skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Comparing LAMP to Django/RoR is comparing apples to oranges.

It is like comparing Windows and TCP/IP.
Kama Sutra Coma
Orgy takes place with desi indians
15 Quick Ways to Shrink Page Load Times
"I think it's extremely likely that JavaScript will be absolutely pervasive in applications in the coming years"

Why?
Q/A: What Thread-safe Rails Means
Love these letters!!

Priceless to anyone who is running a proper business!
We're running out of IPv4 addresses. Time for IPv6. Really.
Hmmmm.

Thing is...you don't "need" any, but you probably "want" some...
I'm going to go ahead and say no. AppJet has been around a year and is nearly invisible. The most popular app on AppJet gets a massive 1300 weekly users and is completely worthless (http://appjet.com/app/799084449/source).

Server executed JavaScript may have a future in web development, but I don't see AppJet being it.
Its sad to hear this news. I guess the music industry is not acknowledging the fact that pandora is infact helping them make money.
GREAT video! Reminds me of zooming out in google maps on the satellite view, really makes the world feel smaller.

> Wanna feel insignificant in the world, watch this.

Size != significance
And where is this "elsewhere" of which you speak?

With no comparable alternative, at least for the time being, Apple has iPhone developers by the short hairs.
I came across this much more helpful summary on reddit: http://blog.headius.com/2008/08/qa-what-thread-safe-rails-me...
Because it has already become a common tongue, and with rich web apps becoming the norm, it'll only increase.. It's the language pretty much everyone building web apps knows. I work predominantly in Perl (and in the past in Python), and I've tinkered with other languages. But, throughout all of that, at least for the past five years, JavaScript has been part of the job.

Imagine the meeting wherein a handful of developers are tasked with choosing a language and platform for a new app. Say, four people...one likes Ruby, one likes Python, one likes PHP, and the last likes Perl (and they all agree that Java and C# are too damned verbose). Which language wins? Well, they all know JavaScript, because every web developer knows JavaScript, and they think jQuery is pretty swish...assume there's a high quality server-side environment, of course.

Obviously, it's not a foregone conclusion that JavaScript will move into a position of strength on the server. It requires too many pieces to fall into place (good implementation, good libraries, good integration with web servers, etc.) for anyone to call it a done deal. But I think it'd be foolish to bet strongly against it happening.
I recall an add-on for Scheme where you could call Unix command line utilities and tie them together with pipes, and it all just looked like your run of the mill Scheme code.

Also, there was a project to enable writing Unix style command line utilities in Smalltalk. They got the image down to ridiculous small sizes, like 45k!

There's nothing about Javascript that would preclude "working with the system." Usually the biggest barrier is the culture of the development community. Really, Smalltalk never completely quit being an OS.
For the record, Dave Winer didn't come up with SOAP, and didn't do with a "bunch of folks from Microsoft". SOAP sucks and it's largely due to MS' influence, but Winer merely came up with XML-RPC, which is pretty close to Damien's idea that maybe POST is enough.

Not that I'm a Winer fan -- his behavior oddly reflects his surname -- but facts is facts. Dave understands the need for simplicity, and needless to say, the SOAP folks don't.
I tend to like most of the stuff I find on this site. I like the CS/Hacker stuff, as well as the science, tech, math, and other 'intellectually stimulating' stuff. I dislike articles that seem to have nothing to do with intellectual curiosity, or seem to be appealing to a very specific viewpoint (aka politically/culturally biased, instead of being intellectually enlightening).
The fact the standard bookmarklet takes you to the discussion for an already submitted article when you click "submit" is not at all obvious from the interface. There should really be some way to find out whether an article has already been submitted without any more than one or two clicks and without having to submit it yourself in the process.

