skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is what the Java designers always talk about: languages have a "complexity budget".

You can choose to spend your complexity budget on different features (static typing, generics, closures, manual memory management, auto casts, overloaded operators, ...). Some features can take away complexity (GC). But once you've overdrawn your budget, the language gets creaky to use and everybody starts talking about "subsetting" the language. C.f. C++ - all those features do serve a purpose, and looking at the feature alone, it might be reasonable.

I think Scala has way blown its complexity budget. They've innovated on too many different fronts. I'd been happy to have Java with closures, first class functions, and maybe better generics.

There was a lot of buzz around DSLs at some point of time, and they decided to go all in with implicits, which I think was a bad idea. I guess they were trying to market the language...
I'm trying to build up the courage to speak with my boss :)

The problem is I don't want to make them think I'm leaving until I'm sure I would take the full time position.
Yes. In our case, the product is based on an underlying open-source project (think Fedora -> RHEL relationship), and the road-map for the OSS project is already public (although always subject to change.) The roadmap for the "branded" release will likewise be open, and we'll also be actively soliciting customer input. But as you might guess, I'm a big fan of the ideas of "Co-creation"[1] and "Open Innovation"[2], as well as Patricia Seybold's "Outside Innovation" writings[3].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-creation

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_innovation

[3]: http://www.amazon.com/Outside-Innovation-Customers-Co-Design...
Scala seems to be the academic kitchen sink of programming languages.
just a few quick ideas:

sell tickets to conferences through affiliate programs

allow users to create profiles with a job status field, and collect bounty when referring them to hiring companies

collect sponsorships like mixergy, TWiST, etc
Related:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2248890 <- NYT commentary

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2248810 <- The actual PDF
Yeah, I think my end game is building my own startup so I am definitely leaning towards getting some first hand experience with a smaller company. It's just I have quite a bit of job security with my internship (basically until I choose to leave) so it makes me a bit nervous to give that up. Typical problem, I know.
Unfortunately, it won't.
Sending a file in the default format of the world's most popular word processor to another party who opens it on a computer with different settings and a slightly older version of world's most popular word processor doesn't sound especially obscure to me.

I'm assuming most people that fail to get invited to job interviews because missing spaces make their resume/cv look careless to a prospective employer opening the file in Word 2007 probably aren't going to be aware of the reasons behind the decision...
High Severity BIND Vulnerability Advisory Issued
Sounds like a lot of old people with money and no clue as to what might be viable using young people without to source their investment opportunities.

It's the investing equivalent of letting whoever is the youngest in the room fix the computer.
Look at the effect, not the justification: just when OO XML was being talked about being standardised, and .doc was more or less interoperable, Open XML comes out. It's an open standard, but it requires effort to convert to it. Microsoft has money to burn so it can do the conversion; its competitors cannot.

Copyrighting the file format puts them in legal hot water: since it is a de facto standard, trying to prevent competition would likely violate anti-trust laws. This way they can appear to be open whilst being closed.
Ask HN: Besides programming, what's a realistic "work from home" job?
I'm starting to think I should quit programming as a career and just do it as a hobby.

I don't like going out to work every day and am wondering what other type of work I could do from home. (It doesn't need to pay as well as programming because I spend very little and have no family to support.)

Any suggestions?
Yeah, I was thinking something to do with the terminal and command line stuff.

Still a very useful, thanks!
Final Cut Pro update will be the “biggest overhaul” since the original
I sort of agree, but I meant it a bit tongue-in-cheek (hence the smiley). I'm sure plenty of people would argue that the Kuro5hin golden age was nothing like the WELL golden age, or the Usenet golden age, or various other possibilities.

One thing I did like about the Kuro5hin model was discussion organized around original, substantive stories, written by the same userbase who were the commenters. That, and stories posted at a rate of one or two a day. Sites like Slashdot/HN/reddit are instead mainly based around discussing offsite links, which K5 allowed but sort of discouraged as "mindless link propagation" (there was a section for it, but people didn't want too many submissions to it, and you typically had to add some substantive commentary to the link to get the submission accepted). The articles were also directly written for / targeted to the K5 community. People do sometimes write blog posts specifically to target HN, but they're often more multitargeted--- stuff submitted here might not be written with an HN audience in mind at all, or HN might only be one of several intended audiences.

Some classic Usenet groups were sort-of in that style as well. You could start a new thread with a one-line post or "what do you think of this?" query, but some groups had a culture of starting new threads only when you had a significant, well-thought out post to make; otherwise you were supposed to stick to existing threads.

