skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a great article, raising many valid points around concurrent programming. I can't speak to Ruby, but Python supports, and has never presumed linear programming.

Python has had POSIX threads since at least 1.5.1. The standard library contains a set tools for concurrent programming (see the threading module, queue, etc) and many included libraries are thread-safe.

The GIL's behavior is complex, but even so it's still possible to write performant, multi-threaded code in Python, especially for IO bound tasks. See David's excellent write up: http://www.dabeaz.com/GIL/gilvis/index.html.

Everybody wants the GIL to be removed, and several attempts have been made, but the collateral damage seems just too great at the moment - C extensions, and tons of libraries, frameworks, and programs would need to be re-written at the cost of greater complexity, for questionable performance gains in the average case.

Backwards compatibility is a core philosophy of Python, one which I think makes it a great programming environment. This makes removal of the GIL more a philosophical problem than a technical one. Python 3 has made some progress in removing GIL contention, but it's certainly here to stay for the foreseeable future.

Perhaps Python will be left behind in the future due to these decisions, but given all the work being done, I find it hard to believe any argument claiming that the Python community isn't actively invested in concurrent programming.
A lot of what our parents generation did: building interstate highways, Manhattan Project, etc, could not be done today.

Being the only remaining superpower (and having little global military competition) really takes the wind out of government's sails of achievement.

Interstate highways, the Manhattan project, the space program, national infrastructure, aerospace, much medical technology, and even computers were all borne out of military necessity. With so many bad guys around the globe, only a traitor could vote against these things.

Our parents built the stuff needed to save the world. We're building better ways to instantly share our bowel habits. I don't know whether to laugh or to cry.
Rebuilding something like Office will take a decade and will likely have no benefits at all.

Rewrites rarely make sense at all. Just see how old some of the code thats in widespread use is. Android is built on Linux that started in 1991(ignoring that Linux was based on the even older Minix and it's Unix roots). OS X/iOS are based on BSD, Darwin and Unix which are quite old.

See http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

>I don't think so. It's just more valuable.
The point still stands.
The health results didn't freak me out either (for the most part, I got lucky with nothing unexpected or terrible).

On the other hand, I like yourself also thought I had a "boring white Polish as far back as anyone can remember" background. Instead, I got some rather awesome results on the ancestry front that changed a lot of what I know about my background.

The results in both haplogroups are interesting (if a bit broad) in their own right, but what really blew my mind was the sheer numbers of very close cousins I have amongst "neighboring" or not-so-neighboring ethnicities/religions/countries. There's a definite history in my family of "running away from the Russians", and so it's fascinating to find out just how much of those Russians (and other people round the 'Bloc) are in fact directly related to me by only a couple generations.
Value Range Propagation
Is SO profitable yet?

Careers seems like a great fit, because you have definite evidence of developers' interests and abilities.

btw: if you don't indent, urls get linkified, like this: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/careers-2-0-launches/
How does "valuations are all over the map" jive with "there is no bubble in tech"? If a lot of tech companies are being systematically overvalued, isn't that the definition of a tech bubble?

It's also no secret that monetary policy is as loose as ever, so it doesn't take a lot of dot-connecting to see which forces are driving these valuations, especially with Fed bedfellows like Goldman are getting involved. Would people be so willing to throw their cash behind 10-100x PE companies if they had to obtain that cash at market rates and without implicit government backstopping of losses? I'm sure no one involved in tech investing wants to recognize this situation for what it is, but come on now, anyone can see that something's fishy.
Cyber Weapon Capable of Crashing the Internet?
Actually, I got mine shipped to Turkey and they also included a pre-paid shipping label to the package.
More specifically, it is provably unbreakable because all possible plaintexts are equally as likely as the actual plaintext for the encrypted message.
I would have picked these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Morgans_laws
MIT OCW is very cool, and they were front runners.

What's next? Putting more course materials on the net isn't really it. What should be next is much more challenging, but has immense payoffs... something like Khan Academy is doing with personalized learning.

How awesome would it be if MIT did something like that, incorporating some of their incredible material?
New Fb App - My Reading List (alternative for amazon/linkedin)
Can anyone comment on whether or not they have found advertising on the SO jobs board to be a good source of candidates? I listed a position there in December for a systems engineer with EC2 experience and got no responses - I've had much better luck with Startuply for example.
I'd love to find links to old newspaper articles talking about building interstate highways and such. Doing nearly anything today seems like it is near impossible. The costs, the time, and the political divisiveness (at even the city local level) makes doing a monorail or adding a line seem like Roe v Wade.
I think a tech bubble generally means that nearly everyone is overvalued.
gedit supports edit over anything that gnome vfs has to offer, in my case it means ftp, ssh, samba and webdav.
I like gedit it's minimalism without being crippled, there are some plugins to offer extra functionality.
I just got back on here and can no longer edit the comment. If I could, I would remove the link, but I have always found it kind of silly to "delete" things from the web like this or not link to it when in reality it still exists. It gives a false sense of privacy and just in general breaks things.
Caltech men's basketball team scores first conference victory since 1985
Bloom.io: Start-Up Proposes Visual Instruments for Social Data Expression
This is not really fair. Compare Go to Java instead.
Real-time Commentary on Launch Conference
Stack Overflow Careers Also Targeting "Passive Candidates"
Thanks for making me chuckle. You do make a good point. If this was just another enterprise Java job, I wouldn't have listed it. I guess I was mostly curious about the Erlang/Android angle.
These kinds of posts just open an endless and meaningless debate.

