skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most of the complaints I see from Java programmers amount to this:

http://blog.tmorris.net/anti-intellectual-euphemisms/

Specifically:

> using the word complex, unnatural, academic, “your world” or unintuitive to mean “I am not able nor am I willing to invest the effort to come to to understand this.”

Other than those people:

The blog author I quote above is one of the many "PL gurus" you speak of that rip into Scala because of its various deficiencies when compared to the likes of Haskell. The ones I am smart enough to understand mostly revolve around the type inference and type erasure problems. You mentioned those but I have already run into issues where I did care about them so I don't think its fair to dismiss them as you did.

The amount of hyperbole that comes from elements of the Scala community on actors I think is a cause of a fair amount of vitriol, mostly because actors are not a silver bullet and come with their own host of problems. Akka is trying to solve some of those problems of course :)

And of course the lack of tools. It's hard for me to talk about this because I loathe IDEs. So far I have been writing my medium sized project entirely in vim + NERDTree and it's been great. I imagine with enterprise scale projects I would start to miss Eclipse though.
0%. I don't need a discount to buy high-quality hardware that I need.

Oh, wait, do you mean "what's the minimal discount I can offer to make you impulse buy something you don't actually need and that might not be as good as the alternative"?
http://appharbor.com are pretty awesome for .NET.
I don't recommend learning CS before JS, because it's a different interpretation of JS, it isn't its own language. In fact, I'm glad I boned up on my Javascript skills (read "The Good Parts" and some solid tutorials) before moving to CoffeeScript.
Understanding the backdoor from the WordPress.org plugins compromise
I've started using Backbone.js in a very limited way for some of our existing apps.

What I'm doing is just using views as a way to provide some structure to what is currently a mess of jQuery event bindings and DOM manipulation. So instead of have a Backbone view that gets configured with a template and passed a model to render, I just do some setup code in the initialize function and then use Backbone's event function to setup all my event bindings for different DOM events that will occur within the element that is the root of that particular view.

This is working really well so far. It doesn't require completely rewriting the app to be a single-page client side heavy application, but does provide a significant amount of structure to the code making it much more manageable. It also lets me reuse some views (sort of like widgets) that were previously tied directly to specific elements in the DOM.
I don't use JavaScript for anything for which I could have chosen PHP. Given that PHP runs in exactly 0 browsers, what do you mean? Few people are choosing server-side JavaScript over PHP, though it may happen occasionally.
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Yeah, and what happens when it introduces a weird bug?
as someone pointed out on HN before "dynamic" seems to be an increasingly common way of saying "doesn't annoy me much" or something like that.
Tell that to any researcher trying to get US government funding for work using human embryonic stem cells.

Tell that to the German green party, who despite clearly wanting a carbon-neutral environmentally friendly economy are in the process of closing down Germany's nuclear reactor fleet.

(Etc.)
Great, what I'm saying is they should steer their customers towards the solution and not bother refuting inanity.
Why wouldn't a business just use Twitter or Facebook for announcing a realtime, short-term deal like that?

I follow most of my local businesses for that reason - many of them already tweet about on-the-spot deals which works the same way. Plus, it's an incentive for customers to follow their social media accounts which also helps with other types of advertising and promotion.
House Bill for Patent Office Reform Nearly Finished
When the original twisted code was released, I removed 1,297 lines of code to port it to twisted and gained a lot of functionality (tornado has just about no support for doing anything async). Not sure where you get less than 100 lines.

http://dustin.github.com/2009/09/12/tornado.html
Can E-Books Save Barnes & Noble? - Very interesting picture
The current wording is causing us to focus on what the lower tier lack, and doesn't highlight what they have.

For example, does it automatically load balance? Is there redundancy within the data center?

For example, is a PHP+MySQL free plan equivalent to one $20 linode, or is it replicated databases and load balanced web servers across five systems?
Would appreciate any feedback. Thanks.
Great post. I like the Noise Dial concept.
Hi all, DotCloud co-founder here. Happy to answer questions as usual. 2 important notes:

1) all private beta users are getting a VIP paid account *for free*. Details soon.

2) Hackers and startups will also get free stuff. *lots* of it.

If you like DotCloud but think you can't afford it - get in touch.

We'd rather build high-quality stuff, priced fairly, and give some of it away, than race to the bottom along with everybody else.
That's a very good point: this planning is part of the role of the CEO.
The referral fee here is on the very high side of engineer referrals, but mid-high 4 figures aren't unusual at all. $8k is also a big deal. Would that poison your friendship?

Meanwhile, "too stingy" to pay a recruiter? How about, too savvy? Recruiters suck. I would be marginally more likely to want to work for a company that went out of their way to avoid recruiters.
No, I was quite serious. I just checked, and the most recent account IDs are actually now in the 15,000 and 16,000s.