I'm afraid it's harder to attract good content to a community these days, though. The people who used to consistently write good stuff for Kuro5hin now have their own blogs, and post their content there instead. In the early 2000s, it was a win-win situation: Kuro5hin provided an outlet for people who had things to say, and people who had things to say provided interesting content to read and discuss. These days if you have something compelling to say, you can just start a blog, and then try to get readers by submitting links across the web.
No need for threads in JRuby. Just use actors and messages (and you can transform any object into an actor). I've wrote it about it here: http://metaphysicaldeveloper.wordpress.com/2010/12/16/high-l...
with the thread now deleted (for good reasons, which is why I'm not linking to it here)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2154106

Why was it deleted?
OT: that website is horrible in Firefox, 100+ assets, 25 secs to the onload event, and afterwards it locks up periodically because of the chartbeat analytics ajax call. In Chrome, it's a breeze, fast load and then completely fluid. Chrome is magic.

PS: the Firefox UI freeze on ajax calls seems to be a Mac specific problem.
Because the people who were buying the company might also have been reading that thread.
Thanks for posting this! Now I finally know why some important texts from business associates never arrived.

I really can't believe this bug made it through to production. Why would carriers accept software with this kind of bug? I know I was blaming my carrier the whole time, and I bet others have been too.
If someone would ask me, I'd tell them honestly. Never happened though.
Good Luck. Based on the fact that you have two options means you are better than a majority of the workers out there. I left corporate work 6 years and never looked back. You will land on your feet no matter what. Follow your heart.
This is great article. I recently was to an interview with a company and thought the interview went great. They even told me they had been looking for a candidate since August. To my dismay one week after the interview I received a similar email. No reason, just the "we looked at your credentials and those of other applicants and have decided to continue with other applicants". Funny thing is the job is still posted and probably will be for another 6 months.

What I don't understand is that if company x has been looking to fill a position for 6 months is company x just too picky or have too high expectations of a new applicant?

I really have to agree with this that companies should at least give some additional reason for the turn down instead of the typical form letter. You as an applicant spent a lot of time working on your resume and interviewing skills the least the company could do is let you know why they wont be offering a jab.

Just my two cents...
http://marcel-oehler.marcellosendos.ch/comics/ch/1992/07/199...

Calvin and Hobbes, 16 JULY 1992

" One of the joys of being a kid is that experiences are new and therefore more intense. For example, I'm about to stick my nose in a jar of mustard and inhale deeply! Let's see what it's like. WHOOP!!

See, whed you are oder, you dake your sinuses fo granded.

Some of us prefer to.
Great tool. Will save me a few awkward google queries site:ac.uk "reading list" x
etc
While it is true that "reversed stupidity is not intelligence", that does not mean negative examples are without merits.

Someone once said to me "A smart person learns from their mistakes, a brilliant person learns from other people's mistakes."

Positive examples show you what you should do and how you should do it, but they often leave out why. A negative example makes it very clear why you should do things a certain way and avoid doing them other ways.
C = A + B;

In C++ what does this line do? The list of things that can effect what this line of code does are: Types of A,B, and C, single arg constructors, explicit conversion operators, operator +, operator =, and copy constructors might come into play. I more than likely have forgotten something from that list.
A friend of mine tried it and gave me the impression that, because you are competing with a worldwide remote workforce for work that does not require an on-site presence, translation work is extremely hard to come by, unless you have exceptional language skills.
I don't understand what you mean when you say they went all-in on DSLs with implicits. I far more often use implicits for integrating Java libraries or papering over clunky apis than for putting together DSLs.
"Get cancer? Better look out."

Of course! There is no real cure for cancer: look at the 5-year survival statistics.

But there _are_ innumerable agencies and non-profits that will take your last dollar and promise you "hope". They will do this for you or for your child who has cancer. Their purpose is to make money. Amazingly, people will spend their last dollar to "cure" their own cancer. To "save" their children they will borrow money against their future or that of their relatives and friends.

We spend most of our medical dollars trying to put off the inevitable (death from old age and cancer). Instead we should learn, as a nation, that it is OK to die, hopefully gracefully, if a bit sooner.
I think all these explanation of fear of legal ramifications and how it's hard to provide feedback are just covers.

Employers and/or recruiters don't provide any reason because the the minimum that they have to do to let you know that you are not accepted is to tell you no. They are not bounded in any ways to do more than that. Telling you why means they have to think, to sit down and write more than a sentence. It's easier to just give a canned answer and send it out.

All the outer explanation of legal ramification, hard to provide feed back, it's just smoke screen to cover the most basic human nature to be lazy. Period.

Personally I've had good feedback 1 in every 50 application I sent. I've always proactively asked for feedback when I can and I think I've probably had 3 good feedbacks so far. One went as far as buying me lunch and explain the decision to me while another invited me back to his office where we sat down and chatted for quite a bit.

