skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Java is the default language in the best selling phone platform, Android. For that reason alone it will remain relevant for a long time. I know Android can run other JVM languages, but until the platform becomes stabilized (meaning most big security holes are filled, new non-trivial features are rare) there won't be a push to make non-Java languages a first class citizen.
I'm currently writing some cobol for shits and giggles. Its terrible.

I don't really get this article though. The "friendly fire" is what fuels the drive to make new hotness to be as good as it can be. I don't think its damaging outside of the handful of people daft enough to take it too personally.

The argument presented in the article is appealing enough, but ends before it gets to the part where it explains how to make inroads towards the cobol folks. Its been criticized up and down, left and right. The people still using it have taken themselves outside realm of constructive criticism. Any time spent there fighting a losing battle could also be spent improving on what we, who are willing to use new tools, have.
Why are different breeds of dogs all considered the same species?
I certainly identify with your point, but I actually had the opposite reaction to this article; particularly the second half.

I started my career working on 'serious' software, then switched to web applications for a few years, and have recently settled into building multi-faceted, research-oriented systems -- and throughout the entire experience, I have consistently found myself having to apologize for the hype and hyperbole surrounding the many of the more modern technologies that I've wanted to work with.

Have a look at the HDF5 libraries... notice the Fortran support? That is a Huge positive for me, even though I hope to never write another line of Fortran in my life. Sometimes there is no 'selling' new tech to a CIO; it just needs to both appear and actually be absolutely solid (for lack of a better word).

Incidentally, I don't think this is a poorly titled article at all -- the author was being ironic, and will probably be rewarded with a 10x spike in traffic from people looking for talking points to take to their next Rails meetup... that's actually pretty funny.
You can work for two companies at the same time if you are on H1B as long as the companies don't object.
Nikki and the Robots 0.3 is out - Haskell-based open source game
Lebanese Hacker Hacked Sony Europe
Thanks for the catch, I had forgotten that they were a UML shop.
Don't agree. You can study the PageRank as a Markov Chain (including the d parameter). Now you have a theory.
Some of us do Java for a day job and feeling a lack of creative expression at work - explore our creative side with other frameworks. Or even pottery classes.

The world doesn't have to be black and white. Why do we geeks try to make everything 0 and 1? The world is not binary. You can "sell out" yourself - work doesn't necessarily make you happy but it may give you means to do something that makes you happy.

I've been working with Java since 1999 and I'm amazed - it won. From applets to EJB hype to Struts and to now Spring and Scala and Android. Game over - they've become a Lingua Franca. There is always room for other players but Java is so firmly entrenched in Fortune 500 code bases it will never ever go away..
Russell Simmons: Confessions of a Life-Long Entrepreneur
I'm an investor at the TechShop in the Raleigh-Durham area. We ran two Groupon deals over the past 9 months. Both had very good results (~280 sales each, at $120/Groupon. Groupon took ~20%). We were VERY careful to structure our deal such that we would make a profit on each deal - membership is fairly cheap per customer. Our main cost is instructor time for classes, and we have a minimum number of people/class. Furthermore, the business is such that getting a potential customer to visit the TechShop is very valuable (the TechShop has a certain wow factor), so we were counting on the discount given via Groupon as the cost of getting someone to visit and try the shop.

So far, the results have been mixed, with about 20% of the Groupon users signing up for additional months of shop access. That's better than the other steep discounted deals we've offered.

So, for a business like TechShop, Groupon works really well. We'll be working with them again.
> Java, with its faults, has completely conquered web application programming. On the sidelines, charging hard, new languages are being invented at a rate that is mind-blowing, to also conquer web application programming. The two are pitted together, and we’re left with what looks a bunch of preppy mall-kids battling for street territory by break dancing. And while everyone is bickering around whether PHP or Rails 3.1 runs faster and can serve more simultaneous requests, there lurks a silent elephant in the room, which is laughing quietly as we duke it out in childish arguments over syntax and runtimes.

Nice job writing a 1000 word article about Java and web application programming without mentioning the elephant in the room C# with ASP.NET

I've seen small and medium shops move over to or adopt C# at a very high rate(for internal web apps) in the past 5 years. .NET is big in the government too and C# is adding nice feaures that Java has either no equivalent or a poor implementation not to mentions technologies like ASP.NET MVC.

THAT is what is eating Java's lunch more than anything else. It boggles the mind how someone could write a whole essay on this topic without mentioning C#/ASP.NET. I think that's a symptom of reading popular blogs around the internet which talk only about things like PHP/Ruby/Python etc. but comes across as incredibly shortsighted.
Funny, I did read that article a few months ago but had completely forgotten about it. It's a good read if you're into the virtualisation thing.
Engineering is reportedly the world's second oldest profession, yet licensing has only been around since the mid-19th century, so I don't think it's particularly fair for the licensing regimes to make a claim of exclusivity on the word.