Seriously people, sometimes 'over 9000' is just a literal statement of truth and not a meme!
kragen@inexorable:~$ python
Python 2.6.6 (r266:84292, Sep 15 2010, 15:52:39)
[GCC 4.4.5] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import os, commands
>>> print commands.getoutput('ps u %s' % os.getpid())
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
kragen 20823 0.3 0.1 9636 3780 pts/4 S+ 14:00 0:00 python
>>> x = [{} for ii in range(1000*1000)]
>>> print commands.getoutput('ps u %s' % os.getpid())
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
kragen 20823 10.8 7.7 168176 159756 pts/4 S+ 14:00 0:02 python
>>> (159756-3780)*1024/(1000.0*1000)
159.719424

So the baseline is about 160 bytes per dict. Objects, by default, are built on dicts. Objects with __slots__ can be a little more efficient.
This is a huge deal. The app looks amazing. I used Tower for a bit but didn't cut it for me. I was planning to ditch Github for Codebase tonight but I'll reconsider after this
"These stats are based on the add-ons hosted with AMO only, and don’t include personas and add-ons bundled with other software."
From the pricing FAQ it looks like $99 for 4 instances is the minimum and then additional pro instances are 40 bucks each a month after that.

https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing/pricing-faq/

EDIT: Also, +1 for a password reset feature to fire up that beta account again.
Right, so they need a line for "best-in-class industry standard reliability measures like X Y and Z" that all accounts have, and then below it the extra bell and whistle that you can buy for "Enterprise" accounts.
Sorry, but for somebody testing a new product in the market, $100 a month is just too much for such a trivial feature (the custom domain). Heroku charge $5/month for custom domains. Its all about the positioning, but this pricing tells me they aren't interested in the emerging, bootstrapped companies, which there are a ton.
You report it and they fix it?
Twitter Voice Search in Swiss Italian
Eclipse's annual software release train arrives
At our startup (kind of a dotcloud specialized for server-side JavaScript) we offer custom domains support [1] starting at $29.95/month, but in general we found out that people take out the time to try the product and the user experience on the free plan before putting any real money into the service.

Maybe it's a behaviour specific for this audience (early adopters in this market are more likely to be individual or startup programmers rather than typical hosting clients, and the technology is relatively new which makes the value proposition to be hard to grasp without a hands-on experience).

[1] https://secure.erbix.com/pricing
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/fd0n/35%20Founders%20Pie%20Ca...

A similar tool in Excel.
How to bake perfect bread, effortlessly (an, um, culinary algorithm)
Better to just stick with command line + git gui?
Looks nice. For someone who has some decent familiarity with version control but none with git specifically: does anybody have any opinion on whether this would be a good way to pick up git for use with Xcode? Version control has always struck me as lending itself well to visual tools so I'm always kind of surprised how poor they usually tend to be.
Does this work on Github:FI?

(Related question: does the API work on Github:FI? It doesn't seem to, but I may be dumb.)
How does this compare to Tower? It's not obvious from the website, but I'm guessing is less fully featured. Anyone with experience with both who can comment?
We're prepping for a major FI release- expect full GitHub for Mac support at that time. (And yes, FI ships with the full API as well.)
Here's Pingdom's response:

http://blog.pingdom.com/2011/06/22/about-yesterday%E2%80%99s...

If I were a customer, I would think this is a good response. It's essentially, "Here's what went wrong, and here's how we're going to fix it." If I were Pingdom, I'd go one step further once they've made the changes they're going to make. I'd write another post that says, "Remember that outage? Here were the steps we said we would make. Today, we're announcing that 100% of those steps have been taken, and to prove it, we just did a firedrill that replicated that outage, and everything is fine."
I've found Scala to be more intimidating to approach than the average non-functional language because the people who tend to use and write about it are of a relatively high level of expertise.

I'm rather sold on it, though. I've been warily learning it in dribs and drabs for about a year, and one of these days will actually write something that accomplishes a task.
Why is it a huge deal? It's just a desktop version of their web app. Or am I missing something?
It is dangerous in theory, yeah. Much less so if you're a package like https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Emacspeak which, while almost entirely defadvice from what I've heard, doesn't modify any existing state.
I believe XCode has git support built in. You don't have to use it, though.
Hi Ryan, we think at $99/month the pro account is great value for a small business. You get unlimited custom domains, ssl, scaling and premium support.

And if you really can't afford it, get in touch about your project, we'll probably give it to you for free anyway.
Most of the discussion on the Arc forum is about developing the language itself. Maybe it's that no one discusses other projects, but I don't get the feeling too many people are actually building things in Arc.