What if I just want to see if it's on news.ycombinator to read any relevant discussion, but don't want to submit it myself?
isn't hacking a subset of the intellectually stimulating?
Agreed on all counts. Culture definitely plays a big role, perhaps the biggest role.
Be an entrepreneur in 3 lessons: 1st, Stop Overplanning and Just Do It
I just don't have enough time in my day to scroll through pages of discussion for every discussion here at news.ycombinator every day, checking to see if anyone has replied to anything I said. It is primarily for this reason that I don't come back to news.ycombinator very often, but I'm on reddit all the time. After all, pound for pound, I actually find the topics here more interesting than those at reddit, but it's just too damned much work to stay abreast of new developments in discussion.
. . . as an option, but not by default.
lulz

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=lisp%2C+haskell%2C+erlang%...
I'm quite interested in economics and politics, thanks, I just think they are likely to drag this site down because they start attracting people who are uninterested in the 'hacker' stuff (and ultimately outnumber us by orders of magnitude, because politics are of interest to most people), and result in long, drawn out and often nasty discussions.

Look at the posting history at the following link. It seems we already have one person who seems to come around mostly for this type of article:

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=kingkongrevenge
This is awesome, but without the lame narration it would be ten times better.
Agreed 100% but the fact that these are different directly rebukes a common conception of what probability means. Many people believe that "what is the probability of X?" really means something like "if we were to re-create these exact conditions many times, what proportion of those iterations will X be true?"

This problem seems to be a good thought experiment demonstrating that those two questions are not equivalent. Which only makes one wonder what "probability" really means...
Motorola Sparrow
Should you cache? Should you use memcached? Should you just shard mysql more?
Why hasn't it happened yet. JS has been around for a while. Web developers's have known it for a while. Why now? Because of Appjet or whoever else will fill that role? Or because 'rich web apps' have reached that point?

{I'm not baiting, I'm actually asking}
I would say that RoR is more popular than, say, Django, but that Python the language is more popular than Ruby the language.
True. But there isn't one dominant PHP framework and a lot of people don't use a formal one or just kind of roll their own.
The two reasons javascript is not widespread on the server are:

1. limited database access libraries, there are no standard libraries for talking to mysql/postgres/oracle/sybase/mssql

2. lack of namespace support in the language itself, which means that you can't rely on external code to not step on your variables.

Also there's a minor usability issue with using the same code in two different environments; the server side and the client-side are not the same and confusing the two can introduce whole new classes of bugs and security holes. Not that anyone here would ever lose track of where the file they were working on was supposed be run.
Why did IBM want to make this video?
> You're talking as if the guidelines that have been established for this site don't exist.

They are, perhaps intentionally, rather fluid and vague. I mean, if you wanted to argue about it, you could say that the problems with Zimbabwe are politics, and certainly aren't new: they've been covering that country's decline for years in The Economist, and if I recall, had one of their reporters kicked out of the country.
DO you have an exit strategy?

If so, when did you formulate it?

If early on, how has it affected your product?
Sexual encounter in Amsterdam
chance sexual encounter in Amsterdam
Yep. The glorious days of mid to late 90s - even Australia had a buzzing scene. Why do you ask?

Future Crew are still the high point IMO. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_reality
Desi Sex Stories
fab desi sex story
You can't say that a language is Blub. It becomes Blub only if the programmer using the language fails to realize that there are more powerful languages. It has nothing to do with mainstream or not.
an easier to read url ~ http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/technology/chi-mxa081...
Techie Biz Podcast-Online Retail
SarahLacy.com: American Startup: Demo Day Summer 2008
If an image doesn’t have these tags, the browser has to wait until the image loads before it can go on loading the rest of the page.

That's simply not true at all, as is this:

By using multiple domains (even if they’re using the same IP address) you can download objects at the same time, where on a single server you’d have to load one at a time.
Uh oh. It looks like sometime in the next 3 years, I'll have to change my kernel configuration to include IPv6, and add ipv6 to my USE flags. The horror!

