skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> More importantly, [languages like CoffeeScript] all fail by requiring that you be an expert in two languages.

Why does this mean they fail?

> learning CoffeeScript and its idiosyncrasies

Which idiosyncrasies?

> The problem is that many programmers are turned-off by the lax nature of JavaScript

Maybe true of Dart, not of CoffeeScript

> but I urge you to ask yourself whether a move to CoffeeScript is sign that you've given up on learning it properly?

It isn't.

> we rarely have problems caused by the very things that CoffeeScript aims to eliminate

CoffeeScript is generally more readable and concise than JavaScript. It's just more pleasant to work with. Does it solve any problems for a narrow definition of "problem"? Probably not, but who cares?

I've noticed that most people who don't like CoffeeScript simply have a negative gut feeling about it, but have never really tried it. Or are trying to prove that they're better at JavaScript than you are (see http://stdout.be/2011/08/23/macho-programming/). I don't mind that: everyone is free to choose his/her own tools, and if one of the hot new tools everybody else seems to be using just looks ugly or stupid to you, whatever. I probably make my own fair share of weird toolkit choices. But I don't try to rationalize them with arguments that don't make sense.
What really kills me with vim/emacs is that if I want to search for users of a struct field (e.g: named "count") on a large code-base, there's really no practical way of going about it.
While it might be harder to get good employees cheaply, you would expect that finding financially independent co-founders would be easier.

If you have reasonable financial discipline, 5 years of $250,000 can easily build yourself a war chest of a few years living expenses: the perfect co-founder.
This is a very promising result - apparently Khan is roughly as good as a traditional teacher provided a teacher is in the room. Now the important question is to figure out how much of the teacher can be done away with.

For example, can 1 teacher + Khan educate 80 students as well as 1 teacher without Khan educate 40? Or can we replace the (well paid) teacher with a lower paid day care worker for at least some of that time?

If Khan can reduce the number of teachers required to educate students, that would go a long way towards reducing our out of control spending on education.
I was in nearly the same position as you around this time last year. It was tough and exhausting for a while until I wasn't learning as much throughout the day. You'll get back to a point where you have the energy to come home at the end of the day and spend a few hours working on your own projects.
Hi zeit_geist,

to me the problems you've described in your blog post are specifically application model problems. I think we shouldn't abstract the application model into the database, but the database into the application model.

I know a very innovative French developer who wrote an application server, that comes integrated with the database. In this very way you just call the exported functions provided by your database directly. How you model your (re)caching/(re)indexing and other application needs is totally up to you. This a) a freedom you barely find anywhere else. b) bare to the metal development of an application c) the most effcient way to develop an application. (b/c you only implement what you need and don't use a generalized construct that serves a general purpose very well, but doesn't scale with your application very well)

I would recommend to implement an application using the pattern that you know works best for the application, if you don't know it yet, then it's time to read books that enlighten our horizon of available solutions until we can start developing again.

I will show you an example of what I mean.

http://gwan.ch/api#kv

This is how I think is the most elegant way to interact with a(n integrated) database.

I am curious on what you think about this. I know I've not referred to the points in your post, but I've read it carefully. Thanks for hearing me out. I'm sorry I didn't post to your blog, but I prefer to post without subscribing to an external party. You limit the users who can answer this way imho. I'm not sure if it helps you to keep out trolls/spammers, but it sure helps to keep response rate low.
For someone with ~ 10 years of experience who has a very good track record, I could see a total compensation package of that order.

Joe Shlub is not going to get this. But I've worked with very good developers (e.g., guys at Apple who were instrumental in making whizzy stuff happen in the Mac's graphics stack) who are worth this, and more.
Adding to the data pool:

I'm also an under-30 engineer making ~250k in the Bay Area (at a publicly-traded gaming company, not at Google). My company has six pay grades for pure engineers; I'm at the second highest. My 2011 comp breaks down as follows:

* 166k base

* 45k bonus

* 35k stock grants (RSUs)

Note this does not include 401k matching, stock purchase plan, healthcare, or any other quantifiable perks.

When I took this job a year ago, I had a similar offer from a prominent NYC startup: ~220k (150k base, 30k bonus, 250k options over 4 years using offer-time valuation). I was 26 at the time.

For added context, I did not attend an elite school. I did not complete my undergraduate degree. I'm smart, but not extraordinarily so (800/710 math/verbal SAT). I interview well. I have a "disruptive" skill (cloud expertise).
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The demise of PC games has been talked about at least since the PS one. I don't thinks it's going to happen for a while. The delivery mechanism on the PC side feel much better than on other platform (I'm completely bias, I even read PC Gamer every month). I do feel that web games have a chance to bring PC gaming to more platform than just Windows. Unity/WebGL/Flash are the future for a lot of genres, AAA titles will still need closer hardware access for sure.

