skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Adding TCP/IP to Windows was an innovation? Winsock was pretty much lifted from BSD. The API is so compatible that you can target both with a simple include file to #define away some differences (that's a good thing, but it hardly indicates innovation on Microsofts side), largely because Windows can't easily support the equivalence between filehandles and sockets that implementing the BSD socket API 1:1 relies on.
The Millionaires (And Billionaires) Groupon's IPO Minted Today
I read your linked comment, but I didn't find it persuasive. I'm no language Nazi. It's clear that language pedants are a pet peeve of yours, and that's fine, but language being fluid is not the same thing as language not having boundaries. It also doesn't imply that users of the language can be prevented from having opinions about its usage. We all together decide the standard, as I'm sure you'll agree. Currently, it's still true today that people in educated circles find "could care less" and "irregardless" to be ugly usage. I think there's good reason for that, but I don't plan to make a detailed analysis here. Steven Pinker's analysis notwithstanding, nothing in the linked comment is dispositive.

My original comment was not prescriptive. I do not claim to be the ultimate authority of the language because no such authority exists. It's hard for people to imagine, but what constitutes proper English is actually probabilistic. Some stuff is 75% good English and some stuff is 50% good English. Some idioms are more or less good English. I find the constructions under discussion to be less good, and my opinion carries the authority of my fraction of say-so as a member of the English using community.

But, frankly, I'm off track. My original point was to call attention to the inappropriate tone of one of the disputants, not participate in more natural language pedantry on the Internet.
(The article is wrong; it's not Motorola, but Motorola Mobility, which is since January an independent company[1])

Interesting. Motorola Mobility is the company that is poised to be acquired by Google, provided the stockholders vote favorably 12 days from now. Could it be an early influence? I'm not sure what MM has to gain by suing at this point.

[1]: http://mediacenter.motorola.com/Press-Releases/Motorola-Mobi...
This is not about you personally but Steve Jobs is idolized by many entrepreneurs on HN and elsewhere. Look at this huge discussion here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3177729 about something that he said.

So I believe Jobs saying the equivalent of "Those that can , do technology and those that can't, do charity." sends a very wrong message to many budding entrepreneurs who may go on to become super rich in the future. An influential man's words live on beyond his grave and influence people. This is not about disparaging him as much as disagreeing with him on that particular opinion, which many people here seem unable to do.
There's gonna be something fancy in the DA8 parking lot, I assume.
I assume the author's numbers come from TheFunded or AngelList, which I'd expect to be a highly biased sample. You would expect more seed deals to go through these sites, since they will typically cast a wider net. Later deals will be more private, unpublicized, and with companies that are already connected to institutional funds. It would be much more interesting to see numbers from SEC filings in the tech sector.
Microsoft builds stuff that's meant to last for an ungodly long time, and mostly they do it pretty decently. IE6 is still a standard because they built it to be a standard, and it has endured as a standard.

This means it's hanging on, old and crusty and hard to use, when its contemporaries are long dead and thoroughly unlamented.

I hate a lot of Java for this, too. That's not a good idea on my part either. Building this way is a specific market niche and we are all better off that there are products that fit that niche.

You and I are not looking for products in that niche, but we should both give thanks that it exists.
I agree completely with this. The article is a disguised attack piece.
That's probably to make it easier to parse with type inference, since right now it's the type name that start's a method definition
Linus Torvalds tends to favour patents, and has three himself.

> I think patents probably work better in certain areas than they do in ours. Software patents? No. Process patents? No. They just don't make sense.

It's not clear from the actual quote that he thinks both software and process patents "don't make sense" as the title states (or just process patents). He probably does, but it's not clear from this interview.

I think he's very insightful about patent and copyright litigation being especially nasty from a legal perspective, because it's winner take all with no middle ground.

Oh, and he think Java and the JVM are "horrible". So consider this polemic approach when assessing his patent views.
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As with so many bits of Microsoft history - don't look at what is replacing Microsoft, look at what Microsoft replaced.

Think about IBM with a full-on monopoly on both the hardware and software, and what that would have been like instead.

Yes. Bill Gates helped make computers affordable.
The screenshots and narrative don't provide nearly enough information to warrant a registration. There's not even a price-tag, will this cost $10 a month or $1000? How does it hook into my infrastructure, do you provide plugins (for which platforms?), is it a daemon, kernel modules, SNMP?

You should really provide a live-demo or at least a screencast so potential buyers can get a remote idea of what they're looking at here.
Pinboard looks good and my extension is not nearly as polished as that but you don't mind stopping what you are doing and enter tags and notes in order to save a bookmark?
You left a type in there!

greetABunchOfPeople people
people do
_ sayHello println
You don't have to assume that they actually mean anonymous functions. There's no real reason why the Xtend compiler couldn't translate closures to Java objects.
You want more evening light, you get up earlier.

