skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I were flung back in time to the 1970s, the two languages I think I could stand to work in would be Lisp and Forth. (C is not on the list because C has still come a long way since then; 2011-C is better in a lot of little ways than 1970-C, and the sum total is quite large.) But in 2011, I'd be more interested in their sequels, like Clojure or Factor [1].

But I do think it's important to look at Forth and see its place in history as a viable alternative to C, on pretty much any level C cared to compete in. It's important to understand that C is not the only way. (I don't mean this as a criticism of C.)

[1]: http://factorcode.org/
"If car drivers were hired like programmers, then a single failed deploy (car crash) would be enough to be fired!"

--Senior Expert in Italian cuisine and consumables distribution for Round Table Pizza.
Looks great.

As someone who logins using OpenID, in order for this app to be useful, I'd need that feature. Currently, I don't know of any apps that let me do that, but I bet it's very doable.

(Just open a Safari instance to let me login to my Google id via OpenID then redirect me, right?)
That is true, the universe's Kolmogorov complexity is reducing every moment. The complexity of our theories, though,is a whole different thing. The laws of thermodynamics don't apply to them: they dont become simpler just by time passing.

What i was trying to say is that the laws of the universe are not "out there". They are models that live in our brains and are limited by our perceptual capacity. And that "complex" and "simple" are properties we ascribe to our brain processes, not properties of the world.
We're not considering only luxury goods though. There'll always be other suppliers of shoes willing to cut their prices to match demands, just like other colleges will cut their prices to match a spectrum of demand.

I think the point is that a Harvard degree will remain viewed as worth more than a Podunk College degree, regardless of the demand because the supply is naturally self-limiting. However, the cost of Podunk College will oscillate with the demand/supply.
And what if Microsoft made cars? (this is an old one)

At a recent COMDEX, Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five dollar cars that got 1000 miles to the gallon." In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason, and you would just accept this, restart and drive on.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn, would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Only one person at a time could use the car, unless you bought "Car95" or "CarNT." But then you would have to buy more seats.

6. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would only run on five per cent of the roads.

7. The oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single "general car default" warning light.

8. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.

9. The airbag system would say "Are you sure?" before going off.

10. Occasionally for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grab hold of the radio antenna.

11. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of Rand McNally road maps (now a GM subsidiary), even though they neither need them nor want them. Attempting to delete this option would immediately cause the car's performance to diminish by 50% or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department.

12. Everytime GM introduced a new model car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

13. You'd press the "start" button to shut off the engine.
There are a couple of start-ups looking to do this. The first that comes to mind is ShopTap. They are looking to hire quality engineers right now, so you might want to contact them if you're looking to build something like this.
10$-12$ an hour? really? it's less then I got when I was seventeen, and I don't even live in the US.
Copying? Most of the stuff is pretty old and invented elsewhere anyway.
Pardon my misunderstanding, if there is one, but didn't C# start as essentially Microsoft's clone of Java? Seems if Java wants to return the favor, it's fair enough.
Itunes 10 and Tiger 10.4.11 - pay Apple again to use products you already own
Which version took longer to write? Which version has fewer SLOC (I'm using SLOC here as a proxy for code complexity)? Weigh those two factors, then choose the winning language accordingly.

I'm oversimplifying, but I believe the point is an extremely important one. We've all heard the startup lore that David-sized startups beat industry Goliaths by being much more nimble than the lumbering giants they're competing against. If you're a software startup, your engineering tools are your sling and stone: if your tools are good and you can wield them with expert precision, you'll be able to iterate more quickly, make your users happier, and outpace the competition sooner.

Yishan Wong has written an excellent essay about the importance of tools:

http://www.algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management-too...
"Am I reading this right? Chuck Moore decided that all programming could be done with sourceless coding and his demonstration of this was a graphical application? This is so common, yet so totally wrong."

He later recanted:

"I'm back.

OKAD was a mistake. I have added Forth to OKAD. ...

A few years ago I gave up on Forth, it was too complicated. It was about the time of the work of the standard committee and I wanted something simple. I abandoned source and used a decompiler to view the object code. It did not really work. I also wanted to get away from the keyboard."

