skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apples and Oranges. Open heart surgery is not most--notice I say most--programming jobs. Nor do most software bugs carry the same sorts of penalties as screw-ups in major surgery.

This is why programmers aren't sued and surgeons are.

There is a huge niche in programming languages for non-professional/semi-professional programmers without computer science degrees. This niche is currently unfilled. Basic used to do the job. Python used to, and still wants to, but it keeps moving up the ladder in complexity.

Lua looks most competitive in this regard, I think. One main data structure, fast execution, room to grow without feature creep.
Honestly, if there was a bubble, would any venture capitalist ever admit to it.
Ask HN: Mobile Developers
I'm working on a project to help you guys get better publicity. Specifically, trying to serve that middle ground for apps that aren't on any Top 10 lists.

If you have a mobile app you've developed (for any platform), please shoot me an email (contact info in my profile), or leave info in the comments so that I can get help you out.
I disagree. I think he mentions a really valid point. Getting users to upgrade from IE6 is good thing, but it's even better to upgrade to Firefox or Chrome instead of IE8.
Browsing Pad, a combination web browser and notes app, addresses the author's need to browse the web and take notes simultaneously: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/browsing-pad/id385931831?mt=8

He has a great point about the distinction between user and OS multitasking. But if and until iOS changes, it means that there are more opportunities for developers to addresses those niches.
Libraries in Denial
IE8 is leaps and bounds better than IE6. In IE8 you barely even need to tweak sites to get them to look right. I'd be tickled pink if IE8 was all I had to worry about. IE9 is going to be much better than IE8 -- by leaps and bounds -- but it's still in beta. At least the release candidate is out. Some people are never satisfied and always need something to complain about. I'm sure you'll find something else once IE9 is out (it doesn't work on their 10 year old operating system).

Edit: So much idealism in this thread and not enough people being realistic.

Here are the facts:

-Web developers hate IE. All versions of it.

-We live in a world with IE.

-Microsoft IS NOT going to suggest that people download Firefox or Chrome.

-It IS NOT in their interest to do so.

-The next best thing is for them to suggest IE8 and then IE9.

-It is in the users' best interest who don't know any better and it is in Web developers' best interest that people are at least using something better than IE6 or IE7

-Windows XP is 10 years old.

-The only thing that's going to be holding back users from upgrading to IE9 is refusal to upgrade their decade-old operating system.

-It would be like people being mad at Apple because the latest version of Safari isn't compatible with OS9.
Cool! http://scri.ch/1in
Deployment, accessibility.

Consider adjusting your tone and the quality of your response, it just makes you sound partisan rather than informed.
Has anyone else noticed that the California DMV actually has a service like this? If you call them and and the hold time is more than 30 minutes, they offer you the choice to hang up and be called when they are ready for you.
Who'd think that would come from the fucking DMV?
HTML5-CSS3,JavaScript,jQuery, Mobile Web, LAMP Developer for hire in SF Bay area and remote possibility now!

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/suyashj
Listic is correct. We (Twilio) do not support international SMS on accounts by default. We are currently offering it in beta. However, after a quick email to Sandeep just now, I turned it on for his account and you should be able to test International SMS on Phoneify now. Reminder: it is currently in beta, so there may be some deliverability issues in countries that don't have great coverage. Let us know so we can make it better.
So you came back to argue with what you basically sum up as a troll?

How a story makes you feel is probably the most important part of it. And I agree with Max: I feel disconnected from the person who says they were hacking awesome crap back when they were 16. I feel even more so because I almost had that opportunity - I learned Basic on my uncle's old C64 when I was 8! I wanted compilers so bad, I read C++ Windows API books from the library without any idea what the hell they meant, but nobody was there to guide me. I gave up. I know it's a bad way of looking at it, but I felt kind of cheated by the universe.

And implying that you need to be that kind of person - who has been hacking since their teens - to succeed, yeah, that makes me feel like I can't do it. I mean Jacques, come on. From that story it seems you a computing god at 17. And my 17-year-old parallel, writing some dumb Java apps, pales in comparison.
My gripe is about "getting fit" as in coming from baseline / nothing to being a reasonable human being. When I was pushing 310 pounds (as in ass weight, not bench weight), this is the kind of thing I would read and go, hey, yeah! Super clever mountain man training! That's the stuff, screw the gym, I'm all over this, I'm so pro!

Not a unique attitude at all. What got me down to the 200 mark though was just joining a gym, pushing out squats / deadlifts / presses (on machines for the first few months), utilizing the trainers, getting some buddies on board, eating less and getting the job done.