I like what sony attempted with the xperia play an android phone with a game pad but, it's sony(who are now tarnished) and it's going to be a niche product so forget good games.

On the mobile and iDevices side, I feel their biggest draw back right now is the input mechanism. Touch is great for a lot of things but in gaming it feels a little weird to me in a lot of genres.

As for the console, well, until now the big 2(sony, microsoft) haven't seen a need to spend money on a bigger console. They are getting to the end but it's not really a longer cycle than the last one looking at this timeline: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_video_game_console_...

Nintendo on the other side has saturated the market for the Wii and needs a new hit or they will die.
Space-complexity of SSA in practices
Some people have signed contracts that assign the copyright of anything they create to their employer, so starting a business on the side isn't possible.

http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/19422/if-im-working-...
Been there, done that. Being a developer is a small fraction of what you need in order to create a successful product. If you are the kind of person who can do it, you don't need to read posts like these.

I don't know about this guy, but it looks like he hasn't done it, and he has little idea of what lies ahead. Best of luck to him.
As of October this year, Apple sold 250 million iOS devices (That’s iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads.)

http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/04/250-million-ios-devices-sol...
Leaving aside, of course, the wisdom of losing your $250k job over a game that nets you $753.32 over its lifetime.
What I can achieve by myself is so much smaller than what I can help achieve as part of a team. I worked independently for 4 years in electrical engineering and now that I'm with a team of 10 other engineers the quality, variety, and magnitude of the projects I am working on has increased 20x. Working independently all that time had a huge opportunity cost but did afford a great lifestyle.
I think it's a good tool. It allows you to produce better code faster. Writing CoffeeScript while reading the resulting JavaScript can probably help you to learn "the good parts" faster. (I'm not saying you shouldn't learn JavaScript 'properly', if you need to deliver a significant quantity of it.)

I've been spending a lot of time writing Boo and reading C#. My intention was to put off learning C# for awhile, at least until after I ship my current project. I'm working on finishing my first game with Unity3D (and quickly developed an aversion to UnityScript).

Boo is an absolute joy to use, btw.

The funny thing is that I'm kind of learning C# by accident, by reading it (and the BCL docs) and writing Boo.

Will I at some point switch to C#? I strongly doubt it. Boo allows me to move much faster, produces cleaner, nicer-looking code, and compiles to equivalent CIL. It's all win, as I see it.
Why does everyone assume that English majors can't program? Or that theoretical physicists can? (they usually aren't very good at the engineering side of programming)
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Seriously, there needs to be something that shows the way to the future. The people working on the next version of ECMAScript look to languages like CoffeeScript as archetypes of the future.

More then anything CoffeeScript shows us what Javascript might look like someday.

We get to actually try out new idioms and see if they work for us. If they don't we have ample time to voice concerns. This is a huge departure from the past.

If anything CoffeeScript will make Javascript better.
I find though that companies often place as much nonsense in my way as they remove so there can be a trade off.
Which isn't that far off from only those 2 nintendo products. So to claim Apple was wildly more influential seems flawed by the numbers.
I'm not sure that this conclusion follows nor am I sure that discussions like this accomplish anything. CoffeeScript makes it easier to write "correct" JS and patches an institutional bug: Javascript's development crawls along. Even if it didn't the browser-as-environment handcuffs developers from taking advantage of new language features. (Have you used JS array comprehensions? No, because browser support is spotty, unreliable). And even in the best of development climates -- a thousand genius hackers ardently updating the code base -- these environmental restrictions would persist, drawn over the frame of IE-Mozilla-Google conflict and competition.

So we have languages that compile to JS that let the language evolve. I use CoffeeScript sometimes and JS sometimes. I'm not going to waste the time in the write-compile CoffeeScript loop for 100 lines of JS that I can write correctly. However, I no longer have to work on a 2k LOC, complex JS app without all the niceties of CoffeeScript. Furthermore, if I'm doing something that benefits from the special expressivity of a Lisp, I'll use clojurescript. If I'm very adventurous (and I need to write, say, an H.264 decoder), I'll use emscripten after any language that compiles to LLVM first.

But these are all for different uses, often things you would never have used POJS for anyway. It's not a discussion of plain ol' JS versions of H.264 encoders vs those made originally with Emscripten. It's a discussion of them not existing at all before, and now having the ability to express them and compile to JS. It's not a question of the old enormous apps we built in JS to the new, simpler ones we express in CoffeeScript. It's a question of not being able to build/maintain 5k LOC in POJS across many developers (whereas this task is less substantial in CoffeeScript). Live and let live and everyone benefits.
Yes, this is the system that I like. I don't give a damn whether or not I live near the equator, in-between, north pole, etc. (for the record, I live in a place where the DST could be considered "useful")

Don't mess with my time.