I want more morning light. Can't stand getting up when it's night, don't care when it gets dark later in the day.

How about we just agree that "noon" means "sun straight overhead" (within a half hour for time zone position) and each get up as each sees fit, with no thrashing over forcing strangers to adhere to an unwanted deviation at arbitrary dates.
That's correct, neither girl has said they were asleep, nor has either one said he raped them. This sort of push story is just propaganda, being placed widely using private intelligence agencies like Palantir who have their corps of posting personas (who are especially active on HN and reddit) working to generate an illusion among the public that there is an understanding he is guilty of rape when he has not even been charged with it. The idea is get him to Sweden, then Sweden releases him to the US for interrogation.
No problem, when you hit Ctrl+Space on the Eclipse editor it completes with a pair (opening and closing) these "chevrons"
What if you multiply it by a negative number?
While I understand skepticism about the claims that have lead to his extradition given the timing and nature of them, the reports of internal conflict and staff turnover at wikileaks make it pretty clear that Assange, for lack of a better descriptor, is kind of a dick. Wikileaks is not an organization which I would consider transparently run, and all reports I have seen seem to indicate that dissent was dealt with rather harshly.

Honestly, from what I've seen, Assange's failure as an effective leader has as much to do with the collapse of Wikileaks as anything.
Assuming that this project on GitHub is yours https://github.com/cirsteve/courseslate and you show it to potential employers, I would recommend you to learn pip/virtualenv, read about django best practices,
(http://lincolnloop.com/django-best-practices/)
Also I would recommend to cleanup your repository from files that are not completely necessary (varios .tar.gz files, .ssh folder, .bash_history, etc.) Those things give you away as a beginner.
>there's no doubt he's self-made

Sure, but a large part of the reason he was "self-made" was his mother's relationship to an IBM executive. I'm not so sure Bill Gates becomes the world's richest man if his mother was a teacher and his father was a plumber.
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The "jellyfish genes" in question are probably GFP[1] (Green fluorescent protein), which has been spliced into many organisms. You can even buy fish with the gene[2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_fluorescent_protein
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GloFish
I vehemently disagree. I think the problems that this causes are larger than the current solution.

Timezones aren't a human construction. Humans have only offered a series of approximations that are accurate enough.

Cognitive dissonance: What time is the business day of Shanghai? What time should I arrive in New York to get there in the morning? What time will my American guildmates be online? People would still have to memorise the major timezone offsets, and this would negate any purported advantages. If we're still going to have to memorise timezone offsets, why bother?

Rather than asking "what's the time in New York?," I'll be asking "what part of the day is it in New York?" The latter will be asked in place of the other, but it would also be harder to answer due to no localised New York time.

"What's the time in New York?" can be answered by knowing that American EST is GMT-5. My local timezone is GMT+10, and it's currently 1300. Hence, I now know that it's 12 PM in New York, which means it's dark, which means that businesses there are shut and it's a bad time to call friends there.

I'll admit that DST makes things harder, but I can still calculate a good approximation on the fly. 11 or 12 PM - it doesn't really matter. If it does, well, I know that the northern hemisphere will be at the end of Autumn, so NY-local DST is probably over.

With one global timezone, how do I answer "what part of the day is it in New York?" Well, I still have to remember that New York's "timezone" is -4 GMT, and I still have to remember that my local "timezone" is +10 GMT. I still have to do a calculation, but I have to have a mapping of times to the state of the day in my head to know where New York is in relation.

It's so much more complicated.

It also makes it hard to know "when" a certain place is. Say I arrive in London, and it's overcast. I'd actually have to calculate what part of the day it is, by working off my home time->day-state mapping. That's so wrong.
Apple Woos Educators With Trips to Silicon Valley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias
At least then vim would understand it and you wouldn't have to deindent every 'end' yourself. It would be nice to be able to use % and some other stuff that you get with most other languages.

The fact is that the visual style of a language is trivial to get used to. Breaking my text editor is a real issue though.
you can dress up a pig...
I'm afraid I don't really get this. Would you elaborate more ? Thanks !
Doesn't really answer the question... why are they on Google bikes? The beautiful design lacks in color so if I see a Google branded bike that's all I'm going to look at.
Plug-n-play? That's a standard?

It is in the "ISA-compatible hardware that doesn't need jumpers" sense, yes. It has a silly-sounding name, but it's a very specific set of hardware standards.