More here:

http://www.ultratechnology.com/color4th.html
Six Degrees Of Inspiration
Thats fair enough. And that sentence I quoted would be much less horrifying in the 1970s given all the changes in computers since then.
Thanks for the feedback. Security and user experience is always a matter of balance. I was seduced by the idea of having a strong password, but I think the current implementations discourage it for a regular use. From what I understand the only alternative under Ubuntu is to disable the prompts altogether, which is really not recommandable. Windows 7 has a nice way to handle it, I wonder if it is secure enough.
My memory for the wage scale was stuck around 2002-2003, so add a decade's worth of inflation.
Before everyone gets all uppety about this post, please take 30 seconds to chucle about it. Then, instead of saying how the industry is so screwed up remember that there are certain jobs where being master-of-all-trades is at least a good nice to have. For example a front-end specialist or a DBA may not be who a startup looking for its first employee might need.

Lastly, reject any job ad that requires 20 years of RoR experience. Instead focus on what the company does. If it is interesting to you, apply. I found that most employers arbitrarily choose requirements, and I just avoid all that want certifications: they tend to be too enterprisy for my taste.

For web people: look at what the perspective employer's product is using for language/framework. It is easy to do and will win you points. It will also help you avoid maintaining legacy systems running on NT if that's not your thing.
The article emphasizes those drawbacks while seeming to imply it's an unavoidable result of their strategy. I don't see that they are; it sounds more like inadequate or poor development and product management.

For instance, why would you have to sign in every time? You can easily use cookies or HTML5 database to solve that in Mobile Safari.

Low Res images, too - since when is Mobile Safari constrained in that respect?
If we raise the stakes to race car drivers, then relevant knowledge on specific tracks, car types, with a performance record would probably be very applicable.

When you're trying to find the best of the best in both drivers or developers, the driver should definitely know about how all the components in his machine affect his performance. This also allows him to communicate his intent and any adjustments that he wants made with the rest of the team (mechanics, crew, etc.).

The problem comes when employers start looking for talent out of their league, like Greyhound trying to hire NASCAR drivers to drive their busses.
The app 'Shades' for OSX is free and can dim to warm colors, too. http://www.charcoaldesign.co.uk/shades

I use it to dim the LED screen of my bedside MacMini to a very faint yellowish/brown color, which is just right for a totally dark room.
I always thought mist Linux packages have some sort of Windows version.
I'm in agreement with your point. The media doesn't take this kind of interest in kids that excel in plumbing. Or painting walls. Or woodworking.

Probably because so much of the public has this perception that "computers" require exceptional genius.
I currently live in Vienna, Austria. Besides lots of public holidays you get 25 vacation days per year and unlimited sick days independent from the vacation days. If you don't take your vacation days your employer must pay you for them, so most (all) employers require their employees to take their vacation days. As your vacation days don't expire, you can also "add them up" and take a longer vacation in one of the following years. You typically work 38.5 hours per week, and while for some areas (paid) overtime is common, it is definitely not the norm for the generic employee.

As for the "not very rich" part: According to Mercer's annual study Vienna is worldwide the most livable city - see: http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/may2010/gb2010... - but yes - I guess that the quality-of-life would be much better without those vacation days.

(Saying all that, I still plan to move to SF in the following months...)
This is basically Playboy's mobile website, not an "App" as we would have called them 4 years ago.

How hard is it to get people to be aware of Playboy's website? With a brand like that, and money to market it, and high visibility through other publications, not at all.
Myguestmap.org generates around 300usd in ads and 10-100usd in donations a month since 2005. Last touched it in 2006. Donations tend to get higher on christmas :-)
There have been probably several hundred multimillion dollar acquisitions in the valley over the last 5-6 years. It's not that rare. And many of those were talent acquisitions. Which seems to support Mr. Deboard's point.
Now, most of that I can agree with. I have nothing against moving the industry forward, and of course I wish all my users and my clients' ones would upgrade in timely fashion.

My main observations in this discussion is simply that moving the industry forward only works if it's done at a pace where the content providers can take advantage of it. Personally, I don't for an instant believe that Google's and now Mozilla's release schedules with only a few weeks of gap help to achieve that goal. Meanwhile, they can and have screwed things up that have worked fine for years and are in widespread use on web sites today, and I think they are in real danger of reverting to the completely non-standardised web of yesteryear, which makes developing corner cases specially for IE look like a walk in the park.

For what it's worth, I find it even more disturbing that even so-called standards groups, particularly WHATWG, now seem to be moving to "evolving" documents. They seem to have utterly missed the point of what standards are for.

