skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've seen the same thing and I've experienced your frustration. However, I also want to offer a counter-point to your argument. You keep coming back to the marshmallow test and how he can't make a sacrifice today for a greater benefit tomorrow. My question is whether he would send a $5,000 banking fee to a Nigerian prince today for a million dollar money transfer next month? Would you?

Delayed gratification is only effective if you believe that you will be rewarded for it. I'm betting that you've never sacrificed a calf to Zeus. That's not because you lack self control, but because you don't believe that you would receive any benefit, not to mention one that would out weigh the cost of the calf. In the same way, your friend is "rationally" choosing to spend $250 a month on a bonding experience with his son instead of spending $125 a month on a failed degree that won't land him a better job. Either way, he's going to get fired, lose his house, and be forced to move to Detroit, but the first lets him move to Detroit with some happy family memories while the other has him moving to Detroit with a worthless piece of paper.

Now, we know that he can prevent his constant economic crises. We've done it for ourselves. Your friend, though, knows that correlation is not causation and the relationship between our self-sacrifice and our economic well being is as tenuous as the relationship between uncle Ernie's lucky Elvis shirt and that time hit the jackpot on the penny slots. As long as financial disaster is "unavoidable", he'll continue to make the only "smart" choice and immediately spend the little money that he does have before he loses that, too.
What's unfair? That the arguments made by emacs users with respect to less powerful editors resemble the arguments made by Lisp users with respect to less powerful programming languages?

I'm not taking a stand on the argument one way or the other, just pointing out how similar they sound. You said:

"There are huge benefits available if you give up all your existing editing tools and spend some time (and yeah, it can be months to years) getting really, really good at just one. Really, that one has to be emacs or vim, which are the only editors out there designed to scale to this level of specialization."

How does this differ from:

"There are huge benefits available if you give up all your existing languages and spend some time (and yeah, it can be months to years) getting really, really good at just one. Really, that one has to be Lisp, which is the only language out there designed to scale to this level of specialization."

Whether you agree or disagree with the sentiments, haven't you heard people expressing those sentiments in much the same terms?
America's former working class is the new American impoverished proletariat. An economy solely based on highly educated information workers is not only unsustainable, it is social-economic bigotry in it's purist form. We need decent working class jobs, not an emphasis on education. No amount of grants, scholarships, or subsidies will fix this. We need startups that make physical goods and provide physical services, not techno-grandiosity.
Wow, a downvote within 30 seconds of posting?

"php" == 0 returns true, and this makes sense how?
Google API House Cleaning
I've found that you can write reasonably complex GUI applications using the current Apple API documents for reference and for the most part get the results you expect.

The trouble is the few times when it doesn't behave as expected. I tried porting a paint program I had once written for OS X to GNUstep. Everything was going swimmingly until I ran into a behaviour of the OS X NSImageRep caching mechanism that wasn't replicated. Unfortunately, the program more or less depended upon that behavior, so coding around it wouldn't have been trivial. I know where in GNUstep the issue lies but I just haven't had the time to have a go at fixing it, so for the time being, I remain stumped.
"#41 Cannot create a final abstract class" is borderline too
Its only a "bug" because there's an unspoken rule that all programming languages should be written in English, and English doesn't have a proper word for this symbol.

Pretend that English had no representation of an ellipsis, but Hebrew did. Should the language author say "Expected: dot-dot-dot" in the error message to appease native English speakers, or should (s)he use the unambiguous form?
It's a little early to declare them a winner when they haven't yet proven they understand the privacy problem. They haven't even launched and tried to show that they understand.
Whose's to say that the human brain doesn't learn by statistical analysis?
The human brain collects data, forms hypotheses and tests them. Just like a statistical machine.
Thing is, a desert is what it is because there is little there to sustain life - and the prime way to deal with that, short of either imposing expensive infrastructure or accepting grinding bare-sustenance living, is MOVE: don't be there.

I wanted to work in high-tech and eventually be a tech entrepreneur. I lived in rural East Bumfuck, NC, where the dominant industries were: tobacco farming, golf courses, shrimping, fishing, and logging. We had no broadband availability, no (or little) access to VC money, angel money, mentorship from experienced entrepreneurs, and a limited pool of technology aware people.

I could have stayed there, and moaned about how "we don't have broadband" or "I can't find any other techies to work with," etc. Instead, I packed up my stuff and moved to the RTP area which is an environment much more suited to the kind of life I wanted. (No, it's not silicon valley, but it's better than where I was).

I know some people don't like to hear "move" as an option, whether it's because of a sense of entitlement, lack of ambition, or just lack of resources to move. But it's simply true that - for many people - picking up and moving is exactly the right choice (maybe a necessary choice) if they want a different kind of life.
PHP's rules, like Perl, does what the programmer wants a high fraction of the time. Except when they don't.