It was a huge, huge advance, speaking as somebody who got multiple graphics and sound cards working, simultaneously, with jumpers, back on an old pre-PnP 486 tower. I literally had a piece of paper with my IRQ and DMA channels and what cards they were assigned to, along with similar mappings for memory ranges, so that I could move the jumpers to reasonable locations for the next piece of hardware I added.

If you screwed it up, the new peripheral (and the old one it fought with) just stopped working. And then you got to go remap everything by literally moving a little fiddly piece of plastic from pin to pin on a card you had to open your computer to get at.

Plug-and-Play was huge. I originally griped about it too, back when it meant new hardware wouldn't work in my 486 :-P
It really whips the llama's ass! Back in 1997, I had a massive 2 GB collection of MP3s.

Edit: The best part was having to sort everything into 45-minute playlists so I could run a cable from my computer's sound card to a tape recorder to make mix tapes for my car.
As far as a precedent, lisp does it that way, and it may be older than the existence of the return statement. Any language that lacks statements usually does it this way.
Go to conferences and meet people! Make a network in your city/closest metro area and use it.

Having a github is a great start, that's one thing I want to see before I bring you in for an interview. andrew_k has good advice as well.
One question has still bugged me since the passing of Steve Jobs:

"What if Apple had decided not to port iTunes to Windows back in 2003?"

Let's pretend that the iPod stayed Firewire 400 - Macintosh users only. Would we have seen the explosion in iPod sales later in the decade? Would there have been enough money and courage to press ahead with the development of the iPhone?
Meh. This one's pretty simple. Ticket revenue mostly goes to the studios. The theater pulls in the cash through the concessions. The cost of the concessions, while high by microwaveable popcorn standards, are highly competitive among their peers.
The turning point was when Microsoft licensed DOS to Compaq. This suddenly send hardware prices tumbling and made computers cheap enough to penetrate the corners of the world.
This even made Linux possible in the early 90s by leverage cheap hardware.
All(or most) of the other solutions were software/hardware tie-ups like Apple and Commodore. Even Apple started taking advantage of this by switching to x86 processors. Also, to MS' credit, they never got tempted to get into the PC hardware market(unlike Google with Android/Motorola) that would've skewed things.

If you think Apple's prices are high now, think what would happen if there no other PC OEMs.
This is actually half of the value of it. It allows you to easily change the implementation without breaking the public semantics. Generally speaking, the first-pass practice in Scala is to use public fields and to make them vals (final/C# readonly). Where you need to provide mutability, you use a var. But due to C#-esque properties, you can go from

var x = 1

to (not great code, but illustrative of the point)

private var _x: Int = 1
def x: Int = _x
def x_= (value: Int) = {
if (value > 1337)
throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException()

_x = value
}

The convention is to use empty parents after zero-argument functions that have side effects, much like the ! in Scheme.
Thanks Andrew, virtualenv is next on my list as my system is starting to get mucked up with different packages and you are absolutely right that I need to clean everything up. Thanks for the input.
I never could care less that his company produced wretched technologies. I cared about how he was responsible for a company that used reprehensible business methods to dramatically damage the competition - some of them in ways that have been found blatantly illegal. It had direct negative effects on a lot of us in reducing our choice.

He might be a nice guy on a personal level, and he is redeeming himself in many ways now in general, but there was a time when it was certainly justified to, if not hating him, then at least detesting what he stood for as a business person.

That said, overall my image of him today is vastly more positive than it was, and as much as his net impact on my life still has been negative, his net impact on the world has almost certainly been strongly positive - after all, the number of deaths he's prevented through is charitable work most certainly matters more than having deprived privileged people like me a few technology choices.
All these posts on HN about DST with no mention of impacts on systems?

DST sucks on embedded systems, especially when the change dates are changed. Not knowing the local DST standard, or not being able to update fielded systems when legislation changes the DST dates, means a system may be on the "wrong" time for days, weeks or months. Many are opting to abandon automatic time changes for "hour+1" user settings, or ignoring DST altogether.

Could be amusing to compute how much worldwide total storage and CPU time is devoted to handling DST.
Daylight Saving Time is great. It helps us have more sunlight during the spring, summer, and fall. Everyone is happy when it is enacted in the spring and they get to have sunlight when they go home from work. And in the fall, you get an extra hour of sleep. It's win-win.
I'm pretty disappointed in the discussion that has gone here. There's been so much argument over things that don't matter much in the end, like whether or not optional semicolons and parenthesis are a good thing. These things are so superficial! It makes me believe that few people appreciate what actually makes a language good or bad.