As you've probably realised by now, I'm no worshipper at the altar of Redmond either. I do wish they would consider releasing faster than every couple of years, and I don't buy their nonsense argument about IE9 being unable to run on XP for a microsecond. (What they say may well be technically true, but it smacks of the kind of arguments they made a few years about during the anti-trust case, that they can't possibly separate browser from $OS because of $DEPENDENCY, where $DEPENDENCY appears to have been easily avoidable if they'd coded things up a bit differently.)
Historic margin at stores: ~50% (varies widely)
Apple's margin, described here as "gigantic" and "almost intolerable": 30%
A good quote from the Anders Hejlsberg (lead architect of C#) about nulls:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/178026/why-is-null-presen...

For example, in the type system we do not have separation between value and reference types and nullability of types. This may sound a little wonky or a little technical, but in C# reference types can be null, such as strings, but value types cannot be null. It sure would be nice to have had non-nullable reference types, so you could declare that ‘this string can never be null, and I want you compiler to check that I can never hit a null pointer here’.

50% of the bugs that people run into today, coding with C# in our platform, and the same is true of Java for that matter, are probably null reference exceptions. If we had had a stronger type system that would allow you to say that ‘this parameter may never be null, and you compiler please check that at every call, by doing static analysis of the code’. Then we could have stamped out classes of bugs.
So you're saying those three languages are so defective that they would have killed the startups that used them?
Pointing to a URL would have been sufficient, e.g.

http://www.snopes.com/humor/jokes/autos.asp
You're right, in that a bachelor's degree per se no longer means what it did, but my point about high school diplomas is that what most everyone got, as of say the Silent Generation (my parents'), used to mean quite a lot. However, by or sometime after say 1955 when Why Johnny Can't Read was published it apparently wasn't even a guarantee of functional reading (I wouldn't directly know, having grown up in a city that Reader's Digest reported on a year or two later with the title "Why Johnny Can Read In Joplin").

Ny point here is that "everybody goes there" wasn't to the best I can tell a factor in the degradation of the high school diploma. I'm pretty sure the expansion of colleges and universities due to the G.I. Bill etc. didn't result in too much of a loss in higher education, that seemed to arrive in the cultural '60s (due to draft deferments and the general Zeitgeist) and very few if any colleges avoided some grade inflation and watering down of the curriculum or its rigor (not even MIT).

Anyway, I don't see these formal educational developments really fitting into the Christensen framework, it's not like the real world where an excavator or a disk drive must perform at some minimal level to get the job done.

---

Thanks for the warnings on the subsequent books, which I haven't read. The first is indeed a jewel, and thanks to my background I could tell that his primary data set on disk drives was spot on, as seemed to be his conclusions. I'll be careful if I decide to go back to the well.

(Have to run, tornado warning....)
First off, the conclusions are partially facetious. Do I think you have a diagnosable mental illness? I don't know. Are you obtuse: yes, I would say you are being obtuse. Do you have Asperger's? I don't know, but you certainly speak like someone who has little ability to understand the motivations of others.

I'm not alleging that we could take you to a doctor's office right now and produce a certificate of verified diagnosis.

The post was largely about how she deals with negative experiences, and only a small part of that was about the event that prompted her experience. Yet you chose to focus not on the part of her post where she focuses on achieving a positive mental state, but to cast doubt -- under the guise of what you claim is rational skepticism (which is where the claim of cheapness comes from) -- as to whether or not she was justified in feeling offended.

Where the claims that you are lazy and cheap come from is that you are apparently operating under the slow-thinking idea that anyone who simply questions anything they are told is a rational, critically thinking agent. In fact, that modus better suits conspiracy theorists than actual, rational analysts.

It's ironic that you think that I'm the one who views things in stark contrast, when you are the buffoon who thinks that claims of the existence and prevalence of gender biases are disproved by naming even one successful female.

> And yes, in fact, I wonder if the wholesale buy in to her statement comes more from how she is an attractive, powerful, young woman...

Wow, if there was any doubt before, now it is removed: you are a verified weirdo. I haven't said anything about whether or not I believe her, only that your line of questioning is motivated by something other than a desire to be purely rational, as you would have readers believe.

I would guess that you are motivated by her attractiveness more than me: if you are like most other male HN readers, you are probably resenting her and other women, especially the attractive ones.
The usual needlessly controversial headline from TechCrunch. In my opinion it really undermines the content which is actually quite interesting.
Or, as some social science suggests, we're all hardwired to respect authority, and what we're noticing are the different authorities we tend to respect.
@pmylund:

Great post! I'm sure that you have been inspired by this comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2564263

No Disqus on your blog. Why not?
Let's say I have a theory that can explain the complete works of Shakespeare so well, that an algorithm based on it (written in C) can generate the complete works.

Now, it turns out that my "theory" is just a printf with a loong string... containing the complete works of Shakespeare. You can measure how "simple" this theory is, by the information content.