For example, why not list rules from boolean logic? Why don't we have concept of induction? I use tree concepts more often than I use SVD.
EDIT for history: [The original comment was by edw##, regarding the strength of his ancestor's sperm. It wasn't a bad post, I just felt it was inaccurate/confusing.]

Though poetic, that's not at all how you should look at it.

Those sperm carry the same DNA. That DNA is the pattern your proteins are crafted with. That pattern (in conjunction with the environment you live in) is what determines how "sturdy" you are. You are not that sperm.

Think of your DNA as the bash program, and the ENV variables as a sort of control flow (like in many programs). The end result of the computation is you.

The "strength" of your father's (and forefathers') sperm is important, sure, but from an evolutionary perspective. Those 100,000,000 sperm were, for all intents and purposes, the same.

23andme isn't about telling you what you already know–though that's certainly an interesting confirmation–it's about telling you what you don't know. Or at least giving you an idea about it, and the raw data that largely determines how you turned out (given your env vars).
"If you've backed yourself into a niche so small that there are only a few engineers worth hiring (implausible)"

This isn't that implausible, actually. Hiring is very^2 difficult.
One simple immediate consequence may be that you cannot answer a question like "do you have any reason to believe that you may be at risk for XYZ" anymore without potentially having to rely on a result that may or may not have statistical significance -- or which you may have misunderstood. A lot of 23andme reports are in the form of "if you are east asian and have the following genotype for SNP rsXXXXXX, you have a 3% chance of developing condition XYZ". Personal genomics services like 23andme are going out there and saying that SNPs are pretty reliable, but the reality for some conditions and traits may still be fuzzy as more data comes in. There may be as-yet undiscovered SNPs that have a bigger effect on your cancer risk than the ones their v3 chip happens to cover, for example, and just having a 1 or even a dozen SNPs may not be enough for a clear picture. On the other hand, an insurance company might find it risky enough to deny you coverage. Nobody knows how that will shake out.

In the future, if a given insurance provider knows you have purchased a service like this, they also can then figure out which SNPs you know your genotypes for (it would be fairly trivial for any insurance company to find out which 950,000 or so SNPs 23andme tests for), and can then craft a survey form asking about these specific traits.

Many people will likely still try the service anyway because they'd rather know, pro-actively address certain issues, and risk the insurance game, than not know at all.

[EDIT: Apologies for not having read your question all that clearly. Just assume the above applies to "admitting you've used the service in public"]
Yeah, I think you are right.. I was commenting on the third party part more than the under the table part.

I was thinking more along the lines of Amazon creating an open or liscensed API for it's ebooks, so that someone can make an app for me to log into and read books that I own. Users could still read their kindle books on their iphones, and amazon could keep it's position as the best book store for iOS users, expand to other devices, etc..

I don't think it is worth it for someone like Amazon or Pandora to stay off of Apple's platform just to give them less leverage, but I agree that they would have to be upfront about it.
Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook
> For the $500 that they normally charge, I felt it was too much.

Some time this year, they seem to have put their prices at $199, down from $499.

Personally, I'm waiting until whole-genome resequencing is down to about $300 from a commercial outlet. I don't anticipate this being the case in the next 5 years, at least, but it's not like my DNA will be changing any time soon.
The health care debate in the U.S is a microcosm of all this. The only thing that people argue about is how much more money we're going to spend on it, and we already spend far more, as a percentage of GDP, on health care than any other nation.

Any solution that has to do with process innovation, technology innovation or any sort of thing that would otherwise upset the status quo besides more money is largely ignored. There are so many vested interest involved that the only thing they can all support is even more money being poured down the same old rathole.
The whole post is based on the assumption that if you hire someone from your friend's company, you lose your friend. Maybe I'm just naive, but I think friendship that ends for such a reason is a lousy friendship.

I firmly believe that one should be able to separate business from friendship. For me, this part of the post highlights the flaw in author's reasoning:

Here’s an easy way to think about the dynamic. If your husband left you, would you want your best friend to date him?
I think that "newest" is less indicative, since anybody can submit anything, and if the community ignores it, then little "harm" is done.