Average joe doesn't have room for gear at home, or the motivation to independently structured programs, or they just flat out get intimidated by hanging around training camps or gyms. I don't think there's room to discourage anything that has potential benefit for people.
Are you trying to say you think it's more effective to encourage users to buy Windows 7 (and most likely a new computer to support it) than to encourage them to install Firefox or Chrome for free?
While this story is uplifting, it's a lot more about being in the right place at the right time.

I'd personally rather see a story about a 30-something under-appreciated corporate developer who is supporting a family with their mid-level salary and benefits striking out and succeeding. I, and many others, are beyond the point where they can strike out and fund a startup, and who simply can not survive on a raman salary.

Sure, I might make more in one contract than I would normally make in a year. But the chances are probably better that I could end up with my family not having a home anymore.
XP installation packages, even updated through the last service pack (SP3), only ever came with IE6. You have to actively download and install IE 7 or 8. Not too surprising if the netbook vendors trying to compete on rock-bottom price didn't want to pay an installation monkey to do that. If you don't know what a browser version is, you're not a lost sale. If you do, you know you can easily upgrade it and you're still not a lost sale.
Hey- I'm one of the co-founders of Fonolo. Excited to see lots of innovation in this space.

ekanes- we don't actually require customers to navigate the menu like Lucyphone. Our system does all of the navigating for you, then calls you back when we're in the right point in that menu. It's fully automated.

We sell our services directly to companies (to connect to their customers); the free service isn't really our main focus. We also offer virtual queuing, surveys, and variety of other features (however they aren't offered on the free site.)

Btw, we've built all of the technology in house (speech rec, dialing engine, SIP stack, etc.) There's a lot of very neat technology under the hood.
How is that a valid point? In what alternate universe is it a good idea for Microsoft to attempt to convert their users to a non-Microsoft browser (from Microsoft's stand-point)? Even if it's good for the users, it's their users, and it's entirely logical for them to want to keep them.
Apple: you must be at least 17 years old to use Opera
IE8 is better than IE6, but if someone is going to upgrade their browser, they should upgrade to the best one available. On windows XP, they can't get IE9, but they can get Chrome, Firefox, or Opera.

It'd be like making a trip to a gas station and filling up to half a tank. Because half a tank is better than an empty tank, right? But... while you're going to all that trouble, why not top it off?

Of course this strategy is good for Microsoft, but web designers should be doing what's good for the web.
Nice, though to be fair your potential user base includes all of the internet vs. just Harvard students.
The U.S. does not have a list, though. The U.S. simply doesn't do sterile transit. That's (a large part of) the complaint.
SXSW RVIP Goes East Coast Vs. West Coast Vs. Press Vs. Investors
http://nibzy.com/ - directory for the best mobile formatted sites for mobile/tablet - web app
Somehow the Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera teams manage to provide a modern browser on Windows XP.

This isn't about "finding something to complain about". I want a modern web, and I want Microsoft to get out of the way of that happening.
CBS Interactive Acquires Clicker.com & Names New President
Well I took the /print off the link because it kept crashing chrome, but apart from that we probably did. I'm talking about non-motivated, non-pro kind of people (see other response, I was 310 pounds and happily googling super fitness techniques while smashing cheeseburgers all night).

Overweight people don't need any reason to not turn up a gym or think they know better. Anything that provides benefit is better than nothing. If the entry barrier is signing up to a gym and having a trainer run you through a program, that's pretty low.

If it's finding obscure training venues with hardcore types and being broken down as a weakling (which yeah, works better than anything out there, and it's what I sign up for these days), then people won't touch it with a hundred foot pole.

Most uber-chunkers already feel like shit day in day out without coming up against further entry barriers or reams of information. Just find the closest venue or activity that will make you sweat and do it.
> It's damn hard finding PC's preinstalled with linux

I always wonder why things like these happen...

> and it's not easy finding compatible devices for those PC's.

Funny. Just about everything I plug into my Linux notebooks works flawlessly. Even my non-jailbroken iPod has no problem syncing with it.

The 90's called. They want their excuse back.

> Sure, nerds always have choice,

Sure we do. We, nerds, have choice and we can create choice where there is none. We nerds can jailbreak locked-up tablets, phones and videogames. But we also want to help Joe Sixpack get a better, safer computer, if, for no other reason, to stop the spam zombies.

Actually, we do things like these because we are generous. We want everybody to have cool toys.
A close family member of mine has a career working for libraries (mainly academic libraries).

There is a great deal of angst and confusion these days about the appropriate role of libraries regarding books, cataloging, functions like providing computer terminals, and so forth.

I don't want to (here, now) advocate for any particular political stance other than to hope you agree that libraries are a cornerstone of enlightened civilization and that radical changes to them raise many questions that deserve very careful attention from those of us who, you know, like knowledge, and learning, and progress, and stuff. :-)
It's like that wise tigerblood celebrity once said - "Can't is the cancer of happen."