Alas, hell is other people.
Higher bit density from the same manufacturer at a similar price suggests a less reliable drive.
Look in the link provided and add up the totals for all Game Boy and DS revisions.
> CoffeScript Means Giving Up on Javascript

It absolutely does not.

There is one good point from this article :

"Anyone who uses a Javascript library should know Javascript well or they will run into problems with large applications"

The rest of the post is an attempt at instilling a granny-state fear for the Javascript scene.

There will always be people using technology they don't understand. Why are you so concerned about it?
Mobile and online casual games have been pulling in very impressive profits for the last 3-4 years while many companies have seen console and PC retail profits decrease in the same period. The demand for hardcore games isn't being threatened but the supply might face harder competition for funds with casual games now.

"Might" as in I don't know how these AAA game publishers are organised internally. If the console division of Capcom sees decreased profits while the mobile division sees increased profits [1], does that mean that people and capital can get reallocated from the console division to the mobile division?

[1] http://www.joystiq.com/2011/10/26/non-mobile-capcom-profits-...
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Thanks big help! If you know anyone needing roommate ASAP my email is my username at gmail.com . Strategically I'm thinking storage unit in the city, gym membership keeps me fit and clean each day, and bed at night just to sleep. I know PHP MYSQL JQUERY HTML CSS UBUNTU SERVER and more full stack I can trade for any help getting established here.
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I wonder whether it would be possible to optimise the Python interpreter to make deep copies copy-on-write. I suppose that would involve a lot of work for relatively little gain.
I appreciate that this is often a geographical and jurisdictional question, but that falls firmly in my "Don't do that, then" category.
Probably not health care. The value of that is hard to deduce.
Possibly not 401k match. Most people don't factor that into their totals.
Traditionally, compensation package for an engineer means salary, bonus, stock.
You did it! Nice work, man.

This feature is going to make Tubalr one of my primary music discovery apps.

So stoked. Cheers!
It's like having a phone number. You'll survive without it but you're making it more inconvenient for others to communicate with you.
Ask HN: Best hosting service?
Hi, I am looking to change hosts. I've used services such as Bluehost, HostGator and Network Solutions. I've been thinking about moving to Amazon EC2 or another service, as I plan on launching my site pretty soon. My question is, what would be my best option for hosting my site? Aspects I'm considering are security, speed, price, backend ui and stability.

To put things in context, my site functions similarly to Yahoo Answers and Quora, in that users create simple accounts, post a brief article and comment on other's posts.
The DMCA "ushered an era of investment, innovation and job creation?" Well, I suppose, but that's an incredibly charitable way to put it. I think "failed to prevent an era of investment, innovation and job creation" might be more accurate. The DMCA was introduced at the behest of big media; it just didn't go far enough to protect their interests.
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> However, it breaks down in semi-structured content, content where---parentheses for grouping---(hierarchical structure is important, data is seldom written and frequently read, and where read performance navigating the hierarchy is most important) and so forth.

Again, this problem is not new. Database greybeards call this OLAP and it's been around since the 80s.

There is nothing new under the sun in this trade.
I agree. I write Python all the time, and I would have expected something like list(*a).
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You should note that most companies flag the serial numbers of the drives inside bundled enclosures.

I had a 1TB WD MyBook I picked up some years ago, eventually installing the drive in my tower some time later, and just under the 3 year warranty it started failing. When looking into getting it replaced the drive's serial number would always return the MyBook product, not the WD10EACS that was inside it. If I was to return it, I would have to re-install it into the enclosure, and make sure the "warranty is void if broken" sticker which I naturally broke removing the drive, was unbroken. I've also seen similar with Seagate FreeAgent bundled external drives.
Why is this a story if the flaws have already been fixed? I have no expectations of perfection from Amazon, just responsiveness.
Hacking out your idea is more resistance than genius. I would say, 99% persistence.

I got my first job a few month ago doing programming, and I learn a lot. However, how I learn is mostly banging my head day after day. When I am at work, I have no choice but to bang my head against the code, trying to figure out why it is not working.
To quote the author: "For the extra effort you'll make learning CoffeeScript and its idiosyncrasies, why not put it towards really learning JavaScript?"

There are so many wrong saying in this statement.

First, understand that CoffeeScript is JavaScript - but without its idiosyncrasies. If you know JavaScript really well, learning coffeescript takes minutes. CoffeeScript embraces closures and prototype inheritence; it just makes it less cumbersome to use.