It would be more interesting to me to see snapshots of the top articles, as we move through time. That would also show us what the readers were deeming relevant.
I had the kindle app for about a year before iBooks came out. I bought some books, but having had an unfortunate incident with Amazon taking a book I'd bought away from me in the past, I didn't invest much time in it.

The Kindle app is so clunky it might as well be a webpage.

Once iBooks came out, the experience was so much better that I was happy to switch. I now have several hundred books in iBooks, including all of my technical books, lots of free books, pdfs, DRM free ebooks from people like pragmatic programmers.

If amazon were to release books in a DRM free epub format, I'd buy them and read them in iBooks too.

But for all the gnashing of teeth and exclamations from people who seem to think this is the Great Tragedy of The Ages, I'm amazed that after so long people haven't figured out Apple's priorities.

Apple does right by the customer. It is the key to their success. non-discriminatory pricing is right by the customer. consistent-terms across sales methods is right by the customer, and by the developer.

Imagine if subscriptions were only %10 while sales were %30-- suddenly instead of buying your apps we'd go back to the way things were before liberated the mobile landscape, where if you wanted Doom on your phone, you had to pay $2.99 a month to rent it.
It is worth noting that, as pointed out in http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/September/10-at-1076.html, the US Department of Justice recently forced 6 prominent high tech companies to start actively recruiting from each other, because failing to do so was anti-competitive.

And that was in a case where they were hiring from each other, but only when approached as was the case in the example.

My attitude is that if your friend is a grown-up and understands how business works, your friendship can last. If your friend is not mature enough to handle the situation, that friendship was probably not worth maintaining. Certainly not at the cost of losing out on a stellar employee who wasn't going to stay with your friend anyways.
Build your own Tron Light Cycle paper model
Good developers are generally employed and don't stay on the market long when they want/need another job. I've done lots of interviews at my last job, and ALL good candidates were employed at the time and were looking for either more money or better environment (there was one case when company went under and laid off all of their staff).
Blah Blah Blah. Social networking was crucial for a country of highly oppressed people to overthrow their tyrannical government. Doctors can identify diseases from their phone in a way that would have taken days, we can de-salt water in way that is practical. New times, new problems.

Our generation is pushing innovation at a speed that is unparalleled, don't confuse the 47 fart apps in the app store as a complete misappropriation of focus.
i'm going to go with the 80-20 rule as the most important math concept a programmer can learn
Maybe so, but I think that the fact that the people designing languages don't think of tool support as a first class language feature makes that gap much larger than it needs to be. There's no reason a powerful language has to be difficult to parse or reason about, it's just that the people designing the language don't place it as highly on their list of priorities as (IMO) they should.
You think this is bad, you should have been here for the Firebird fiasco.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox#Early_Versions
Customer decision making behaviours that are consistently irrational
I don't understand what you're talking about. My entire site is HTTPS, I also use Strict-Transport-Security, have a ruleset in HTTPS-Everywhere, and I don't use cookies at all. If I were to use cookies, I'd make sure to add the secure and httpOnly flags.

Me putting a redirect on http to https is no less secure than not providing http at all.
It seemed more like he was trolling to me.

Everyone who complained on this bug paid for Android as a commercial product.

I may be a master Linux debugger, but I'm not about to debug every little appliance/automobile issue I have because there's a bug in it's embedded Linux subsystem.

I never thought I'd see the day when people would use OSS as a defense for a commercial product not getting fixed. Especially when I suspect that the component involved isn't actually open source.
While this might be a good business plan, this isn't what they say they do:

https://help.squareup.com/customer/portal/articles/11866-whe...

I've only done a few transactions with Square, and none took 30 days. Do you have experience to the contrary?
13" MacBook Pro specs leaked, reveal "Thunderbolt" I/O port
You own a Kindle and prefer to read Kindle books on the iPad?
Ashton Kutcher Backs Ticket Start-Up SeekGeek
Great points, I didn't intend to make gedit sound crippled by explicitly noting FTP, it's a great editor.

Thanks!
I recently spent some time integrating with the Facebook Credits API, and even though it's smaller, it's a similarly frustrating experience.

The documentation is sort of there, sometimes contradictory, and I always have to resort to reading their code examples in PHP to really figure out what data is expected, how to format it, and what I get back. None of their APIs are really well thought-out, they're all slapped together to sort of have all the relevant data. I understand that it's better to ship than not, but a little thought. Please?