I haven't done anything large either (I have a decent-sized amount of Arc code, but it's mostly collections of smaller things, e.g., solutions to 50 Project Euler problems), but one of the projects I'm hacking on could become large soon.
"efficient Python web servers (like Tornado) use event driven way of handling HTTP requests. The downside of that is that there can only be one HTTP handler function executed at a time. If that function takes a lot of time, it blocks all other requests."

This statement needs clarity. If the handler is CPU-intensive, the design of the server (threaded vs. AIO) is irrelevant. Both will perform equally, the only difference being that on an SMP system, the OS could schedule the thread on a different processor. This is why the typical deployment model for AIO servers is to start one server per processor and route incoming requests to a proxy to balance the requests among the available servers.

On the other hand, if the handler is dependent on slow network services (e.g. database or downstream API service), the AIO-based server will easily be able to handle additional incoming requests while waiting for the other tasks to complete, subject to memory. This is the power of non-blocking I/O function calls.
We've had pretty mixed results so far. There's some real problems with the Chrome Web Store, most notably that it's really hard to find new apps - in our industry (games) all of our users are very late to the party so the only way to find their stuff is if it's featured or in a search result.

But Google's been really receptive to our feedback so hopefully it'll improve in time for ChromeOS.
It seems clear that GitHub's goal is to make git useable. I'm super excited about everything they can do in that direction. Git's underlying model is fantastic, but it's UI is lacking. Bravo GitHub.
I'm not sure you get it. You're not paying for the custom domain. Try thinking of it this way: the "Free" account is actually a "Trial" account, with the key limitation that you can't use custom domains with it. The real account costs $99/mo.

You might be right about what the pricing communicates. As a bootstrapper, I do object to the notion that $1200/yr is an untenable expense. I expect that number is less than what Patrick "5 hours a week" McKenzie spent on hosting while still a Japanese salaryman.

But: you're probably right that this pricing says, "if you can't afford to cough up $1k for your hosting, we're not a good fit for you". And I think that's probably a very very smart move. This is a low margin, support-intensive sector. A startup entering it should probably not make things harder for themselves than they need to.
It works with central repos other than github too - it picked up assembla repos I had and pushes to them no problem.

Great stuff.
I was around before Rails, back when Tapestry, Wicket and Appfuse projects were making my life easier. How does Clojure for Web development make my life easier? is the question that should be asked.

Clojure's been popular in the hacker community for a good 2 years now. That's a weak argument.
As I'm learning couchdb and plan to use it for a project, the coffeescript addition for map/reduce certainly gave me cause to look more closely at coffeescript
Friendly advice: get better at saying "no".
As you've been developing in CoffeeScript up until that point, explicit compilation doesn't really change code and isn't likely to introduce new bugs.
Firing off support request. Looking forward to new FI. FI has been f'ing great for us.
I enjoyed reading the blog and how clearly he talks about his business and sells the benefits (not just features). I know MBAs who are not able to so clearly articulate their pricing and business models http://www.phenona.com/blog/phenona-business-model/
Not as much as losing a liability lawsuit. Good customer service is partly a marketing exercise - in the sense of spending some resources on avoiding negative publicity. But shuffling it around from one cost center to another is essentially a form of defining the problem away, and it's not a good foundation to build on. 'Sure, you feel unhappy with our product now, but try thinking of yourself as being happy instead.' If you define it as marketing then you're just going to get a customer service experience featuring relentlessly happy people who refuse to admit the product could have any shortcomings.

Search on 'sirius cybernetics corporation'.
That's kind of like saying that a BMW M5 is just a version of a Ford Fiesta. Both will get you there, but the comfort and enjoyment will be somewhat different.
It's a little dangerous, but Emacs users have been making numbered backups automatically since before there was RCS. Since before there was GNU Emacs actually.
Motorboating - Miss USA Pageant 2011 Evolution Answers
Motorboating...

Best. Video. Ever.
Agreed, EGit is not ready for public consumption. Sticking with Tortoise or command line is the only way to make sure you don't end up doing serious damage to your repos.

Their biggest problem is their treatment of previous changes and parents. It fubars the system by repeatedly introduce previous additions or deletions from your codebase.
I'd guess because they'd have an audience including potential new customers with an app like that whereas anyone following them on Twitter or Facebook is already a customer.
Well, their web app tracks the history and changes of your repo hosted there. It means you see them only after you perform a push.

On the announcement they say:
> But those things are only great after you've pushed your code to GitHub.

With the desktop app you can manage your local repository before pushing changes to github
The kind of cool thing about that example is, provided the guy wasn't being told he'd get to meet the girl, it's just a simple value exchange, beneficial for both parties.