We need less bi-polar, and more bi-winning up in here.
just don't know why i'd use this over yelp ?
Quite true, but of all the Twitter/Social-related websites I've built (a lot), this one has seen more hits and buzz than all the rest already. Please allow me to be excited :)
Funded by Night Competition Promises to Energize Detroit Startup Scene
Ah I see. And I agree with that.

I meant he raises a good point on whether (from a web developer's perspective) you should use this Microsoft banner at all.
Building a faster Ruby garbage collector
Success is visible to everyone, but the hard work and preparation that goes into it, sometimes over the course of years, is not always apparent. So when most people see a successful person they go "He has all the luck in the world, I wish I was that lucky", or "He is a genius, I wish I was as clever". What they don't realize is the amount of toil and persistence that went into that success, either directly or indirectly, just like in this inspiring story Jacques has shared with us. Success doesn't happen overnight. There is hard work involved. You can achieve things too, provided you work for it.
Justice Department investigates Web video group (MPEG-LA)
Yeah, can see how it read lol. There's no cage, just a smith machine at my local gym (and there's only two in town), so I do freeweight squats at home, then smith there, going for the max on each.
my profile: http://commonthree.com/razamobin
Haha yes...whoa a little late on my reply.
Headline should have been something like, "CBS Interactive Picks Up Clicker.com"
For me, the "word soup" was the authors trying to get across why they did the specific things they did. While many of the individual practices are widely known today, knowing the underlying why is the only way to get real value out of the techniques or to let you know when you should abandon or adapt them.
> IE8 is leaps and bounds better than IE6

A brick is leaps and bounds better than IE6

I learned not to attribute to malice what could be explained by incompetence, but, sadly, incompetence alone cannot explain a company the size of Microsoft being unable to offer a modern standards-compliant browser.
A virus so large it gets viruses
I retort! http://scri.ch/1k5
Sustaining an artificial scarcity of high quality integrated OS releases has been what RHAT has been about since the beginning. Why is this new move any surprise?
http://ruby-toolbox.com/ is a pretty great way to vet (through popularity) gems you're thinking of using. They are sorted by category. aweseome_print is listed in the irb tools category, didn't see kaminari.
How about with a stand-up desk? Do you find yourself slacking off with regards to posture? Of course, it may not be a problem for you regardless, if your issues were more related to, say, lower back pain.

Incidentally, my sister, who is obese, wants to take your plan one step further by going to the treadmill desk. I'm told that there is no problem interacting with stationary desk items after a period of adjustment.
Sure. That happens when all 7 billion people on Earth know about your product. For which products do you think all 7 billion people know about it?
Judge Allows Sony to Unmask Anyone Who Visited GeoHot Site
> In what alternate universe is it a good idea for Microsoft to attempt to convert their users to a non-Microsoft browser (from Microsoft's stand-point)?

Exactly.

It's stupid for Microsoft, but everyone else would benefit from no longer having to cope with Internet Explorer. Heck. Even Microsoft would stop spending money developing their browsers and that would certainly improve their bottom line (much like abandoning MeeGo will improve Nokia's). As it is, Microsoft does whatever benefits them, regardless of how much it does hurt everybody else.
With Win7, using Chrome, the site offers IE9 only, not IE8.

I'm quite pleased to be seeing this from MS, no need to be snobby about it and put down IE overall. If it wasn't for the free availability of IE in Windows, we wouldn't be using the web 24 hours of every day.
I think you're being a bit unreasonable here. IE9 relies on parts of Windows that just don't exist in XP. Windows XP is ancient by software standards. Sure, Chrome et al. work in all operating systems, but you're upset at Microsoft because they don't want to support an operating system that they want people off of already. It's their decision and I'm glad they want people to upgrade. People got mad because users didn't want to get off of Windows 98 because of how dated it had become but fewer people are upset at the "Windows XP is good for a lifetime" crowd.

IE9 is coming and it's much better. When the people holding back on upgrading finally upgrade then you'll have your better Web.
I did a lot of maths in college before I moved onto programming and computer science, but I also found the problem hard. I think I could probably work it out from first principles eventually, but it's surprising how much calculus and trig comes down to memorising rules.
Deployment of what? How would a compiler written in ABCL and delivered as Jar be more difficult to deploy???

Accessibility? For who? The people who actually can maintain a Common Lisp compiler are using mostly Lisp and share parts of their code. There is almost no Common Lisp compiler written not in Lisp. Part of the runtime system may be written in C, but much of the rest is Lisp and especially the compiler.