The greatest irony though is that if you want to make a post asking for help in the official developer forum, you're met by this page:

http://forum.developers.facebook.net/register.php?agree=Agre...
Honestly, the frequent "answerers" on SO don't know their arse from their elbow either. The way to learn Lisp is reading the Emacs source code. When you wonder how something words, do a describe-key and follow the link to the code. Explore. Edit. Learn.
We have done work for companies like yours as well as YC companies. If you need help my contact information is in my profile, send me an email.
No, if you read the article, the author ultimately suggests that you proceed with the hire in an open and transparent way -- giving the potential hire a way to back down if they would be uncomfortable with you doing a reference check. The (imho) important part of the article is this:

> "... the best way to deal with these situations is openly and transparently. Once the you become aware of the conflict between hiring the superstar employee and double-crossing your valued friend, you should get the issue onto the table by informing the employee that you have an important business relationship with his existing company and you will have to complete a reference check with the CEO prior to extending the offer. Let him know that if he does not want that to happen, then you will stop the process now and keep the process to date confidential. By speaking with your friend before making the hire, you will be able to better judge the relationship impact of hiring her employee. In addition, you may avoid making a bad hire as often candidates who do well in interviews turn out to be bad employees."
somewhat OT:

> 2. You mean (IIRC) 'ip link show'. ifconfig on linux isn't maintained, and breaks in a bunch of situations (Aliases on VLANs on bonds, for one)

This seemingly simple change seems to be taking forever to gain traction; "use `ip` for network config on linux".

There is so much googlable stuff instructing one to use ifconfig, route, etc. that it seems to self perpetuate. I often find people telling others that "you can't do that in Linux", when the real answer is along the lines of "you can't do that with the route command" (to give an example that I've seen a few times recently, route can't manipulate routing tables)
we were profitable until we raised VC and started spending it :-)
My point was more along the lines of "unified purchasing experience" != "good purchasing experience." You could have all apps unify on a horrible purchasing experience, no?
My brain exploded trying to read the original post, and De Morgans laws seem like someone sense to anyone who has ever had to code a conditional.
I can't help but feel there's a bit of "Mathematic elitism" in this post, and I really disagree with it. I struggle to understand why this concept is "the most important" to programmers, yet I consider myself a pretty solid coder.
After the Dot-Bomb: Getting Web Information Retrieval Right This Time
I posted an ad for a Junior PHP Developer last year and also got no responses. Ended up hiring someone off Craigslist.

Maybe it works better for upper-level developers?
How You Meet Your Spouse Matters
List of static website generators
I hear they have an opening for a librarian that they've been trying to fill for millenia.
And, Emacs comes with documentation on both Elisp and every built-in feature of Emacs itself... but apparently nobody reads that. It really confuses me, as the built-in documentation is like the whole point of Emacs...
How I Indexed The Daily (HTTP proxying using Charles for Mac)
Seeking co-founder Launch Conference in San Francisco
For UI programming and animation transformation matrices (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformation_matrix) (plus some simple calculus) are really all you need.
A sector being overvalued as a whole isn't enough? Perhaps the bubble is really focused on particular segments within what is generally known as 'tech', but it still seems like the most appropriate label.
It's a strange example to use in a story bemoaning the decline in startup innovation as well, since the interstate highway system and the Manhattan Project were not exactly things done by startups.
Actually, if a merchant is "on reserve" and having their funds held, then the processor is required to keep the money in a non-interest bearing account. They don't make money on it. Reserves are to cover the processor's ass on chargebacks.
Google Ventures leads $20M round for Transphorm to overhaul power conversion
Almost all sites that have comments and user moderation concentrate on the comments and up voting / down voting them. Normally, when dealing with people, I don't remember the individual quote that made me think they were brilliant / a troll, I wrap that up into my sense of them. If I'm flipping channels and see someone who has struck me as a brilliant commentator, I stop based on the visual cue of their face. Names are kind of hard (is this the guy who called me a $%$% or was he the one who really knows python?).

I guess I wonder if the same thing keeps happening on
"comment moderation" sites, isn't it time to look at the ways your view could be based on your (not the group's) opinion of your fellow commentors? I don't have a technical suggestion, but I will probably think a lot on it.
People need to understand OCW and Khan Academy serve two very different purposes. OCW was made to make the awesome materials generated by MIT profs to the general public, while Khan Academy was made specifically for the purpose of giving personalised learning. In my view both of them are noble causes and non of them should be abandoned, you can teach very less material in 10 mins after you cross the K 12 level. For covering one lesson in at the undergraduate level you definitely need at least half an hour.
Ask HN: Feedback on UbuntuCloud.com - Simple EC2 Control Panel (Lean MVP)
Looking for feedback on the new landing page.

Our goal is a lightweight Ubuntu focused alternative to the "kitchen sink" approach of the AWS Management Console and other tools in this space with an experience that's closer to dedicated/vps style hosting.

We have a lot of respect for the HN community and look forward to some great feedback, both positive and negative! If anyone wants more details on how we're applying lean principles let us know.