The fact that Xtend can be easily translated to Java source code is a big sign that it probably won't have any dramatic impact on your productivity. I think the comparison that has been made between Xtend and Coffeescript is most accurate. Xtend will likely be more pleasant to work in than Java, but it won't be a game changer in terms of what you can accomplish with it. Still many people are happy with Coffeescript, and if Xtend does thing right many people might be happy with it as well.

And, I'm pretty sure David Pollak is the only Scala evangelist who is worried Scala won't or shouldn't overtake Java. Everyone else seems to be committed to making Scala a better and better out-of-the-box experience, and there continues to be initiatives and commercial investment in improving things like IDE support, documentation, coding standards, training opportunities, and more.
Where are you geographically located now? From your prior comments, I've seen NY and SFO.
There were several DOS alternatives available. Hadn't Microsoft been there, someone else would have filled that niche quickly. It is simply highly unlikely that removing Microsoft from that equation would have made all that much difference given just how competitive that part of the OS market was.
Yeah I never understand why people argue for permanent DST so it can be lighter in the evening all year round. Is it because we're all stuck in the mindset that work has to be from 9 to 5, and your favorite show has to come on at 8pm?
Facebook CPC would be 50 cents to a dollar. A 33% conversion rate is unheard of.
In the frameworks we instrument, we grab that information for you at the appropriate point.

In the case of vanilla PHP, the concept of controller and action is less well-defined, so we provide a function that you can use to log controller/action information you have in whatever routing class/function/layer you have.
Thats where I spend most of my time. NY right now for the holidays.
The term "xenophobic" might be overloaded, much the same way that "homophobic" is. You don't need to actively hate homosexuals to actually hold homophobic views. I still stand by the point that discriminating someone based on their nationality or citizenship is holding a xenophobic point of view. But let's agree that the term might be confusing.

>>If you gave every single person a choice (...) they'd all be living in Iran, the Congo or the US?

As if the only thing to factor in when choosing where to live is the "social contract". There are many people that are allowed to live in Canada and Australia, and yet they don't.

You'd be surprised by how averse to change most people are. Even in places where people have more opportunities to come and go, they still prefer to stay where they are over risking for better opportunities elsewhere. Not all Americans from flyover states want to move out, no matter how bad the environment might be. The same applies to Europeans in the EU, or South Americans in the Mercosul.

>> (...) There's not enough money in the world to pay for the UK's social security system for every person in the world(...)

I can see that we hold many different values about other things, and these might be contaminating the main topic of discussion. I don't want "government benefits". What I want is "free flow of people and services, so that they don't grow up to be dependent on these government benefits in the first place".

>> Why are you deserving more than any other being on the planet?

I am not more deserving to anything, neither I am any less deserving to anything.

>> And why should I even be allowed to stay in the UK?

Why shouldn't you? Are you dangerous? Are you denying someone to their freedoms? It doesn't seem to be the case.

In my value system, you should be allowed to stay anywhere where your presence (or your actions) do not cause direct harm to society. In yours, the country of origin takes precedence over the individual.
Bigass Macbook Pro with 27" monitor. Kinesis keyboard, J. Random large mouse (I have huge hands). Software, primarily Emacs, some Xcode.
Direct3d? Why not use OpenGL?

Because OpenGL is Not Good, even to this day. It's a brutally fragmented system that's got little going for it except ubiquity; the problems with it are numerous and ugly. (But you can't expect much from something where everything's a frigging GLuint, can you?) It is popular because it's everywhere, not because it's good.
nope. i've done TDD for 3 years, ever since I learned Rails.

in my experience, that's exactly how product design and development works. whether it's a startup or a goliath like Google, you implement a lot of features to test a hypothesis and if they don't work out you scrap them. i think you're "never write a line of code you'll throw out later" plan comes from a mythical world.
That's great and all...but they did, not somebody else.

Surely somebody else would have eventually written an open source Unix clone. (Probably not GNU, but somebody.) But Linus gets praised for it, and rightly so.
Help us build the Permabank project for #occupywallstreet! https://github.com/FLOSolutions/permabank

It's a Django gifting platform that will be pretty well-trafficked once we launch it in a couple weeks, that we hope to turn into a full-blown alternative economy platform one day soon. We could use dev help and have lots of people down here who could offer pointers for dev job opportunities to good coders. We're on irc.freenode.net #nycga-iwg. Best of luck!
Very cool stuff. I'm very interested in hearing more about how this conference (which I have every confidence will be really great) will complement the Conj.
Do you think it's better for the sun to rise at 8:25 am? Because that would be the situation during the winter solstice in San Francisco if DST was made permanent. Not much fun to wake up and go to work in darkness.

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/astronomy.html?n=224&#...