skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are mixing up the languages with the platforms.

Java doesn't let you connect to databases or any of that - the JVM does, and for any language running on it (Scala, Clojure, etc).

Java the language just gives you a certain set of syntax and semantics which can be useful to model a problem and its solution - classes, interfaces, etc.

Even if you're limited by the API of the platform - the browser - that has nothing to do with whether a different language is useful or not for your particular problem.
The Samsung Galaxy S2 was competing against the 16 month old iPhone 4 so I'm not surprised that the judges gave it the nod.
Before Netscape: the forgotten Web browsers of the early 1990s
> It's value is down to about $5

Hovering around $4, lately!

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg1zvztgSzm1g10zm2g...
Boring Story of a Single Post That Increased My Traffic by 128%
Why would such a valuable site continue to allow itself to be plagued with this type of repulsive usability issue?
The issue isn't about the == operator returning false. It's about the == operator's return value not being typed.

Evaluating "a == a" could return the string "potatoe" which would evaluate to false (and make no sense).

I don't see the big deal with this. If your == operator is buggy, it's buggy, no matter whether you can only return a boolean or some random other type.

(I personally found most of the criticism in the article to be in the same vein: inflammatory, superficial comments after a quick reading of the spec.)
I wonder if it would be of any use.

How much support is there for C++11 in compilers today?
CityPockets: How they use mobile to bring relevancy to daily deals
Already a solved problem thanks to HQ9+:
http://www.esolangs.org/wiki/HQ9
Yottaa speeds up SMB websites with its first paid product
The C++ standard comes at an impressive page count of 1300+. The print version seems entirely useless to me compared to a searchable PDF with links and chapters. Why on earth would you get it?
In the meantime, several federal states have admitted to using this software. The software analyzed by the CCC had evidently been used by the Bavarian police.
Rental Software from Dysel
I am looking forward to apply for startupchile, a little research on payment gateways has pointed me to dineromail.com, have you evaluated that option?.
A point I would make is that employees are often at the mercy of the employer for the length of the commute. I knew a man in the Four Corners area of Montgomery County who had a quick commute to White Oak. The EPA relocated his office to the Crystal City area of Arlington County, changing his commute from 10 minutes to 45 minutes on a good day. BRAC just pushed a whole lot of jobs down to Fort Belvoir and quite a few more over to Bethesda Naval Hospital.
...why not just use the Stack Exchange "Code Golf" website?

(http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/)
Steve Jobs wasn’t great; he wasn’t even close
Sexual selection by sugar molecule helped determine human origins
this is one of the most interesting 'blog' posts I've read in a long time. Kudos to the letter-writer for exposing his own inner mind that publicly.
Actually NaN != NaN is not a language design, it is required for complying with the IEEE 754 standard.
Reston/Sterling, VA - AnyPresence (http://anypresence.com)

We're a small venture-backed enterprise mobile application startup. The founders' previous venture had a successful exit.

We're currently using Ruby, Rails, Coffeescript, Mongo, and a whole lot more. We're big fans of testing too. If you're in the DC area, interested in startups, and have some ruby experience we'd love to hear from you.

Email a little bit about yourself and your resume to jbozek@anypresence.com if you are interested.
Satellite photos from my house
What is the point of this article? The iPhone 4s was a slight improvement over the iPhone 4, and frankly I'm still shocked to hear things like the RAM is the same and the processor still clocks at barely 800Mhz. For Apple, this is fine. But saying that my iPhone 3gs-holding-friend shouldn't be disappointed just because Apple is selling millions of them, is just silly. He's disappointed because I'm about to have a 1.5Ghz dual core phone with 1GB of memory and a resolution higher than the computer I used in highschool just 4 years ago in a thinner form factor than his phone. He will love his iPhone 4s and I will love my phone, but I don't understand the tone of this article. Is it really so unreasonable to want LTE given the available phones on the market that have LTE? Or a form factor that is more competitive.