I know I'm trivializing, because I'm sure there are a lot of computers out there that don't support it, including some important routing devices. I just couldn't help pointing out an instance where Linux users definitely have it easier.
In fact, the article contradicts itself in several places. The author doesn't know what he's talking about
We do think AppJet will be the platform/framework of the future, but in the present it's a little early to compare the AppJet Framework with PHP, RoR, Django, etc.

AppJet was designed to be easy and make it possible to write cool little web apps with a small amount of code and a small amount of knowledge. From this perspective, it becomes obvious why we chose JavaScript as the server language: it reduces the number of languages you need to learn by a factor of 2.

I think it's succeeding at what it does. There are lots of cool apps in the app directory, and most are <500 lines of code in a single file. Many of these apps are written by high school students who learned programming with AppJet. Some of my favorite include {pxl,outliner,files,wikijet,agglodex,dict,livescore}.appjet.net.

We are working on improving the AppJet Framework to be good for large apps. We're also working a lot on our platform. (mrtron makes a good point about platform vs. framework elsewhere in this thread). One day, we'll tell the hacker news community that we think AppJet is a suitable replacement for PHP, Django, RoR, or whatever you're building your startup on. But we're not there yet.

In the meantime, if you want to hack up a simple database-backed web app without worrying about hosting or setting up SQL or anything, AppJet is your platform. Or if you want to learn programming with a platform that will let you do a lot knowing only a little, AppJet is your platform.
How I Raised $5.3 Million in Venture Capital at Age 22
We do think AppJet will be the platform/framework of the future

Could you elaborate on that more? Why will this platform be _the_ platform of the future?
Video of Socialthing's first pitch
Click-n-Run. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNR_(software)
Winsock trumpet!
The short answer is that we see problems with all the existing ones, and we think we can do better. The longer answer will be the subject of blog posts as we roll out milestones along the way.
The big thing for me is the resource usage: Rails is wonderful, but I have a lot of different apps running on my server, and they all consume a fair amount of memory, which adds up. Anything that will slim Rails' footprint down some will mean a lot of savings for a lot of people.
"Interior Decorators" like to call themselves "interior designers", but true "interior designers" do not like to be called "interior decorators". Technically, "interior design" is a subset/related to architecture. "Interior decorators" don't know much about building materials, and don't use Pantone colors. Interior designers know things like how wide walkways are supposed to be, how many square feet you need per-person (and how to arrange common areas to meet this legal (firecode) requirement), knows where exit signs should go, etc. There is also a significant amount of project management work that Interior designers do, in terms of managing the build out schedules and doing a lot of the technical grunt work in a build out.
Don't forget the (often drastic) tax incentives for foreign industry in the developing world.
some people have too much free time on their hands
It was kind of boring -- not that the app isn't good or that it was a bad idea -- they didn't demo anything they just talked for three and a half minute about a pain that only needed 90 seconds. It was the same listless and disaffected speeches I would make back in high school classrooms.
I believe that we'll see ISP NAT for customers before we see widespread adoption of IPv6 in the USA. The dynamics are all backwards for encouraging people to switch. Web site operators (and other content providers) will, in general, pay extra to have an externally reachable IPv4 address, in order to stay accessible to the ~3b nodes already on IPv4. Most home users don't know or care about IP addresses, so they're not likely to go through the trouble to fix their systems to talk to the set of systems that are reachable via IPv6, especially so when considering that the most popular sites are available on IPv4 anyway.

For these common users, being able to send unsolicited traffic to their nodes is actually a misfeature (SQL slammer from a few years ago comes to mind). I've always thought that an ISP could sell a NATted connection at a premium as a security feature, and the cost to deploy a solution like that would be a small fraction of the cost of engineering IPv6 into a network infrastructure if it wasn't designed with it in mind initially.