(So long as the advice the scammer gives is good!)
Doesn't look like they are working on the real problems at all, and are instead creating others.

First person to invent won't matter, only who pays the fee first? UGH. Way to discourage innovation and encourage patent trolls. With that they'll be able to watch new products on the market and try to file patents on everything, then sue the person who actually invented it.
Motorola xoom become hot product this week
Sorry for the late response.

I'll just point out one part of your comment, and use it to illustrate what I wanted to say.

> instead of learning to use their computers more efficiently

What i wanted to say is just that, you might be just more efficient by avoiding spending a lot of time learning complex tool, and concentrate on simple one, with the hope that the loop of improvements of your tools will compensate the loss of productivity due to a non-optimum usage. The general idea is, if you spend of lot of time to learn a tool, you are betting that it will worth it on the long run, at the hypothetical cost of losing the time use to acquire that knowledge we you finally decide that an alternative is a better option - with the added momentum you'll have before quiting your hard learned cherished tool. On the contrary, when learning quickly, less efficient, simple tools you bet on the future evolution of that tools : you will gain in productivity on the later tools that might pop up, ones that you will also learn quickly, but will be a bit more efficient.

While I would completely agree with the author on the fact that some people will refuse to learn what would be more efficient tool on the long run, he fails to recognize that a chain of more simple tools, that improves over times and allow quick adaptation and optimization can be in some circumstances be an approach that leads to the exact same efficiency.

This is why I complain that the article was pedantic, because it states too strongly that mastering complex software is the way to go, whereas, while there is a regrettable tendency to discard complex tools too quickly, diving in them might be not always as wise as it could seem.
I agree that it's a huge IF, but the repercussions are much worse than "inconvenience." You have to follow the scenario a few steps further to figure out the full magnitude of things. "Civilization" is, in a sense, a massive and highly complex life-support system. You don't really need it to live in a small town, but the populace of a city or even a large town can't survive without it. There's a saying, "Any city is only three days away from a riot." Without a massive and sophisticated logistical system constantly bringing new supplies in and waste out, food and other critical supplies will run out very quickly, and then things get ugly fast.

After the financial system is zeroized, how do you get paid? The company you work for has no money with which to pay you. They have no way to make money, because none of their customers have money to pay them with. If you're not getting paid, what's your incentive to show up to work? Everybody would be in that conundrum, so commerce would grind to a halt and cities would start to starve. The government would order law enforcement and the military to keep working even without pay, and they could probably force workers in key industries like power companies to keep going to work, but they couldn't do that for everyone. Even if you had cash to buy groceries with, the grocery store probably wouldn't have groceries to sell to you because they would have no money with which to buy them.

The government could magically set account balances, putting money into everyone's pocket based on some sort of guesstimate, but that wouldn't really work, either. Fiat money is based on trust: the assumption that if you accept a dollar in exchange for goods, you will be able to turn around and exchange that dollar for a comparable quantity of other goods. If the financial system is zeroized, that trust is broken. People would rather have tangible assets instead of money of dubious origin that has demonstrated the capacity to literally vanish overnight. Hoarding and hyper-inflation would ensue.

The punchline of all of this is that millions of people would starve to death in the cities within a matter of weeks. Millions more would pour out into the countryside, looting and pillaging. Law and order would break down completely in all but the most remote places. Remote places would probably degrade much more gracefully to lower levels of technology, and bounce back quickly as well after the dust settled, but the cities and suburbs would literally be wiped out. An event like this would probably result in a death toll comparable to a widespread nuclear strike, and would equally destroy the nation as a functioning political and social entity.
This metaphor intrigues me. What are the "pathogens" that Google's "immune system" is trying to prevent?
How about combine this with book-in-advance?
So say you get $20 of pizza for $10, coupon website actually runs the payment system - takes payment of $10 in advance, and then you show up to get your deal. Then limited-capacity places could do realtime deals available to limited number of people to reach but not exceed their capacity, and bargain-hunters would be sure they'd get their deal and not show up somewhere that just became full.
This looks awesome, but is it too soon for a feature request? I'd love a side-by-side diff view, FileMerge style.
Eh, people always want the things they want for free. "It's a pity the free tier doesn't include the thing I want most, if it did I might pay for it down the line".

They rarely do.
I don't see any reference in here to reform of software patents and such. Is this reform purely financial?
I used Tower for a while, and I didn't have the chance to test Git for Mac yet (will do later today when I'll be using my Mac).

One thing that Tower can do quite well is dealing with multiple remote repositories (e.g. github + heroku).
If GitHub for Mac does that as well, I believe I'm going to switch to that.
Free, too. GitHub don't mess around.

Any plans for putting it in the Mac App Store?