I guess from where I'm sitting, I'm used to Apple kicking everyone in the nards from a tech specs perspective, and I don't think that's the case this go-around.
I used to be more optimistic, because I thought the poor (jobless) would eventually claim their rights. But what if the rich have robot soldiers, too - how are the poor supposed to claim stuff then?

Other than that, I suppose the government has to redistribute stuff. I don't see another way. Also, human reproduction will probably have to be regulated.
Amazon goes sci-fi with latest book publishing arm, 47North
Nobody said the iPhone 4S wouldn't sell nor that it was a bad phone. Just that we were hoping more from Apple, and that the company didn't do anything innovative this year. I still think the same, but I'm hoping Siri will prove me wrong (because it would be really cool), but I don't count on it.
For the record, I'm the CTO and co-founder of Buyosphere.

Yes, for the moment, Buyosphere may at a first glance look a lot like Pinterest. At the moment, the main visible difference is: we focus around products people want or have... and the site is much slower (that will be solved soon). The end goal is to help people discover products they want. Hence the name Buyosphere.

We're working on a nice twist that will be released at the end of the month. It will make our unique value proposition much clearer. Stay tuned!
What the heck, I'll bite.

I'm underwhelmed by the 4S, just as I was underwhelmed by the iPAD. I don't see the appeal of either of those at the price point at which they are offered. In my opinion they're not significantly better than the technology we had in 2000 (although the battery life is tons better). There's very little I can do on those devices that I couldn't do on my iPAQ, or on my tablet computer back then.

I'm happy a lot of people are thrilled with them though, as that means that the state of the art will eventually move to a point where I get to see the value. Now, please, go enjoy whatever it is you enjoy and stop trying to justify your decision to the rest of us.
I'm an Australian but I currently work in New York. From my perspective, a startup in Australia has many hurdles:

1. The cost of living. Seriously, Australia is an incredibly expensive place to live now. I'm from Perth and I'd say that overall it's cheaper for me to live in _Manhattan_ than Perth now. MANHATTAN. Actually, same for same rent-wise, Perth is still cheaper but Manhattan has options Perth doesn't (like saving money by living in a walk-up);

2. Virtually no VC and startup community; and

3. Depending on your industry, you will find very consumer-friendly legislation that is actually a problem for small companies to comply with, particularly in the finance space (and within that space, particularly dispensing anything that could be construed as "financial advice"). The US has gotten worse about this in the last decade with SOX and other reactionary legislation but it's still better.

Put it this way: I don't think something like Mint could ever be done in Australia.

Now Australia's fortunes rise and fall with China's so the boom industries are mining and construction. If you can think of something to sell to these industries, you could make a lot of money. But why do it in Australia? The strong Australian dollar makes it more attractive to do it elsewhere.

Sure health insurance is an issue but you can buy that in the US and even if it's hundreds of dollars a month (IMHO) you're better off overall.
It's a linear argument: it won't succeed (in part) because it's designed to be deflationary, so it will fail, so it'll lose its current value.

(Note: it's not my argument, I'm just trying to explain why they aren't necessarily incompatible)
Bill Gates India scheme 'spared 100,000 from HIV'
Football Memorabilia and Collectibles
If he's receiving random emails they are probably not important or sensitive enough to be valuable to the government. If he's receiving non-random emails that contain sensitive data, it should all be encrypted.

If you do get something important that is not encrypted, you can forward the mail to yourself as ciphertext.

You're correct that Appelbaum has no control over Google's retention procedures.
Are the downvotes just because the article is (another) hack job fluff article with a tenuous link to Steve Jobs, or because people like HN for tech news and not the same arguments about politics/religion/morality that make Internet forums so homogenous and boring?

All the comments here are heavily skewed towards legalization/tolerance of drug use (at worst, outright indifference) so what gives you the impression that HN "blindly accepts the 'drugs are evil' viewpoint"?