Perhaps my opinion is dissenting, but I'm not sure we'll ever see IPv6 (except in that alternate universe of Japan, where everything is way more awesome anyway). I have a feeling we'll keep piling on the hacks until a paradigm shift of some type.
Yep, tho' they probably aren't aware that they are, it's built into the intranet that they store all their Office documents on. This is probably the best way to do it.
Yeah, thats what i meant. Do you use ruby for scripting blender or anything else other that RoR? Do you use it for scientific computation? Do people use it for shell scripts and small games, or GUI apps?You can do that with ruby, but for me, people learn ruby because rails is popular, python doesn't have that one big killer app, people learn python because its generally fun and useful for many stuff.
This is scary... but only because just yesterday the security logs on one of our boxes indicated an attempt to brute-force SSH and the IP resolved to...

Asia Pacific Network Information Centre
This is just more illustration of the cultural difference between the two camps of developers:

Microsoft: Yes this seems strange, but this is actually what the users want - and we have tests to prove it - so we'll do it

Linux: RTFM n00bz! Ubuntu! Ubuntu!
The regular expression required to validate an email address
I've never understood that confusion, it's nonsense. Start doesn't mean "start your computer", you don't click it to start your computer, so it very obviously means "start doing something". "Shut down" falls under "something"

http://sysop073.blogspot.com/2008/03/start.html
I would expect the problem with buying land to be the absence of somebody protecting it. Will the government of some remote country really send out an army to protect my 100 acres of rain forest if the chainsaw men approach it? I highly doubt it.

Of course if you are a billionaire and can afford your own private army, maybe it is worth a shot.
I watched the relevant minute from the clip, wtf is wrong with this guy? He made fun of the start button thing and everyone laughed, and then showed the super confusing Windows print dialog and compared it to a "747 shuttle cockpit", which actually got applause. The dialog has like 4 options on it; there are more buttons on this HN page than on that print dialog. I may watch the whole clip later, this is absurd
The Trickle List
C's pointers as closures in Scheme
I generally agree with you about his tone. The attack on pg was obviously inane link-baiting (which seems to have worked), and the guy has made his name from being negative and destructive. Still, he writes with such over-the-top viciousness that I find it hard to take it seriously.

I'd probably feel more strongly about it if it were my head being shat upon, but I tend to write off his bitterness as just another way of grabbing attention.
Struquine: A Useful Lisp Trick
The three states are not equiprobable. Suppose that she must say instead which particular state she is most likely to be in: M+T, T+T, or M+H. Well, we know that Heads is chosen 1/2 of the time, so she should choose M+H! After all, the probability she is in M+T is only 1/4, and the probability she is in T+T is only 1/4. (Since Tails is chosen 1/2 of the time.)
The problem is that its a slippery slope, as you relax the rules on the content, it'll get worse and worse. So before long HH will be another reddit clone with 1/10th of stories on the front page being even remotely relevant, and the rest is nothing but regurgitated blog spam
Judging from this video, it seemed like kind of an iffy investment. They stated one competitive advantage over the few sites they mentioned like profilactic, which was that they would push content instead of just pulling.

In reality, though, a site like socialthing is limited by the APIs that they can access. They didn't build some novel technology like the folks at Dopplr for extracting interesting information from your social network data. They are using the same APIs that all of the other aggregation sites use, so they had no reason to believe at that point in time that their competitor sites wouldn't use the same APIs to push content as well.

I have a beta account at Socialthing and replying to Twitter posts is the only significant pushing ability that I've seen from them (correct me if I'm wrong) Those other aggregation sites do the same thing too (including profilactic), as was inevitable. Either way, congratulations are in order for such a quick exit. They were doing something right!
Are Macs More Expensive? The iMac vs. iMac Wannabees
There are a number of sites I've come across with the same purpose as EveryBlock in reporting events and news by locality. There are even citizen-journalism sites. I wonder which one will take off, if any. I hope Google can scour said sites with semantic tags and present local news an all-encompassing, easy-to-read format.
I Don’t Understand Y Combinator Hate
My OS's have IPv6 enabled by default (10.5 and Vista).