I've met many Electrical Engineers over the years. Some of them are licensed PEs, many are not. The vast majority of the EE projects do not involve a risk to human life and therefore are not required to use PEs. I've never noticed any angst on one side or the other over the use of the word "Engineer" to describe EEs who don't have their PE.

I also have met computer programmers who do write software that involves a risk to human life. They are every bit as meretricious and dedicated to building defect-free systems as engineers in any other discipline.

Arguably, there's no pressure to enact a licensing regime because there have been so few incidents in which software has actually hurt people. That's a testament to the professionalism of the computer engineers who write life-critical systems.
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I never thought I would defend Cobol but I have found that Greenscreen terminal based programs written in Cobol and Powerhouse are amazingly fast compared to equivalent web based applications. (I speak from my experience in Financial industry. your experience may vary). Scalability is a mater of throwing more IBM hardware at it and its not very expensive to operate. The IBM Iseries is something unlike anything I had ever seen in terms of scalability. Just saying that your new fancy language of choice is not necessarily better than Cobol.
What Java? You mean PHP? or RoR? Do some reality checks.
The difference now is that there are clear steps to follow for success! It may seem like more steps but before you could spend hours futzing about with gem versions, then discovering that your current apps no longer ran, etc.
Reddit founder interview on techcrunch
It's absolutely unbelievable that for a solved problem we don't have reliable offerings and need to beg Google/Microsoft for an api access or buy expensive enterprise software. How difficult is to take one of the thousands open source translation libraries that every university's linguistics department offers and turn it to some semi-correct service
Why Board Meetings Suck
Ask HN: Intern or freelance - which is better on the resume?
If you had a choice of interning at no pay for a respectable firm or getting a freelance gig at a similarly situated company what do you think would look better on a resume if your goal was to get a permanent job later on? (not necessarily at the same place)
What is Network bridging
Network bridging is used for the purpose of connecting two or more internet connections so that the internet on some other computer can be easily used. The network bridging service is mainly done in
Did anyone see the link to the originally published article?
http://thecodemechanic.wordpress.com/
Why some user-level java.exe is better than any other .exe? ^_^ Why in 21th century, with only one remaining platform (x86_64) we should stick to 15 years old concept form isolated from OS environment? Why primitive select/pool/signal I/O and several "bridges" inside user-level process are necessary to run a web application?
I'm going to cite Steve Pavlina here: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/07/how-to-get-from-a-7...

Some snippets:

A 7 seems very close to a 9 or 10, but often a 7 is a local maximum — you can’t get any higher by continuing to follow the same path that got you to that 7 in the first place.

A 7 is pretty good. At this level you feel generally content. It’s OK, fine, acceptable, satisfactory.

What you’ll find when you leave the comfort of your 7 and go chasing after that 10 is that your 7 was never a 7. It was only a 3.

Java is the epitome of "7"-ness. It's a decently powerful language that you can do cool things in if you find a good rock and smash the right things in the right places. As a language, it's mediocre but so much work has been poured into it that nothing is too hard to accomplish in it... then again, very little is easy or fun in the way that Ocaml (once you get it) is easy and fun.

Java appeals to business types because it seems like the low-risk choice. The libraries are going to be there, and even if it's hard to be better than a 7.0 programmer in it, mediocrities can easily get up to 3-4, which is seen as "good enough".

You might be able to go from a 6 to a 7 in a week or a month, perhaps even a day with conscious effort. A few tweaks here and there, and you’ve got it. But to go from a 7 to an 8 might take a year or two. 7 doesn’t always connect with 8. You might have to take a path like 7-6-4-2-3-4-5-6-5-4-6-7-8 to get there.

This is what switching out of the Java paradigm, into Ocaml or Haskell, is like. You have to work hard and learn new things before you get to a level of skill where you can be even a 5, much less an 8 or 9... but it's actually possible in those languages.
Interactive CSS3 Presentation... In CSS3
Do junior development/design jobs exist anymore? Can't find work.
I'm using a new account because I'm not sure if I feel comfortable attaching this question to my name. I'm an entrepreneur at heart, but have been trying to find a junior design job so that I can improve my learning potential and get out of the home office.

The problem is that I'm having an impossible time finding a job.

I'm a competent designer, and HTML/CSS don't scare me, but these days that isn't good enough. You need to know javascript or jquery and ajax, HAML & SASS, and what seems like a dozen other technologies.

The same is true of development. It's not enough to know a language or two, but you need to be a rockstar programmer across the board.

I'm not complaining, but I'm having a rough time paying the bills and thought I would seek some advice on finding junior level work, whether contract or FT/PT.