It's not that you suck, it's just human nature. Most of us are a lazy bunch.
What the the article seems to miss is that Scala can be used strictly as a "better Java" without using any of the advanced type features or idioms if that is what you want.

(Anecdotal)War Story: Once upon a time I worked with a team of scientists (not professional developers) who had some legacy research code in Java, had tried moving to Scala and got badly bitten by the advanced type theory bits and so were considering moving back to Java. When I joined the team I taught them how to use the "Scala as a better Java" approach, (which would correspond to approximately the L1 level in Martin Odersky's blog post at http://www.scala-lang.org/node/8610) and to this day they are happily building new stuff in Scala (and Java).

Just as you can use Common Lisp without completely mastering macros, the condition system etc, to get stuff done at the cost of some redundancy when compared to what the code would look like if an expert were to write it, so can you use subsets of Scala to get serious work done.

I suspect problems arise when you have the attitude that you must completely master the language before you start using it to build stuff. This excludes all but the ultra simple languages from consideration. Reductio Ad Absurdum, Imagine a world where the only programming language in use is VB (or even C) !

I offer the hypothesis that when using any new and "large" language on a real life project you have to work with a subset. This is not a bad thing and "subset" is not a dirty word (as long as the subset is clearly identified and at least as good as the alternative languages). As you gain experience with the subset and actually build useful systems with it you can then go deeper into the language and learn more advanced features, which you can then use to refactor your code to use those advanced features where appropriate, in a virtuous cycle.

Imagine you are learning a non programming language (say French) or even musical notation. If you wait till you have wrapped your head completely around whatever you are learning before you start using it, you are (a) going to wait a long time (b) very unusual in your approach. Is having an ultra simple syntax or a small surface area a virtue? Yes it is. It is one aspect of a design but not the only one.

The lack of an IDE is a more valid complaint, (especially if you plan to have big teams of mediocre programmers) but then you restrict yourself to using only core mainstream languages with very strong vendor ecosystems (say Java, VC++, C# and VB). It would be nice if every new language sprang from their creators brows fully equipped with ultra functional IDEs but that maybe a tad unrealistic a wish ;-).

I also suspect that most of the carping comes from people who haven't actually used Scala in any serious fashion. Complaints about "too complex a type system" from people who have never used Scala to actually build something have about as much legitimacy as people who refuse to use Lisp because it has "too many parantheses" and just "know" that parantheses are confusing.
The suggestion may exist because it's possible to do nasty things if a user (particularly a logged-in user) goes to your http address.

If you don't have cookies configured to use https only (you don't), an attacker can grab a user's cookies. They can also intercept your redirect and send users to another site (see sslstrip).
What about disabling voting until a user reaches a certain amount of karma? Of course, you'd have to give the upvote ability to the original members (hand selected?) so that the system could actually get off the ground.

It would be similar to the "invite only" community idea where older users have to actually approve new members, but less restrictive. Perhaps even have upvotes on users instead of just comments. It would be similar to an "invite", but just for allowing them to vote. I'd say also keep the hellbanning that we have here. There will sadly be some false positives, but it seems to work very well for keeping out the worst.

Perhaps upvoting users could affect the reputation of the folks doing the upvoting. If you upvote a bad user into the community, your reputation suffers as well.

Now, this does nothing to solve the problem of groupthink, and in fact somewhat enforces it. However, I think some amount of groupthink is inevitable if you want to create a strong sense of community. Because you're trying to cluster users around a core set of values, it's probable that they'll think similarly in other ways as well.

Edit: I think multidimensional voting helps as well. Ignoring the comments voted "funny" on /. helps to filter out what people liked just because it was amusing. I think "agree/disagree" voting would be useful as a separate thing, because too often that winds up conflicting with upvoting/downvoting for quality.
Not sure where you are looking but there has been no lack of jobs for software developers where I am located. If you can code Java in Dallas you can slip and fall into a 6 figure salary. I guess I am spoiled but the ideas of sending out "Hundreds" of resumes seems foreign to me.
There's been a hell of a lot of updates of FCP the last few years. I'm not sure how much is relevant innovation and how much is simply a strategy for dealing with piracy.
I was once not hired for a job i applied for (during the interview i was cross questioned a bit like an interrogation but a lot like i had done something wrong and this was my trial!), after the interview, his assistant was really kind and said to me,"really sorry about, that is my bosses confrontation style ..." then i was told they would like to see me again!