Second, who said that programming in CoffeeScript means you don't really know JavaScript? CoffeeScript let you write better code in less line. (By better I mean easier to maintain and read). Furthermore, CoffeeScript programmers tend to choose it because they enjoy coding in Javascript and want to keep using it. What is way more scary is maintaining codes of designers who use jQuery without understanding Javascript.

Third, I hate the "For the extra effort" part. It's like saying, either you learn Python or C++; you can't learn both so better spend the time learning C++. It's just totally wrong. Good programmers tend to enjoy learning new technologies and paradigms. I'd even go further by saying that learning CoffeeScript will make you a better JavaScript programmer.
If you find yourself wanting a hard drive more now, than you did before reading this, be aware of this effect:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/oz/scarcity/

"""Scarcity, as that term is used in social psychology, is when things become more desirable as they appear less obtainable.

Buyers for supermarkets, told by a supplier that beef was in scarce supply, gave orders for twice as much beef as buyers told it was readily available. Buyers told that beef was in scarce supply, and furthermore, that the information about scarcity was itself scarce - that the shortage was not general knowledge - ordered six times as much beef. (Since the study was conducted in a real-world context, the information provided was in fact correct.) (Knishinsky 1982.)"""
Wow, tons of great data this bozo used to support his argument.
I have taken a short look at your approach only. I still think KV-stores are Assembler-like constructs and as such I would apply my criticism to your approach equally -- please correct me if I (mis-)judge your project! But in general, I think your approach is a good one.

Regarding comments at my blog: I don't understand what you mean with "subscribing". According to the settings page, you do not have to register. You are free to comment there anonymously.
That being said, your comment at HN is highly appreciated. Thank you for taking your time!
Hi,

I run engineering for foursquare. About a year and a half ago my colleagues and I and made the decision to migrate to MongoDB for our primary data store. Currently we have dozens of MongoDB instances across several different data clusters storing over a TB of data and handling 10s of thousands of requests per second (mostly reads but the write load is reasonably high as well).

Have we run into problems with MongoDB along the way? Yes, of course we have. It is a new technology and problems happen.

Have they been problematic enough to seriously threaten our data? No they have not.

Has Eliot and the rest of his staff @ 10Gen been extremely responsive and helpful whenever we run into problems? Yes, absolutely. Their level of support is amazing.

MongoDB is a complicated beast (as are most datastores). It makes tradeoffs that you need to understand when thinking about using it. It's not necessarily for everyone. But it most certainly can be used by serious companies building serious products. Foursquare is proof of that.

I'm happy to answer any questions about our experience that the HN community might have.

-harryh
86th Birthday Rage
http://www.google.com/search?gcx=c&sourceid=chrome&i...
Might work for some people who are not influenced by the clock; personally for me if it's not 12 pm it's not lunch time.
> To really program, you need to know assembly.

That's just an absurdly untrue statement.
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> actual wealth [vs.] frivolities like fashion accessories and entertainment.

I'd argue that's a fallacy. Show a pre-industrial revolution subsistence farmer a car factory, and he'd throw his arms up in horror over the frivolity. Imagine his reaction to seeing a airplane factory producing billion dollar vehicles that are meant to freight hundreds of so-called "workers" to spend a week out of their FOUR annual vacation weeks drinking and dancing in southern Spain (where? the furthest this farmer has ever travelled is the next county over where his sister lives).

> (Side note: there is a case to be made that pure libertarianism would result in more wealth for everyone, meaning more people could afford voluntary charity and community spending. Bluntly, I don't have that much faith in human nature. At minimum, I could only see that working when coupled with the right sociocultural value system, which emphasized a balance between selfishness and community, rather than an adulation of greed.)

Governments enforcing sociocultural values only works when those values exist. In the old east-block, governments were hard at work enforcing a set of values it's citizens didn't share. It didn't work. The UK doesn't have a constitution, but it was much better at protecting it's citizens than these east-block countries whose constitutions, on paper, were vastly superior.

If the people broadly didn't care about inner city schools or the homeless, nothing would be done for them, government or not.
Do you or anyone else know how much/little Google outsources their development work?
I was having a discussion with a fellow engineer about the outsourcing model and innovation.
It collects measurements from distributed renewable energy installations and uses those measurements to measure & optimize the systems' performance.

I suppose you could have engineers drive around with clipboards, but the amount of data collected and the frequency its collected at would suffer. In other words, that job could never exist for a human.

Is that close enough to count for your "theoretically"? I don't think so, personally, as it could never make business sense to have that job be needed for the operation of the business, so...
The tech wasn't ready yet but everyone could see it back then. It may not be ready now but it's really close. I would give the console one more generation of dominance before everything is upended.