(Personal opinion: Legalize and tax the lot, treat addiction as a health issue and not a criminal one.)
Is this the next "how fast is Fibonacci" fiasco?
One reason might be that posts/users are getting axed. Would be nice if everything except spam was unmoderated, imo. Also, the current rate limiters to keep spam out are blocking those that would otherwise be more active.
We don't all sit a lot. ;) Personally, I've become a huge fan of standing desks. I have a Biomorph desk with a hand-crank adjustment, and my boyfriend has the GeekDesk (motorized up/down...very cool.) We both LOVE our desks.

Added benefits: Fewer back problems, more energy, and much less motivation to surf HN. (We now tend to spend a lot of our spare time exercising or being outdoors due to having more energy and less pain.)

I cannot recommend a standing desk highly enough. Believe me when I say you will hate it for the first 2-3 days. Get through that (take breaks by sitting if you have to), and it will likely be one of the best investments you've ever made.
In Chrome:

As is JS ops/sec: 3,163,860, ±3.70%, fastest

JS (from Dart) with --optimize ops/sec: 23,337, ±4.84%, 99% slower
I'm aware of the illegal NSA spying, but surely they're still somewhat more cautious about deploying domestic surveillance. Going overseas makes it all legal and OK, here they at least theoretically are not supposed to be doing things, and that's better than nothing, right?
> This makes as much sense as 'everything' being true. You would write if (true) {...}, but I can't imagine why you would do that.

I think his real point is that there's no 'truthy', no evaluation to true. Later in the article he says that

if (a) a.foo();

isn't possible because of that. A better example would've been (a != null) instead of (1 == 1), imho.

> This seems to directly contradict the first point. Which is it? It should do a dynamic type check and generate a run time exception in both cases. I don't see anything to convince me that "2" + 2 will be a concatenation... in the spec.

Not in the spec itself, right. But the current documentation seems to imply exactly what he states. See the definition of '+' here: http://www.dartlang.org/docs/api/String.html#String::String

"String +(Object other)
Converts other to a string and creates a new string by concatenating this string with the converted other. "
You could say the same about chocolate cake.
I don't know, you're possibly right. I think the influence (or lack there of) of LSD on Steve Jobs as mildly interesting. I think creativity and ingenuity is undervalued in the industry that HN caters to, but I understand the sentiment that this article or even my comment might be off-topic and that's fine.

On this post and (more) on other SteveJobs/LSD posts over the last year, I've seen people nearly talk about marijuana as if it is the destroyer of worlds, which I don't think any reputable scientist has possibly ever endorsed, yet people are scared and hide in their bunkers because they're never tried, done any research on their own, and just take the "AboveTheInfluence" ads at face value.
Media digitisation: Book transubstantiation
They were two separate meetings. From the article:

" ... I actually did attend the meeting that John describes in his blog post. However, as a full time engineer on WebObjects, I also had the opportunity to attend a different all hands that Steve Jobs called ... "
> I have long been an advocate for a single internet currency,
> independent of all governments.

I don't see a single currency as a replacement for government currencies for the simple reason that managing inflation/deflation (including introduction of new money as the population/economy changes), particularly as a way of managing debt and facilitating class mobility are decisions that vary between cultures.

The lack of fiscal control was a common complaint some decades ago against the euro forming, and as another comment points out, the loss of monetary control has exacerbated some European countries' fiscal problems.

Adopting an common internet currency intended to replace global currency will likely fail for this reason, and also because of governments' concerns for the tax/revenue implications.
I had the very same doubt the author of the comment you replied to seems to have had. What confused me is that I thought that the 'directioning' these problems to Jewish people was an implicit scheme.

After all, simply directing the questions to Jewish candidates is discrimination too start with. They took so much care in finding a set of problems they could justify as not discriminative that I though they had developed a clever scheme to implicitly direct the questions.