I've had a few interviews with big and small companies, and though I felt some of them went well, I can understand why they didn't hire me.

So what do you do? Do you take jobs outside your skill level in the hopes that you can figure it out? Do I stalk Craigslist and Elance to bide my time until I can learn more? Do I keep looking for junior design jobs? Do they even exist?
Without knowing what's included in the core of the language and what comes as constructs on top of it, it is hard to get impressed with these examples.

I see them as an equivalent of giving STL-heavy examples when trying to impress someone with C++ - "Look! Sorting an array with one function call - std::sort(head, tail) !"
This is correct. In my experience, the 10-20$/hr guys are usually programmers who have just started and are good only for some sideline stuff. The moment you engage with them with a sizable work, either the rate goes up or they back off.
In my experience looking for work, almost no one I've interviewed with asked or cared about my freelance work.
An excellent and very detailed discussion of a complex issue. I can certainly see why any copyleft supporters who had contributed to OpenOffice are outraged. From the legal perspective, wasn't the GPL designed to prevent situations like this?
Yes, we were talking about this specific thing at work the other day. How come all non-trivial Java programs end up a mass of Factory and Implementation classes?! Several of the systems I support even weave in Spring, which while helping in some ways, completely obliterates readability. :(
There is that, true. And I guess some legal principles also derive from Roman times. But I meant more the trust/mistrust in government that they were measuring in the article.
Very fun. I have only one gripe and that is the fact that you have an alert pop up when I try to leave the page. I hate alert messages.
Other than that the game is really fun and the questions are difficult enough that I don't think googling would give me much of an edge given the time restriction of each question. Good job.
>"And this is why I dislike the way that software people misuse the word "engineer".

You ought to hear AIA members go on and on and on about software architects, information architects, etc.
Great news for YouLing, my mouse-over translator for Mac. I just made it a couple of weeks ago, and was very disappointed when I heard about the API closing!
http://goo.gl/MsV4D
I like to compare hating java to hating SUVs - they may be used inappropriately most of the time, but there are scenarios where they are the best tool.

In the enterprise, you need a language that can support
- multi-million line code bases
- a development team of dozens or even hundreds of programmers
- a software project that lasts years
- a team that changes over time
- a team that isn't just rockstar programmers (try hiring dozens of rockstar programmers at once if you are not google, facebook, and you aren't doing something perceived to be 'sexy')

I think java and C# are the best languages that meet those criteria today (and if you don't want to be married to MS, then you are left with Java).

I think dynamically typed languages are not appropriateness for such a scenario.

However, HN is a startup-oriented site, and those certainly are not the criteria you need to meet in a startup.
we wouldn't mind adding it, but it would create clutter on the calendar page.

though, a user can always sign-up for multiple accounts.
That sounds like a good strategy. I'm not sure which site you're looking at, but elance and several other sites offer tests that you can take to prove your skills. I'd say a day or two spent on those is time well spent, and generally inspires confidence in the buyers.

There are a number of other free or inexpensive things you can do to make yourself look better: use a sharp looking picture of yourself, have a halfways decent website (a one page site is OK - leaps and bounds better than nothing), email @yourdomain.com, toll free numbers are fairly inexpensive, sign up for a BBB membership, etc.

Also, I can't stress enough that you need to have good clear writing that touts whatever skills you have. (On your profile and your personal site.) Don't lie, but do brag a little. If you're not the best at copy-writing, have a friend look over it.

Also, make sure to mention which city you're in / near, as many buyers prefer to work with someone local.

It's OK to specify on your personal site that you only accept work through [XYZ freelance site].

A blog on your site is a bit more work, but can pay off in the long run. You won't get a lot of business directly through the blog, but it will help boost your google rankings which _will_ bring in business. Keep it strictly limited to informative articles on topics you're interested in working on, and try to post regularly - at least once a week to get started.

Lastly, you want some referrals from me, leave your info here: http://nfriedly.com/techblog/2010/12/calling-all-avaiable-we...

Oh, and what everybody else has said: raise your rates. Start at $45/hr and raise it by $5 every few months.
Ah, a splendid retort. I'm sorry, I didn't realize who I was talking to!

"abuses the network"

Yes, that poor network. However, observe that harassment, denial-of-service, wire fraud, etc, are not primarily illegal because they abuse the "network". Think a bit, and I bet you can figure out why they are illegal. Think a bit more, and I bet you can come up with some differences between a DDoS and a copyright infringement for non-commercial purposes, such that one might be considered an apple and the other an orange.

That aside, I call you a troll for bringing up the free-speech strawman. Tell you what; go find me someone who believes that wire fraud or network intrusion is "free speech", and I will promptly return your testicles (or whatever else it is you think I have stolen from you) by mail. Some rules: this person cannot be in prison and cannot be related to you.