My ISP of choice is well on the way to providing native IPv6 access: http://ipv6.internode.on.net/

My hardware manufacturer of choice is now developing IPv6 devices: http://www.billion.com/news/news090706.php

---

There's a good chance that when I buy my next modem I will have unintentionally adopted IPv6 (with no additional configuring or anything either).
The Bold does sound pretty interesting:

http://apcmag.com/blackberry_bold_handson_review.htm

I'm confused, though. Can you explain why you used a dozen different BlackBerries during a year and a half? If you're so happy with them, why replace them so frequently and why get an iPhone?
Naturally, reasonable people will disagree. How many things are there that are interesting to everybody here? That some stuff seems uninteresting is a feature, not a bug; it's an aspect of the intellectual diversity that is the raison d'etre of the site.

Speaking of the guidelines, I don't think anyone pointed out the one that actually addresses the "off-topic police" explicitly:

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site.
I agree with everything Steve wrote. It's a sad but a reality we have come to accept. As a co-founder for a startup with two apps on the store, it's always a little sad and frustrating to deal with the rules and restrictions set out (even the ones that are). Then there is also the lingering fear that they may just remove the app all of a sudden if they don't like it.

But having such a distribution channel, the potential for huge quick growth is unprecedented. The sheer number of potential and current users really helps keep the spirit up.
Edward Tufte’s iPhone
The Centro currently has a $100 rebate.
The A-Z of Programming Languages: Python
For some some Lisp-developers Lisp is blub relative to Haskell.
Report names China as the world's leading producer of renewable energy
HTTP allows you to specify the return format right in the headers of the response, so that's a clue that a REST ought not to standardize it.

About 95% of the services I use (or write) just send the equivalent of key-value pairs back to the user. JSON is the best choice here. However, for other services, the best choice is to send back HTML fragments, XML, executable Javascript, or even image and graphics formats.

The one thing I would like to see standardized is error handling. Too many service throw back 200 OK and then, in some custom way in the body of the response, tell you there was an error. This is like snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

However, neither is it really obvious how to return the right HTTP error status. If someone asks your web service for a map centered at 2000 longitude, -1000 latitude, what do you say? 404, no such map found? or do you say 409 Conflict, even though that was really designed for PUT mid-air collisions? There ought to be statuses that more clearly map to common REST service problems, like "request parameter out of bounds". A common return format to represent such errors would be great, too.
Agreed. Not only is it old, nobody really knows what plan or timetable Access has for it.

If I were a developer of mobile phone software, I'd go iPhone all the way. Despite Apple's restrictions, every single iPhone owner would have easy and immediate access to my software. RIM's version of an "app store" looks pretty empty at the moment:

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/builtforblackberry/
Have you used the MidpSSH client for the BlackBerry? I'd be interested to hear how well it works compared to what's available for iPhone, Palm OS, etc.
American Startup: Demo Day Summer 2008
so the answer is to write ... an article whining about the whiners???
I don't get it either. It's a good thing to see a new model of investment in small startups and the education / training that apparently comes along with YC investment is practically unheard of (in my experience, anyway) in other VC firms.

Most of the criticism that I've seen seems to come from, well, critics, and not people who actually build stuff so that may have something to do with it.
Blubbiness is not a property of the language per se. Is it the phenomenon that you don't recognize if an unfamiliar language is more powerful than the currently most powerful language you know. The more powerful languages just seem bizarre are annoying. But you immediately recognize when a language is less powerful than one you know.

Therefore many developers think they are using the most powerful language in the world ("Blub").

So if Python is the most powerful language you know and you don't understand the power of eg. Lisp macros or the Haskell type system, then Python is Blub for you.

If Lisp is you favorite language and you don't understand the power of the Python readability, the concept of "one obvious way" and so on, then Lisp is Blub for you.
As a Windows and Ubuntu user I would find it offensive in a face to face talk.

Your statement is an overgeneralization to say the least.