I mean, the university prepared itself to answer "But the problems aren't hard, check out the solution!" when asked "Why did you give hard problems to Jews?". I would simply ask "Why didn't you give everybody the same set of problems?". What I don't get from having skimmed over the paper and comments is how they prepared to the latter question.
Type Theory and Functional Programming
In general it's true that you can't avoid the runtime, but in this case I think people's expectations are colored by CoffeeScript, which offers (for many) a more productive environment than vanilla JavaScript, with no runtime at all. Since Dart is a CoffeeScript competitor in the "languages that compile to JS" space, this is a legitimate disadvantage. Dart may well have so many advantages over CS that this becomes a non-issue in practice, but we shouldn't pretend this isn't a story at all.
IPhone 4S faster than Galaxy S2, despite being 800MHz
I, too, wanted to ask this question, but feared that someone would respond with something akin to "submit a patch" or "grep the source code"

Obviously, it makes sense for someone who is versed in the news.arc internals to fix the problem; nonetheless this issue certainly bugs me.
Hehe, apparently these days on HN you can get downvoted for posting facts:

> The Dalai Lama has cancelled a trip to South Africa after he was not granted a visa in time, an issue activists have blamed on Pretoria’s reluctance to upset China.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/496eb260-ee96-11e0-9a9a-00144...

edit: In case people are wondering about my comment, the original post had negative votes earlier today.
So is this the pattern we can expect for the coming months? HN posts titled "Steve Jobs and [insert my agenda here]"?

I realize when you want publicity for your cause, startup, whatever you tie it to something else that's in the news anyway but all these "Steve Jobs and X" posts are bordering on tacky or tasteless.

Although at least this isn't as bad as Stallman's truly tasteless rant.
Startup uses cloud for real-time video transcoding
Absolutely. I am at a loss as to why people use Java for Internet facing sites and apps. Of all the things Java 'should' be used for (embedded apps and desktop applications) it gets most used for the one thing it wasn't designed for - the web.

So...was GWT developed for Java web developers that didn't want to learn Javascript? Javascript is just one of the things you have to know how to use to build a modern web site or web application.
You get that when your session expires, which takes just slightly less time than writing a well thought out comment.
From the comments:

'Apple's eschewing of openness is a myth. What they have done is use free and open standards where they cannot add value (e.g., in an OS kernel, a network stack) and go closed where they do add value. MS is much more closed: they insist on keeping the innards of the OS closed, and also make it very hard to inter-operate by breaking accepted standards. Jobs's real genius was a first-class skill at abstracting: trimming things down to their essentials. Even if we don't agree with all his choices, we can learn a lot just from understanding that.'
I think some pages are generated statically and expire. Why the login/logout pages "expire", I can't really guess at.

Wow, not sure why this is so deserving of downvotes. Trying to find a source, but I thought there was a previous discussion of many HN pages being statically generated and served quickly with links that expire after a certain time (or become invalid because of what may happen on the server side of things). But oh well.
Mastering HTML5 Prefetching
Yeah, I think the problem with the 4S is that it's a fairly minor update. Look at the difference between the "smartphones" before the original iPhone and after, the iPhone and the iPhone 3G(S), and then the iPhone 4. Each was a significant upgrade in both technical prowess and on-board features. However, the consumer market has already seen -everything- the 4S with this year's Motorola, HTC, and Samsung offerings.
> I don't see anybody ditching RIM yet.

Then you haven't been reading asymco :).

This recent article includes such sentences as "During the last month alone RIM lost 1.2 million users." http://www.asymco.com/2011/10/07/3411/
If the US decides it wants access to your accounts, I don't think putting a server in another country will be enough to stop them.

The real answer to this and all other serious privacy issues is to use strong cryptography properly. There's no two ways about it. Anything that isn't encrypted before it sees a NIC should essentially be considered a public broadcast.
This happens to me a lot while reading HN. I hit "More" and by the time I am done reading a few comments on a handful of entries, the next "More" has expired, and so has the current.

This only happens on HN (at least to me).
You wouldn't have to write if(a==a) in the first place in those languages, however. if(a) would suffice in C and C++ for an integer type or a pointer, and possibly for an object in C++. An integer value would also work in Python. I can't say anything about Ruby.