What if there was another theory (algorithm) that could also generate the works exactly, but was shorter - would you say it's a better theory?
I found this comment the most depressing:

You have an extremely hot wife, who also happens to be extremely wealthy. Instead of making love to her and rolling around in money all day, why on Earth would this freak waste his time building rockets and shite?

I never thought I'd have to explain why having a hot wife AND building rockets would be a better life than just having a hot wife. Extra points if you build rockets together.
I really dislike this submission (flagged). It's facile humour, but only just barely funny. I found myself wishing people who upvoted it could be banished. But that thought gave me another.

What would a layering / segmentation of HN users look like? Imagine the voting history of HN users on certain types of articles was used to classify them, and each classification of user saw a version of HN customized to only users of their classification, including front page articles, comment and new submissions, in a transparent way similar to hell-banning?

Probably too elitist and conducive to groupthink, but worth an idle ponder.
What % of the sky is visible from a point on a sphere.

50%, duh.
Ah, I did not know that the systems of Tycho and Copernic were the same.

I think that when most scientists (and bravura above) invoke Occam's razor, it's to pick one of two non-equivalent theories. For instance, the Ptolemaic system made predictions that were, given the limited accuracy of the instruments at the time, indistinguishable from the Copernician system. But I'm quite sure that scientists felt justified in "betting" on Copernic because the equations are simpler, and use fewer arbitrary constants.
> I have seen some job ads like that, where they sought people with experience in x86 assembly, C# and database modelling as well as front-end development.

Finding people with that combination of skills is impossible? Unlikely, sure, but... I have those skills. In fact, I did everything from x86 asm to Python to DB work to writing a complete web frontend in my last startup (while I was the only tech person). Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised to see this constellation of skills in a number of startup founders, where you have to wear many hats.
The question is ill defined - it depends.

Define "The Sky" as an enclosing sphere. When it has the same size as the Earth, the percentage of it you can see is 0. As it gets larger, so the percentage you can see goes to 50%.
With all respect, I think either the salary or the requirements have been exaggerated in the retelling since then.
Assumptions:
1) Earth is a sphere with radius r
2) "Sky" is a hollow spherical shell with radius R

The surface area of the entire spherical sky is: 4\piR^2

This can be represented by a spherical integral that I'm not sure I can write cleanly here.

We just need to change the bounds of that integral to find the area of the observable part of that shell. The Intersecting Chord Theorem along with some trigonometry can be used to find these bounds.

The answer I get is:

(1 - cos(x)) / 2 where x = Arctan(sqrt(r(R-r)) / r)

This seems to have the correct asymptotic behavior (as r approaches 0, cos(x) approaches cos(pi/2) = 0, and the answer approaches 50%

EDIT: My previous answer assumed the shapes were cones instead of spheres. Sorry about the confusion.
So this makes them the zuckerbergs of ipad cat games?
MessagePack in Node isn't much more than bindings to the C++ library (https://github.com/pgriess/node-msgpack/blob/master/src/msgp...). For me the bottom line was "What's faster in Node, for my project, right now?", and the answer was JSON.

There are benefits to MessagePack that have already been mentioned here, namely not having to base64 binary data first (smaller size), but that's true for any binary message format. I'd love to see some other binary formats thrown into the ring and see how they compare to MessagePack in both size efficiency and encode/decode performance. BSON seems like an interesting option, but I don't know enough about it to comment...
If your assumption were true I'd guess it wouldn't make any difference. The problem with your question is the assumption that the two versions would be the same - unless one was a copy of the other or both were copies of a third. The original language or framework has a lot to do with how you look at a problem. A painting done with watercolors will look very different from done with oils, even if the artist and scene are the same. Someone might counter this argument by pointing out Heather Jansch's driftwood sculptures of horses, which are remarkably made of bronze - but most of the time the choice of tools and materials has a lot to do with the result.
Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big
TED talk on this. guy calls it a "filter bubble": http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu... TL;DW: filter bubbles/group think might be bad for a functioning democracy because functioning democracies rely on good information
80s
Get rid of all your office mainframes! We can put the power in each client with a PC! Decentralize everything! No more sharing a computer with everyone.

90s
Fast ethernet lets us centralize everything. It's way easier to manage a server with a network of clients!

2000s
All the clients are cheap and idle. P2P is the wave of the future. Who needs servers?!

2010s
Cloud is here! Better to centralize everything in Amazon, Rackspace, <Generic_Cloudservice>. Leave nothing on the client!