For instance, 0 == false isn't too crazy, it's like C. But automatic coercion of string values to ints makes "0" == false which is sometimes what you want and sometimes not.

Practically this burns people in form validation code because often you want to test if a field is an empty string and if you do the obvious thing you can end up kicking out "0".

When I write PHP I have my own "PHP on nails" library that has functions that smooth out most of the things that are wrong with the language, and one of them is a comparison operator that is somewhere between "==" and "===" that most frequently does what you want it to do.
This might sound silly but I get that "a-ha" moment quite a bit. It happens to me when I do something that the big boys do like persist data to a database using an ORM tool or implementing something as simple as an MVC app. I would keep testing different things and emulating things you've seen in real life so you too can continue getting that "a-ha" moment.
It's bad, but it's also very, very good.
It's such a gradual process that I never experienced any sort of epiphany or "ah-ha" moment. The best way to learn it is to use it in real world scenarios; just 3 months at a job where I had to program/figure things out taught me more than a year of practice tutorials.
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Hire Fast, Fire Fast
Not only do we need to reduce working hours, we need to provide a basic income guarantee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee). This is what the promise of technological progress is about, and is one of the tenets of Marxian communism. Ironically, the basic income guarantee is also something that is advocated by many liberal and libertarian economists.

These two factors are IMO key to further accelerating the rate of technological innovation. They enable anyone who is interested in science and technology to freely pursue these interests, whereas today many people are driven away from science by huge disincentives (massive student loans and poor career prospects).
YouTube - Joe Belfiore shows off Windows Phone Mango
English has a huge vocabulary from German. Even the royal family was mostly imported from Germany.
I'm still baffled that I agreed to exactly those terms when I hired on where I'm at now (3 years non-compete, including all competitors, vendors, and customers (which is essentially everyone)). But the job prospects were weak, especially for someone with no legit programming experience and a hardware-focused degree (and no hardware firms were interested). It's our stance that since we "train" folks from nothing, if it's in your head we probably put it there.

Don't know that we've ever enforced such an agreement, but it is in ink just in case it's needed.
I'm actually surprised it's still there. I remember WTFing at that about four years ago.
Society has been re-engineered any number of times, to good and bad effect. If you think that how it is where you are right now is how it is, has been, and always will be everywhere, you're wrong. Society is made of people, including visionaries and others who are captivated by their visions and have the ability to implement them. Contemplating human society is not the same as contemplating the stars.
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That just doesn't sound very convincing. If PayPal had an unfinished Wallet product before Google even started, what happened to PayPal's product? Did PayPal shelve it and now it's taking out its frustration on Google?

EDIT: Wow, lots of down votes just for asking a question?
You are technically correct. There is no finite pie. But there is a finite pie in our minds.

We behave instinctively as if there is a finite pie. We push our boots in others' faces instinctively, try to keep them down, shut them out, push them away, because our genes think the pie is finite.

Social networks do act so as to keep outsiders down. Not because it's rational, but they do.
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Link to the Amazon Mac Software store: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/?&docId=1000691231
I've had a couple of "ah-ha" moments during my career so far. The first was when I noticed that "hey! I can WRITE programs myself!". That was one of the happiest weeks of my life: my father showed me how to write a very simple C+4 BASIC program, a dancing stick figure on the top-left corner of the screen. I spent the rest of the week drawing different things and 'animating' them. That was somewhere around 1987 or so.

For the next few years, I played around with C+4 basic, didn't do anything serious. But in 1991, we got our first PC, and I tried to port the stuff I wrote on the C+4 to gwbasic, and later QBasic, but didn't succeed. So I dropped basic, and tried Turbo Pascal. That was my second ah-ha moment, when I discovered its help.

By 1998, I was reasonably fluent in Pascal and 386 assembly, but then my harddrive crashed, and I lost everything I wrote and collected since '91. That's when I installed Linux, and started to poke around with Perl (we had internet at school, and it was full of perl scripts. I choose perl because that's what I found the most resources for), and I discovered regular expressions: third ah-ha moment.

The fourth ah-ha moment was when I started to play with esoteric languages, which in turn resulted in learning a couple of other, real and interesting languages aswell. And then I realised that hey, I can program! And I don't care what the language is, once I knew a few, I could very easily learn another!

That moment was when it dawned on me, that programming is something much deeper, and something much more than simply writing code in one's language of choice.

And then I found the "Learn You a Haskell for Great Good" book, and when I finished it, I was enlightened.
A better PHP than PHP: You mean like Railo?

http://www.getrailo.com/com/index.cfm/whyrailo/developers/

(Scroll to bottom where they address why for PHP devs)
yeah.. php really has gotten a bad rap.. nearing ASP proportions
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the one critical core factor is self-motivation: you can't make someone do what they need to for their own good.

