'd have to do is use HTTPS to access Google, Yahoo, etc. Unless of course you require all your browsers to go through the proxy server on your device that forces HTTP on them. Which is more of a pain.
I disagree, their datawarehousing efforts are enormous and key to their success. I seriously doubt they would trust another company with this.
"And that startup time of JVM is orders of magnitude worse than pretty much anything else."

Sure, let's throw out of the window all the optimizations the VM can do at runtime because it takes a whole second to start the VM.

And you need to actually compile the source file before executing it!

Those server applications should all be written in bash because it's instantaneous!

Kidding aside, one prof at my university once told me that she wished students should still have to compile and wait for a program to start. When there is such a delay, it pays to read your code and try to understand it before running it (as opposed to run-and-see-what-happens).
Javascript
704 points

Is the top of the list

Cheers.
Do patents currently assist the small companies fight the big ones

I think everybody knows the answer to that one and it's as asking if the US went to Irak on valid concerns for WMD: official answer is Yes; and when that will change hell will freeze.
Teflon is not removed with water.
Ask HN: Wordpress premium themes business
For my limited experiences, premium theme business seems a quite profitable and attractive.

Although from some comments from HN, the profit for this business is declining now. (tasty theme and wpreviewsite plugin), personally I still think it is the way to go.

But anyone in here had experience about promoting,marketing and making sales about premium themes/plugins?

Correct me if I was wrong, in general, these premium themes do seem hard to code, some plugins, for example, gravity forms, takes time to build but still, not the rocket science. so i guess the problem is down to how to promote, marketing, and sell these theme/plugins, any ideas suggestions?

Cheers,
Customer Service Process Reengineering proposal to Groupon
Open Customer Service Process Reengineering proposal to Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason