skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The worst of both worlds: Dart fails to provides the advantages of static languages, without compensating by the flexibility of dynamic languages.

This was my impression exactly when I first read about Dart. This is the language that Google wants to replace Javascript? Please. Javascript may have some strange design quirks (or outright flaws, depending on who you talk to), but at least it has the sense to have a meaningful boolean context. I understand that you can't try to revolutionize everything if you're targeting a wide audience, but this just looks like decaffeinated Java.
Note that I didn't reply to your original post. While one might argue whether this really is irony or just a tired "haha, Perl" joke (or about the applicability of ad hominem by association), I was referring to the more immediate "envy" issue. Not that I don't regret posting, as I don't think digressing in this direction is worth a discussion here – although that would've taken place without my contribution.

"Perl, right, yafeelme?" is basically the "What's the deal with airline food?" of the programming world…
Normally I would down-vote such a comment, being that it's all promotion and no contribution...

But I clicked the link and have to say that site is gorgeous. I signed up to give it a try.
The lunacy of the "iPhone 4S is a disappointment" crowd
How can I eat meat with a good conscience?
69 slides? How long was the presentation?
Anyone know if this is open source?
Apologies. I unintentionally mixed some numbers. My typical ride was 30 minutes, on a route with few traffic lights. That's an average of 15mph, which is pretty tame.

20 minutes was my _record_, with me hauling ass as fast as I could possibly go. And for the record, I was drenched. But I brought a change of clothes and had a quick shower that day. :)
Ah, didn't know that. Thanks.
They may not be able to guess whether you in particular or your children are Jewish, but if I can guess your name from your sex, zipcode, and birthdate, I'm pretty sure that there will be many markers of that major a part of your life to someone who examines you at any depth looking for those markers. A major marker will probably be, for example, the lack of any markers of any non-Jewish group, i.e. you're not an obvious Catholic, Muslim, Protestant, etc.

Of course, as a black American, I'm jealous that that's the biggest question that you have.
There are very few banks. The poster is clearly upset with his, but if they refuse to do business, he will have even fewer options.
How Bilingual Babies Sort Out Language
Start Online Earning With Blogging
I will never understand how HN manages to be so (maybe relatively) anti-drug, even in a latent fashion on this topic. I do, not, understand this sentiment. For all of the things that HN does not take at face value, there is a blind acceptance of the "drugs are evil" viewpoint espoused (often exclusively in the face of their own studies, dozens of times, over 20 years) by the United States Government.

Downvote within 3 minutes, immediate comments touting how evil and unhealthy they are (which for the majority of lower level drugs are simply untrue, but you wouldn't know that unless you thought for yourself and read the literature).

Maybe I should clarify, there is an unusually large amount of effort that seems to be exuded in terms of keeping others from taking drugs, either through culture, pressure or laws than I am used to expecting on HN.
It would not be beneficial to standardize such s young technology. It is likely that the best car battery design hasn't been invented yet. Standards bodies are there to codify best practices and not to decide things by themselves.
"Any time you program one language in another, you lose all the benefits of the target language"

... yeah, like when C gets compiled to machine code, you lose all the benefits of machine code.

On some level that's true. You can certainly write machine code that's faster than C, and often you can take advantage of hardware features that the C compiler can't use (in some cases, SIMD.) On the other hand, C code can be portable across platforms and developers can be more productive.

GWT keeps one important attribute of Javascript: the ability to run cross-platform on web-browsers. It trades the benefits of programming in Javascript for the benefits of programming in Java. Static types have some advantages, and you get to work with Eclipse and have automated refactoring and a good debugger.

His fundamental criticism against single-page webapps is valid, but this is true about Java applets, Flash, Silverlight as well as some Javascript frameworks.

A fundamental criticism I'd have of GWT is that it's very to build very complex applications in GWT, complex enough that the problem of managing asynchronous communication becomes a real bear.
He makes three distinct points and each are wholesale defenses of secrets, and the second two combine to ignore the fact that it's a government entity making the secrets and dismiss the lack of transparency as important, again, especially given the laws we're discussing. I don't know how I have possibly mischaracterized what's occurred here.

What am I missing here? They've boiled this down to completely trivial examples that ignore the gross violations in Constitutional rights via gagged court orders, NSLs, FISA warrants and courts, warrantless wiretapping, etc, etc. They're debating the need for having IDs to buy alcohol as a defense of secret government laws that are meant for protection.

This is the quint-essential "security vs liberty" and "governmental security through obscurity". It's old, I've been debating it for years. Frankly, it's intellectually weak.
Isn't this just a fancy derivative of "fill this form out and we'll send you a free iPod?". Because that's all it is..

If you tell me people want achievements, well.. Achievements in games feel good because there's actual skill involved, and it feels like you mastered something. You can't say the same for doing random tasks online. You can't just throw a word like 'achievement' or 'score' on top of what you're doing, and think the effect will be the same.
Onkyo tx 1008
I either sit on a stool, or on the edge of my seat. For me, using back support just encourages bad posture.
Where did you find your refurb? Does Humanscale have an official refurb program?
Our customers were thrilled to see their 20 year old applications running on an iPad. I don't know how that would be possible without a java interpreter for funky old languages, and GWT as a bridge to the web.
Having a == a be able to generate false is quite common, it's for instance the case in C, C++, Python and Ruby (off the top of my head), when a is the floating-point entity NaN. Surely not all of these languages are ill-defined?
I think one of the reasons JS succeeded is precisely a major complaint of experienced developers: globals [1]. But this, (perhaps as with PHP) is what enabled novice developers —some of whom eventually became experienced developers—to learn the language easily.

We all started with some bad practices, and as we matured our code did too. But the loose, forgiving standards are precisely what enabled broad use in the first place.

When a language imposes more constraints on the programmer (it may be for their own good!), it limits adoption and growth.

1: From the summary of Javascript: The Good Parts, "... Douglas Crockford identifies the abundance of good ideas that make JavaScript an outstanding object-oriented programming language-ideas such as functions, loose typing, dynamic objects, and an expressive object literal notation. Unfortunately, these good ideas are mixed in with bad and downright awful ideas, like a programming model based on global variables."
I seem to think that they are used by smaller or personal organisations (that's what I think they would be ideal for anyway). So maybe a lot of trades-people and freelances could be utilising their service.
[Review] MetaTrader 5 – Best Free Trading App For iPhone
IOS Live-Chat for Apps
its new and will add live-chat to mobile apps.
They may not be evil, but they aren't particularly good for you either
My four year-old son is bilingual and he is also learning Mandarin songs and some words in his daycare. Although I have read about the incredible ability of young children to learn up to 5 languages at a time in many linguistics courses, I'm still totally amazed.

From my cursory observations, it seems like learning the words is te easy part, the grammar is harder to acquire. Up to perhaps three years old, when he was talking Turkish to us you could easily understand that the underlying grammar was English, he was just filling the slots with different words. Now, he has both grammars fairly down (he's making the cute verb past tense over-generalization mistake, though, i.e. all past tenses are regular with -ed).

His language skills seem to be superior to his friends in both languages. This is one data point, of course), but I think learning 2-3 languages at once is beneficial in language development.
downvoted for irrational mysticism
Yes, it has to also be offered as open source.
So what does influence take-up? And does Dart have it?
Reminds me of Carl Sagan's musings on marijuana usage.
In my view, GWT is for creating large/robust web-based applications, and that is where machine-level optimizations really pay off. If you are writing a tiny utility on a page, hand coded javascript might pay off, but if you are writing a large/complex application, it becomes impractical for a human to do what a optimizer can.

I am not saying that GWT is perfect for everything, but it pains me to think of writing (and debugging, and refactoring) a large application in javascript, or any weakly typed language. I've tried it, and found it difficult to maintain.
That is not working very well in Europe right now with the Euro...
That's dynamically loaded, try it with the runtime

$ gcc hello.c
$ ls -l a.out
-rwxr-xr-x 1 maht maht 4511 Oct 11 16:38 a.out
$ gcc --static hello.c
$ ls -l a.out
-rwxr-xr-x 1 maht maht 574106 Oct 11 16:38 a.out
Maybe because is better to be safe than sorry? The fact is that there are a lot of people whose life is very publicly destroyed by drugs.
(...) it begs credulity that someone who has filed patent applications dealing with cryptography had never head of Bitcoin until I asked about it.

I don't see why; Bitcoin is hardly innovative in cryptographic research (in fact, that's part of its appeal, since it makes it more trustworthy), and I don't see why should a cryptography expert necessarily be interested in new currencies or financial tools.
Think about all the searches that are related to current events. Assuming most of these events have never happened, that's a lot of new, unique searches.
A big multi-billion $ business deciding to dictate its own behavior or end is not the same as dictating law, even if the law reacts by changing in order to preserve the business.

The current system, where corporations often actually, literally dictate many laws is a lot less open and straightforward.
How to Build a Million Dollar Business by Age 28
> You would write if (true) {...}, but I can't imagine why you would do that.

In haste to make your point, you overlook that Boolean expression are used in loops too. Combined with a "break;" I'm sure many here have used a "while (true)".
"Anyone got interesting, concrete data to share rather than anecdotes about Steve Jobs?"

Here are all of the Johns Hopkins studies on psilocybin:

http://csp.org/psilocybin/

You might also be interested in going to Horizons if you're going to be in NYC this coming weekend:

http://www.horizonsnyc.org

It's all of the talks on the latest scientific research on psychedelics for therapeutic use. You can also watch many of their previous talks here:

http://vimeo.com/horizons

As well as many of the talks from the huge MAPS conference that took place last April:

http://www.maps.org/media/videos/

If you're looking to read any books on this, a couple I'd recommend would be:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594774021/erowid-20

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594772509/erowid-20

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0892819278/erowid-20

I have an entire page with many more links to this stuff, but it's on Squidoo so if I linked to it then my comment would be auto-deleted. Heh.

edit: Changed Amazon links to donate affiliate fees to Erowid
That's his point exactly. Critics on one hand claim that bitcoin will always gain value and on the other say that you will suffer loses/not have anything of value when it loses value. These two arguments seem to be incompatible with each other.
Kirpeep: An Open Market for Goods & Services Launching out of MIT Tomorrow
There is a lot of great wisdom trapped in Dan Sugalski's blog. I've tried to recommend his articles before but they've never gained any traction.

http://www.sidhe.org/~dan/blog/

Of particular relevance here is his Parrot Retrospective:

http://www.sidhe.org/~dan/blog/archives/000435.html

Especially the last two items. One being the list in the wrap-up: good advice and the other being the one about Leo—the man who single handily derailed Perl 6. One guy is pretty-much the reason we all laugh at Perl now. I watched it happen: he refused to build a MVP, he kept throwing away working code to re-architect it bigger and more convoluted ways. There's a big lesson there for every start-up.

If you do take a look be sure to read Dan's well-written blogs about language design and implementation, especially those tagged "What The Heck Is:"

http://www.sidhe.org/~dan/blog/archives/cat_what_the_heck_is...

I've always held a lot of respect and sadness for Dan Sugalski. The guy was not only a brilliant architect and hacker but he had the knack for always being right. It's sad that he didn't stand his ground and was sadly pushed out of the project. I get the impression he had some tough times after that.

If any of you guys see he CV come up you shouldn't think twice in giving him a senior role.
Steve Jobs and Sukkot
What? And there are a lot of peoples' lives destroyed by greed. Does that mean you don't seek to make money?

A greater percentage of water drinks drown than marijuana/lsd/mushroom users die from marijuana/etc usage. (As in, no one dies from them.)
http://www.amazon.com/Aeron-Chair-Herman-Miller-Adjustable/d... with the back support removed. Hard floor wheels.
Will Windows 8 be the Safest Operating System?
My Aeron chair that I've had for less than a year.

Does its job, looks sexy, but might not be the chair that has the most value for its price.
I'm pretty deeply involved with the reprap project. I have 4 printers at home. I don't need to imagine this. During the industrial revolution, access to the means of production was the primary determinant of wealth. Industrialists won big, most of the rest were factory slaves, essentially, except for craftsmen who were not replaceable by machine products. How does this translate to the modern world, where 3d printers are getting cheap enough for individual families, even relatively low-income ones in the developed world, to own?
In Canada, the statistics for illicit drug use almost mirror the statistics for tobacco use; a legal substance. At this point, it is not even clear what we are attempting to solve by the legislation.
I've got complex feelings about Java.

The comparison with Ruby and Python isn't really fair. A better comparison is C#, which is like Java in spirit but has a large number of incremental improvements over Java.

Underlying it all, Java has an attitude that concision doesn't matter. One reason why people don't do anything interesting with generics because you always have to write

GenericContainer<AnotherGenericContainer<ArbitaryTypeA>,AbitraryTypeB> = new GenericContainer<AnotherGenericContainer<ArbitaryTypeA>,AbitraryTypeB>();

C# has var, extension methods, function pointers, generics without type erasure and many other little things that show respect for the programmer. You realize then that the "problem with Java" isn't an all or nothing thing (static types suck), but an obstinate cultural attitude that's gone on for 15 years.

C# might not be as concise as some languages, but it shows you can have something a lot like Java that isn't as bad... and that makes it clear how outrageous Java is!
The thing is, if you've owned both a Toyota and a BMW that are outside of the manufacturers 'free maintenance' window, well, you'd know that Toyota makes a vastly superior vehicle.

I think this supports what Jobs said rather than diminishes it. People love the BMW for the image, and for the performance in certain rare cases. (The BMW is superior to any Toyota I've driven once you get above 100Mph) People love the Toyota because it's an economical, reliable car that performs quite well at the speeds you normally drive.

The mac has a certain image that people love. I mean, that image, personally, does not appeal to me, but that was Job's point. If you can make a product that resonates with a small portion of the market; and if that product resonates to the point where they are willing to pay a large premium, you can make quite a lot of money. Maybe even more money than selling a lower-margin, higher-quality product to the masses.
This must be the most useless award ceremony in the world. They are out to give everyone an award, and make headlines - hence, Zuckerberg.
But you don't have to standardize the internal battery tech, just the form fit and interaction. For example, the shape and electrical connectors the battery will use. Then everyone is free to make their battery hold 2x as much as the reference design and that's OK as long as it fits and talks the same language to the car and charger. Same way I can buy AA batteries with lithium inside that last 8x longer than the generic store brand.

There's no reason to dictate the battery chemistry or internal cell layout. As long as a standard is set for slow-ish charging (i.e.: the battery tells the charger, "give me X amps at Y volts"), we're good to go.
The design goals for Dart look suspiciously like the original goals for Java, particularly Make Dart feel familiar and natural to programmers and thus easy to learn. In the case of Java, that just got us a crippled, verbose knock-off of C++. Hmm.
Ask HN : The best CRM ever developed
I began to use Olark as a paid user recently and it changed my way of working. Before, I was focusing on "development" thinking that clients would come. Now, I am focusing on clients so that development will come. Olark helped me in that turnaround.

Now, I'm looking for the best online CRM to help me keeping track of everything about my clients. I'm currently using ZohoCRM but I'm not completely satisfied. The UI is hard to use. I also tried Highrise but wasn't satisfied.

What I'm looking for :
- An email that I can BCC to for email conversations with clients

- A simple read/write API (ZohoCRM API is read-only)

- A simple UI

- More than one user

- A fair price (~20$/user/month)

Let me know what you're using and why!
Check out scalagwt. They've enhanced GWT to read a protobuf abstract syntax tree so that any language could be compiled to javascript if it can target that output. The first language they have working is Scala, which is far more suited to working with frontend code than java and in my opinion better than javascript. The nice thing about GWT in general is that you get to use a traditional oop approach to maying out the components of a webpage ala java swing.

http://www.google.com/m/url?client=ms-android-verizon&de...
OpenSUSE Announces First Public Release of openQA
possibly because it take more juice to run the new chip?
And have ~50² religious wars in the process? No, thanks.
Why music ID resolution matters to every music fan on Facebook
For some strange reason only the dailymail has all the photos and video.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2047345/Father-par...
Sam Harris on LSD:

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/drugs-and-the-meaning-of-...
Yes, and there is substantial risk for the American involved too. If listed as an owner, you're the one who gets served if the corporation gets sued in the US. So it's never as easy as "find an American and get paid", unfortunately.
Such a device was featured in Charles Stross's recent novel Rule 34.
Building a multidimensional display from trash
"Unknown or expired link." - Why?
Why would such a valuable site continue to allow itself to be plagued with this type of repulsive usability issue?
Real Life iPhone 4S’ Siri Demonstration Is Pretty Damn Impressive
There are plenty of bad schools in the US, and always have been. As rbranson remarks, in some places this has to do with racism. In others, it has to do with generally low expectations.

But yes, schools are a big deal, and often a deal-breaker on living close to work.
One can easily be anti-drug while supporting legalization. I personally support legalization of more drugs, but I'm not going to do them myself and I'm going to do what I can to keep my kid off them.
I have been more and more amazed at how powerful PyPy turns out to be. In order to eke out a small space-and-time improvement on lists they implemented multiple versions of lists: general-lists, integer-lists, string-lists, empty-lists, and range-of-integer-lists. This is invisible to the programmer, who can create a list of 3 integers and then append a string and the data structure will silently change itself behind the scenes. They have even done things like changing the sorting algorithm (eg: integer comparisons are super-fast so a different sorting algorithm is optimal). That is deeply powerful magic, and I shudder to think how difficult it would be to implement the same features in an interpreter or compiler written in C. And all this with just a handful of nearly-full-time programmers!
The problem with your argument is that you appeal to the idea that open source is more virtuous than proprietary software, and you want that virtue to rub off on Apple, but unless you explain why open source is virtuous, nobody can refute your implication that Mac OS X has almost as much of this virtue as Linux does.

I would almost certainly be running OS X even if none of it were open source, and I tend to believe that that is true of most OS X users (even those users like me who can program). In contrast, the fact that parts of OS X are open source does not seem to help OS X gain traction in markets where completely open-source software stacks are vastly more popular than OS X, like embedded systems, supercomputing and internet servers.

I am not an expert on all of the reasons developers and admins of embedded systems, supercomputers and internet servers prefer completely open-source ecosystems to OS X, but I tend to believe a lot of it has to do with not wanting Apple to be able to jerk them around and has to do with the fact that if they started to use OS X, Apple would be able to jerk them around almost as much as they would be able to if Darwin, Webkit, LLVM and TextEdit were not open source.
Google LevelDB inspired compaction in Cassandra 1.0
And this is why my blog only has 4 posts over 2.5 years. I simply don't have the desire to take on such polar opinions with such little topic background. It seems these knee-jerkish opinion bits on Dart, GWT, X, Y, Z have grown in popularity here. I enjoy the discussion because the comments here are full of more information than I could quickly aggregate myself, but I wonder when I will become a pompous enough software engineer to feel the need to write posts like this.
a cool project would be to make a webapp that implements the following contest: create an ELF binary to do X with the smallest number of bytes.
Apple and any of the big brands of German cars have been associated (emotionally and culturally if not officially) together quite often. Volkswagen, BMW, and Porsche especially. Except for Mr. Jobs's personal preference, there's almost no association between Apple and Mercedes-Benz ("the German car for people without a sense of humor.")