I doubt that all of the poor lack all personal motivation. For one thing, there is considerable social disincentive for people who unintentionally signal that they are poor.

I remember reading one account of a poor woman who had no idea she could walk into a downtown skyscraper. She always thought that she'd have to check in at the desk or present some sort of ID. This is true for some buildings, but not for all of them.

In the case of attractive women, I'm sure the number of guys who would actually talk to her and ask for her number are much smaller than the number of guys that want to.
What makes ME sad is no keyword arguments. Helper/wrapper functions either get an annoying and difficult-to-grok-at-glance associative-array for it's params (bad), or a huge list of rarely-used parameters (worse), or a huge set of wrapper functions to set their own paramters (even worse), or outright duplicated functions for similar-but-not-quite tasks (worst).

This happens to me while producing something like a jqGrid, or other javascript/html hybrid stuff that need a few extra options sometimes.

Django/Python? No problem! Just use the keywords you need.

(More Info: The difference between a single associative param standing in for keywords arguments, or a huge list of regular arguments is a choice in complexity/readability IN the function vs. calling it.

For the single dictionary approach, you lost the built-in parameter defaults nicety, which means you need to handle the case of a missing parameter manually. This kind of sucks, especially if you hate seeing PHP Notices during development (which kill JSON/XML output anyway). This makes your function often twice as big (or more) than it needs to be.

For the other approach, you wind up with calling

foo("","","","real value", true, true, 2, false, false, "option I want");*

which just about invites all sorts of hard-to-find bugs, and you have to look at the function definition every time you want to change an option. Also, it's flat-out rude if you aren't the one calling the function.)
I know it's not exactly helpful to tell those people "don't work for such an employer" but nevertheless: Don't Work For Them.
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The problem as mentioned by others: Micromanagement.

I personally like being open about my process, but I've been in situations where this turned into every decision being second-guessed, and the entire direction micro-managed by someone who wasn't really experienced, but superior in rank.
And Dave Abrahams is now actively developing el-get, which I prefer to ELPA. http://github.com/dimitri/el-get
10 Books That Will Fry Your Mind This Summer: Wired
Oh yeah, English vocabulary may be even more German than French... what I remember is that while overall English vocabulary is heavily French, it leans more German when you consider the most frequently used, conversational words.
People will defend their self-inflicted misery.

This is a big part of the dynamic of alcoholism, drug addiction, bad relationships, and stupid dogmatic ideologies.

I bet it plays into working life and the various "geek scenes".
This seems like an ad-hoc collection of hand-written hacks. What I've wondered about is the feasibility of a public domain collection of superoptimized (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superoptimization) code sequences for particular tasks for particular architectures. The repository itself would need to have the actual machines running to do timing, but the code sequence search can be done in a distributed fashion like folding@home (on the assumption that shorter sequences will generally result in shorter timings).
I'm not sure if you're making a general point, but I don't think it's universally true. Anything you can do on a netbook can be done faster and more accurately on a supercomputer. Working backwards from why we don't all use supercomputers, we can probably figure out why not everyone uses lisp and emacs.
Hacking Magic with Lisp and Unix - "Wizards's Bane" (fantasy novel, free)
Fate of Data.gov Revealed; US Gov Almost Completely Drops the Ball
if you fix your code bug you can re-invoke from a test example easily

The best part is that you can re-invoke practically always!
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Why astronomers (and other scientists) should program in Python
While I'm unsure of the details, I recall that Microsoft claims that Linux infringes upon many of their patents (don't remember the exact number). Therefor it is not unlikely that they would license out those patents to other companies who are known to be large users of Linux. If the cost of licensing were less than the expected cost of litigation (to have the patents declared invalid or demonstrate non-infringement) or if the companies believe that the patents are valid and that Linux would be found to be infringing if it went to court[1], it would make economic sense to license them.

[1] Which could be unimaginably costly for Amazon, considering their cloud offerings. If Linux were found to be infringing upon Microsoft's patents and they managed to get an injunction to prevent Amazon from using products shown to infringe[2], that would completely shut down most of Amazon and most of the web that runs on S3 or AWS.

[2] I'm not a lawyer, just extrapolating from cases where companies have been forbidden to sell infringing products. I'm not sure if this could actually happen, but it's a scary thing to think about.
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Stream(SQL) Event Processing with Esper
It's pretty old, but some of you might not know this. Amusing story of a computer programmer "summoned" to another world, who tries to use CS to tame the wild magic.

"backslash cd slash grep moira" isn't that much different from "abracadabra alakazam" after all...
Yeah, I'm in the midst of discovering the horror of having my parents/extended family on Facebook. I now have to filter all of my dumb comments against "will mom call me to see if I'm ok" and stupid jokes have to be checked for grandma-appropriateness.