One more request -- kindly stop abusing the network with your profanity.
You can follow economics on hubski. http://hubski.com/tag?id=economics Same code base, in for the long haul. :)
Ditto: Leading the shift from checkins to stepping out w founder Jyri Engestrom
By public channels do you mean Free-To-Air or do you mean that they recieve public funding? If the latter, I believe the restrictions are more reasonable.
A car body made from "structural batteries": EV breakthrough?
Originally from third-world country, I went from $8/hr to $50/hr in less then a year on oDesk. I quit it since I work on h-1b visa now in USA, but once I get greencard, plan to get back to freelancing, if no other projects will popup in my head.
How do you consider what the Kindle does different from electronic paper? Matching the true physical dimensions of paper seems impractical when you no longer need more than one page.

After about a year on the Kindle, I just finished re-reading a set of novels. Maybe I just don't find it as important, but the impossibility of losing my place and inline dictionary beat out any physicality problems.
Yeah, the real headline is "Chinese 17 year-old sells kidney without parents knowledge."
The problem is that you don't get those 3 points if the opponent rushed the multi-choice and got it right. Denying your opponents points is a valid strategy considering the goal is simply to have the most points after 10 questions. Even if I face a very easy question, pressing multi-choice and picking the correct answer is preferable to typing the answer in and possibly being too slow.

You could possibly solve that by making the multi-choice feature buttons use 1 second to work. Basically, I click banana, and 1 second after that the server actually acknowledged my answer.
Kindles don't have LCD displays. E-ink is as easy to read as newsprint, at worst.
>approach that can can be extended to handle more cases "when you need it."

I guess my take on TinEye is that cases "when you need it" may be cases outside their target current market segment. Getting people to use their service is probably more important than using a sophisticated algorithm.
Large corporations have the money to run huge applications on serious systems, and might get a slight performance benefit from running Java. Try running it on virtual servers for small web applications though... It's painful. Compared to Python, Ruby, Perl and PHP it eats resources like crazy. Developing and deploying Java apps feels slow and like being stuck in the stone age, unless of course one starts building a large automated infrastructure with continuous integration servers and repository managers... leading back to my first point: complex, heavy and hence expensive infrastructure. Debugging large web applications is worse than any other common programming language for the web. In all honesty, I've never written any serious software in that language – I know more about administration of systems running Java – so I'm not getting into a discussion about the language in se, but it seems very hard to get a clean transparent architecture in larger applications without drowning in hundreds of small little classes littered throughout. While there is a lot of badly written software out there in any language, it's always the Java programmers around me that complain most about trying to decipher how a complex Java application actually works and which code and classes hook into others.

Then, there's the Sun/Oracle thing... While Sun was still pretty respected, being associated with Oracle feels like a wolf trying to befriend a chicken. Especially coming from the open-source perspective, I'd rather not deal with them. If design-by-committee wasn't bad enough, the control of a company like Oracle should set off some alarms...
It also demonstrates the view people had of commercial banks in the late 1970s that the public would buy an explanation like "we're the type of people who wear a belt and suspenders."

If any bank tried to claim today that they're so incredibly, overbearingly cautious, they'd mocked as being obviously full of shit.
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That's a very interesting idea. I think a lot of startups would consider personal engagement at this level to be out of the question, but I'm going to seriously consider this approach (or a distant variation) for our beta launch.
My theory is that the language's lack of complexity bothers 'high-end' Java devs at a subconscious level, so they think they have to invent it in order to seem relevant to the larger community. Another idea is they may believe elegance is a function of using powerful language constructs, rather than a function of minimalism.

I see the same problems in Ruby sometimes: metaprogramming used without a compelling need. Luckily it isn't as much of a PITA because nobody thinks its OK to program via XML files anymore.
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I don't hate Java as long as I don't have to use it.
I don't hate COBOL as long as I don't have to use it.
The same is true for a number of languages that simply aren't fun to use.

The difference is just that it's more likely that I have to use Java at some point, compared to COBOL.
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Yeah. I went into hand-waving-territiry, because didn't have any concrete references at hand. In medieval history, there is a distinction to be made between roman and germanic law. The concept of roman law is that things are written down and a crime is interpreted in relation to the formal, written text. In germanic law, things are much more contextual. There weren't a lot of formal laws, instead you'll have collection of respected eldars pass judgement. So basically, roman law is pretty much what we have today.

Now, I still haven't directly answered your question of course, but the fact that the whole concept of law can be traced back to the romans is at least fairly close.
There are many non-religious people who quietly carry a burden.

For me, it happened when I was young, and in light of 'adult guidance', the guilt I felt for my alternate vision of the world was intense.