But after some thought (1 second), i just wanted not to go back again ... so maybe meaningful feedback to the interviewer/company would be useful too ...
doing #1 and #2 at the same time would be easy.
Since the remove is RF vs. IR you can actually put the thing just about anywhere. Mine sits behind my TV.
Programming language matters little for something simple like this, just choose a scripting language like Python, Rails, PHP etc. Set up your tables in MySQL or something. Good luck!
Death by To Do lists
... and that's potentially a good reason not to post the link again here at the moment. You (by which I mean user duck) might consider redacting it. Please.
You have to be good, yes. I think once you're good and you are also good at finding clients, you should be able to do well. Haven't done it myself though.
New app that translates Chinese text on photos
I gave it a try, and at least on the Windows version, their browser crashes if you mouse over the wrong areas or click the wrong buttons (on mytv.taiseng.com).
Here's a blog post about it. You see it when you register your books: http://robpickering.com/2010/07/inexpensive-ebooks-from-orei...
I don't even like the name "console" in the context of js, why didn't they pick "logger"
The link is blurbtastic but points off to the meat, which is here: http://security.ece.cmu.edu/aeg/.

Leading paragraph on the abstract:

The automatic exploit generation challenge we address is given a program, automatically find security-critical bugs and generate exploits. Our approach uses a novel formal verification technique called preconditioned symbolic execution to make automatic exploit generation more scalable to real-world programs than without it. We implemented our techniques in a system called AEG, which we use to automatically generate 16 exploits for 14 open-source projects. Two of the generated exploits are against previously unknown vulnerabilities.

They have a pretty sweet video of some runs.
Create your sales pitch ahead of time
OP wants Mom to make some money
As far as I see this, he admits the problem at the end: Microsoft Word is a Word Processing program, not a publishing program.

You are not guaranteed to have your layout preserved when printing. This can be for a variety of reasons, but it could be simple stuff like having your file in A4-format and your printer only having papers of type "Letter" or something equally silly. In cases like these, Word is forced to reformat.

If you need or rely on a 100% accurate re-representation of your content, Word should not be your tool. Never. Use PDFs. Simple as that. If you are writing a normal texts however, it will probably never be a real problem which you will even notice.

Now, my question to the author (should he check out HN): How on earth is this related to OOXML? Where is the smoking gun saying this is a bug in the file-format? I honestly don't see it, and I don't see anyone else here questioning this unbacked claim.

I honestly expected better from HN.
I started working on a side project (now abandoned) about startups:

http://haxiny.appspot.com (just a mockup)

If I get enough feedback I may start working on it again.
I would ask Mary Ramblin of morethanmary.com she did gain travel sponsors for her travel blog articles so she may have some advice and insight.
Essentially, it's a combination of time and votes. The older something is, the less it is promoted; the more upvotes a submission has, the more it is promoted. The original calculations (I believe) can be found in the Arc source code.

Having said that, pg (et al) have tweaked the calculation over the years. Some changes are reasonably well-known or clear (eg, longer comments fall slower than short comments; Ask HN submissions fall faster than links); others are, I'm sure, hidden away to prevent gaming the system.

Could it be improved? Constantly, I'm sure, in subtle ways. The better question is 'Is it being improved?', to which I think the answer is yes.

I'd be interested in hearing more about what you mean by 'page views'. My immediate intepretation is that page views aren't important - a page (link or discussion) that has 10x as many views but fewer upvotes is being measured on quality (upvotes) not quantity (which, if nothing else, can be gamed by a linkbait heading). But I may have misunderstood your suggestion?
- writing. plenty of places still paying for content.

- use software like tradestation or wealth-lab to build a workable trading system. trade from home.

- background checks. with rise in VC investment is also new needs for doing cheap background checks.

- penny auction arbitrage. there's a new startup in penny auctions every day. they start off unprofitable because not enough traffic. meaning, you can win cheap ipads for almost nothing and then sell on ebay.

- project management. people still need websites done. You can outsource to india using scriptlance or elance and do the project management from home.

- e-commerce. 1 idea: do a blog about living forever. when it starts to get traffic start selling a nutraceutical package on it.

- photography. do weddings cheap. you have to leave home but dont have to work as many days.

I'll think of more if people like these ideas.
"Tell Me Why I Suck" could be a great anonymous "3 words"-style service...People post their resumes, cover letters, and people can give anonymous feedback on why they suck.
Generally I despise comparisons as they tend to get overboard, however I agree with everything you've said.

I've only been on OSX for about four months but I can attest to one fact. OSX and Macbook hardware is so well integrated I get uptime of more than 30 days easy. Since I got my macbook, I've only restarted it handful of times. My work Macbook hasn't been restarted since it was bought a month ago too btw and I spend about 14 hours on it ever workday.

It is the type of performance I remember getting from Windows server OSes on very optimized hardware.

Anyway, Win7 is pretty rock solid. I never had problems with it and I've been using it since beta phase. Though I have to reboot the laptop after a day or two of working on it.
Having been down this road before, in similar circumstances, with multiple family members: be vewwwwwwy careful that she is the one driving this business forward, or it won't work and will only cause you grief.