For example the compiler for ABCL running on top of the JVM is written in Lisp:

http://trac.common-lisp.net/armedbear/browser/trunk/abcl/src...

Please stop your patronizing tone. You can also increase the quality of your own response, which was near zero.
Good ole stego. Manual discovery is 99% of the fun!
Smith machines are especially bad for squats because they will let you put up more weight than your back can really support. Same with the other squat replacement machines like hip sleds. Eventually, you will either crush your discs in the machine itself, or doing a regular squat with too much weight.
In 40 years there has not been very much improvement. The same concepts of decade old languages are implemented in newer languages.

OP:
> Programming should be simple. And it should be accessible. And when I mean accessible I mean people with IQ of approximately 100 should be able to write programs.

He's looking for the wrong tool for the job. We'd need great IDE's for this to hide all the stuff making the app complex.
Wow, thanks for the link. Lot's of good stuff in there.
kalendae: Nice site. I think the major thing that separates Paul & Chad's site and your's is that you can start voting without any sign up whatsoever.

Perhaps you three should collaborate or you could simply remove the registration portion and let people start voting from the homepage.
Right on the money for why over-25's with kids don't go out to see many movies any more. And this goes double for dramas - a moderately priced home theatre will easily approach what you get in a multi-plex, quality-wise. If I'm going to deal with the logistics of going out, I'm going to choose the movies most enhanced by a huge screen and sound system - and that means comic book movie most times.

So, here's my stupid suggestion: make prestigious straight-to-DVD dramas, work out a deal with distributors to charge a little more (to separate out your movies from the garbage straight-to-DVD releases), and effectively do an end-run around the theatre system, which you'll never beat in a world with DVDs & home theatres anyway. This also may take the stigma off releasing NC-17 movies, if they're marketed right.

* Please add "& blu-ray" everytime you see "DVD"
This is written by the same guy that develops the Dandelion Eclipse plugin (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dandelion-ecl/). I think he just really likes Java.
>A brick is leaps and bounds better than IE6

That's why it's great news that Microsoft wants users to upgrade to at least IE8. They will have IE9 once they upgrade their ancient OS as well.

We all know how you feel about Microsoft. Your comment being down-voted into oblivion at the bottom of this page is a good show of how you're approaching my comment. Microsoft is making good progress here.
Yes.

I am more of a pragmatist than a perfectionist, so I don't set out to do everything "perfectly" the first time. (Although I suspect the people that know me best would disagree, but regardless, I don't have the thought pattern that this guy is talking about.)

Based on some things I've read recently and observing my own behavior, I've decided that there are two things which will cause me to procrastinate on a task: either the "start cost" is too high, or I don't know how to do it (or how I want to do it).

The first case happens when I know all of how to do a particular thing, but I just don't want to do it. A good recent example of this was spinning up a ground-up web server rebuild and taking notes on the entire thing so that I can automate it later. I know how to do that, I just don't want to. I'd rather go read HN -- or, really, do just about anything else, including the dishes -- so I'll procrastinate indefinitely.

I now keep an eye out for when I start doing this. I have a very simple, small, white lined notepad on my desk, on the very edge of my workspace. If I procrastinate too long, then I start with a clean page on it, and I break my ominous job down into a series of pathetically simple little tasks: "1. Log in to Linode; 2. Order new server; 3. Name new server; 4. Boot new server; ...", and I fill that out while I'm reading something or doing other things. Sometimes I'll take about a day to write something out that way.

Then, I'll be staring at the notepad, I'll see the first line, and I'll think ... huh, that's not so bad. I could do that. I should do that. I think I'll do that. ...OK, that was easy. I guess I should do the next thing too. Before I know it, I've immersed myself in the task and I won't come back up for air again until it's done.

In the other case, where I don't know how to do a particular thing, I've just come to terms with that and I structure my workflow around it. I try not to commit to projects that are too large, or with too many question-marks, or with too tight of a schedule. I'm confident that eventually I'll figure out whatever puzzle it is that I'm stuck on, I just have to give it time, and stressing out and trying to force myself through it won't help.
Even when eligible for a visa waiver, the process sucks. You have to register with the ESTA 72 hours before flying. You have to leave North America within 3 months, so if you're transitting to Canada or Mexico, you have to get an actual visa, otherwise you're in violation of the visa waiver.
Sneak peek of the NYTimes Magazine redesign
Not to mention the incredibly detailed application that takes several hours to fill out.
Excellent images. For anyone even remotely interested in the topic, the film “South”, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0198559/, is comprised of hauntingly awesome actual video footage of the ill-fated 1914-1916 voyage. I believe there's also an enhanced version of the material (with re-enactments &c.) but I haven't seen that one.
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