The fact that a==a can return false isn't really the main criticism here. You could override the == operator in C++ to do that too. The article is claiming that having a literal boolean true be the only "true" value is an issue. I think I agree with this just because this code evaluating to false is out of line with every other language out there, and I haven't seen a case (yet?) that it's an improvement for any other practical purposes:

a = 1;
if(a) {
print("A is true!");
}
> The comparison with Ruby and Python isn't really fair.

It's fair because there is nothing stopping you from picking up any of them, a decent framework and be orders of magnitude more productive than either a Java or a C# developer. C# is a better language than Java, but it still comes short when it comes to developing web applications.

There are hugely successful apps written in C# and Java, I agree, but their existence is owed more to the brilliance of their developers than a brilliant choice of tools.
I also find it ironic that this link to perl.org took 15 seconds to respond.
Preventing User Errors in Automated Teller Machines
I think you're on to something there. Doesn't processing also encourage the use of globals as a way to make it more accessible to artists who are just learning how to program?
Father of SSL says despite attacks, the security linchpin has lots of life left
This is apparently an old problem that hasn't been fixed yet. As you can imagine, pg has a lot to do these days ;)

See here
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28944
I am fairly certain, having never met Steve Jobs, that he was a bit more than just marketing hype and product fluff. In my mind, that was part of the public facing that he allowed in the open. I, as a complex organism with multiple thought patterns and facades, recognize that there was probably much more to Steve Jobs than the article author stated. Whether you use Apple products is regardless to the fact that boiling a human down to a couple of descriptives is fairly shallow.
> ... yeah, like when C gets compiled to machine code, you lose all the benefits of machine code

You know that's an apples to oranges comparison. JavaScript and C are much more expressive than assembly language. This complain is that you are writing code in a less expressive language (Java) that's being compiled into a subset of a more expressive one (JavaScript).
If you clicked on the links, you'd know why.

The software stores the current state in a closure. The closure gets cached. When the cache is full, the older closures get flushed, hence the error message.
"a measly iPhone 4S with an A5 chip, an amazing camera, voice recognition, iOS 5, and 1080p HD video recording."

Well, even looking at his list from the perspective of an iPhone 4 user...

A5 chip: I don't think my iPhone 4 is slow in anything I do. I guess the 4S is better at playing FPS that are terrible on a phone anyways.

Amazing camera: Nice feature, but the iPhone 4 camera is pretty good already. I doubt this is as dramatic as the 3GS to 4 camera upgrade.

Voice recognition: Might use it in the car sometimes. This used to be available for the iPhone anyways, and no one used it.

iOS 5: I get this on my iPhone 4.

1080p HD video recording: iPhone 4 already does 720p and I've never felt it lacking.
I dunno, something like:

* The backing of the largest web company in the world.

or

* Inclusion in the second-most popular browser in the world.

Yep. That aught to do it.
The HN server uses a table of closures to implement those links (the id code for the closure is the bit after fnid= in the url).

When the HN server starts running out of memory, it drops entries from this table. When your browser asks for an entry that is no longer in this table, you get the "Unknown or expired link" error.

This is a crazy design, but unless someone would like to patch the source code and get PG to accept it, we're stuck with it.
I agree with the tone of the people posting comments here:
The hardware refresh is nice, but it's nothing special.

If this were an Android phone, that would be OK as the next super-device would be no more than a month away. As it's the iPhone, though, this means that people are stuck with a device that is only just on par with current Android devices for the next year.
What if people are already using your product despite poor documentation?

Then what's your motivation to make the documentation better, and the abstractions easy to understand?

At worst, you could simply believing that you work in an inherently complicated field where people must pay for services and training just to get by.
The key policies and papers which defined the NHS
I've become accustomed to getting the error when I linger on the page for a bit, and even in that context it's pretty irritating, but tolerable. Just this morning however, I'm able to click on the logo link at top-left, immediately navigate to the bottom, select "more," and get the nasty - that's remarkably dysfunctional.
How is that a fallacy? "Better safe than sorry" is a platitude that can be used against any activity that entails some degree of risk.