No one presents the same face to the entire world. If Facebook really wants to be a bigger part of my online/social experience, they'll acknowledge and start acting on this fact.
compact() + extract() is the closest you get.

$foo = 123;
$bar = getSomeBar();

myFunction(compact('foo', 'bar'));

function myFunction($kwargs) {
$foo = SOME_DEFAULT_VALUE;
extract($kwargs);
if ($foo > 5) {
...
}
}

If you want to `sanitize' which arguments can be passed that way, use extract(array_intersect_key($allowed, $kwargs)); ((EDIT: or use EXTR_IF_EXISTS)).

Nb., extract() works on any associative array, you don't have to use compact().
I resonate somewhat with the gripes about Emacs' crustiness. But on the other hand, I don't understand the complaints about it being ugly. I haven't heard that for a while. I'd like to think that my Emacs is quite pretty:

http://jlongster.com/s/emacs.png

There are things Emacs can do which VIM will never do. And vice-versa. They are separate editors embracing separate philosophies.

Lastly, keep in mind that this is 40 year old software, and considering that it's done a great job keeping up with the times.
The answer is simple: "Disruption".

Smartphones are disruptive to the PC industry. In fact they are a canonical example of disruptive innovation. A phone is nowhere near as good as a PC, but it's cheaper and more convenient. It fits in your pocket and gives you instant access to your data, no matter where you are.

The margins for smartphone software, thanks largely to Apple, are much smaller than the margins for desktop software. In fact, you could see the promotion of $0.99 software via the app store as a strategic move by Apple to coerce Microsoft into not pursuing mobile software.

That's a typical move by a disruptive innovator, to focus on low-margin low-end segments of the market, which a dominant incumbent is generally motivated to walk away from, preferring instead to focus on high-end high-margin products.

The 30% fee Apple charges push margins even lower.

In some ways, this is working. There is no version of Microsoft Office for the IPad or the IPhone, for example. Some of this is likely due to the fact that Microsoft's application software business is being disrupted from multiple sources (there is a web version of Office). Both Google and Apple are pushing desktop office in the same direction that Toyota pushed GM : toward SUVs.

Apple also has a strong motivation to commoditize mobile software because it has major positions in several complementary markets: Hardware Sales, Music sales, Video Sales, and Application Delivery (the app store).

If Microsoft doesn't compete, fiercely, in both mobile and web their fate will end up being very similar to both General Motors' and DEC. Windows Mobile 7 is a first step in this direction. It's not sufficient, they should be selling mobile versions of Office too, but it's a fist step.

I would say that Microsoft's efforts to collect Android patents are really an effort to reduce the margins handset makers can extract from sales of Android phones. It's not meant to serve as a profit center for the company.

In any case, Microsoft's introduction of Windows Mobile 7 serves several purposes:

1. It pushes a business model that commoditizes hardware, rather than software.

2. It makes it more difficult for their competitors to displace Microsoft's enterprise business. If they don't release their own mobile OS and mobile Apps, then it's only a matter of time until that happens.

See the following for more info:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ7EG58J5eo
in statically typed languages like Java, C#, Scala and C++ people are always screwing this up

most languages have some screwed-uppedness about collections, both intrinsic to the language and that gets introduced by people who make APIs that aren't well designed. for instance, arrays and Lists are often not quite perfectly uniform (and it's often a thoughtless arbitrary choice if people decide to return you one or the other) Scala introduces it's own collections that provide more confusion when you're working with Java. The .NET framework has a great implementation of generics (makes Java and Scala look like a joke) but there are still many legacy APIs in the .NET framework that use non-generic collections.

One result is that it's not always obvious what the right way to test for "empty" is. One of the worst of them is that pretty frequently APIs will give you a null when they ought to be sending you an empty collection, so you need to check for null.
Because the string is first converted to an integer.

"==" makes the comparison after converting types (see: Type Juggling in the docs) where "===" requires that the types be the same in order to be equal.

Kind of weird the first time you see it, but it's a language design choice and does make sense once you understand it.
I think pretty much every single PHP developers feels like you ^^.
First pitch in the valley? No problem
I find that most people just don't understand what being poor and living and rural place is like. Besides the need of a car for a job it is absolutely necessary in order to have any social contact. When you live in a rural place your friends live at least 30 miles away. This is why rural "hicks" get pissed off when the gas price gets high. It takes way there ability to socialize.
I used to think smalltalk was annoying and useless. I was most of the way out of that attitude by the time I lived in Germany, and was thoroughly rid of it by the time I left.

Growing a new social circle in Germany is a complete bitch in large part because people really are less superficial and more direct. The "etiquette of simulation" makes everything so much easier. I'm not saying it's all that easy to get to know people in my home country, Ireland, but there is at least a place where talking to total strangers will not get you funny looks, the pub.

And dating, oh god, dating.

I miss Germany.