skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Qore programming language
Whoa, Nathan Barry was my first boss. He was 19 and designing websites—I was 14-15 writing PHP CMSs. We worked in an incredibly hot 2nd story office above a bike shop in Boise Idaho. Good times.

Glad to see you've found success in the iOS realm, while helping improve people's lives in a real tangible way.
Salt Lake City/valley has a better grid system, just saying. I dearly miss it.
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That's absolutely true and Adobe are not the worst. Autodesk are really bad at this; $3995 for AutoCAD in the US vs $7,635 in the UK. This doesn't make Adobe any less dishonest though. Software piracy is a complete anathema, but with gouging and disparity like this it's quite clear why it goes on and begs the question as to who is the thief and who is the victim.
1) Corporations don't understand IT. To them it's a cost center, not an enabler. So to minimize costs they must find developers that are (a) easily replaceable (b) cheap to hire

2) Sun did a great job marketing Java in the late 90s and early 2000s. So corporate managers felt safe adopting Java; it was the "in" thing. And as kls said, corporations have a lot of inertia. Why break something when it's working? (It's due to this mentality that some corporations still run VB6 and COBOL apps)
I used to do admissions interviews for computer science at a UK university. Some applicants liked to boast about their A grades in ICT. My usual response to this was: "err, ok, I won't hold it against you".
You would use it for testing your pages or for screen scraping. Having the DOM server side allows you to use most client side JavaScript libraries such as jQuery.
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Ask HN: Should startups invest in business cards?
Obviously, there is a practical tension to keep costs to a minimum, especially when teams are small and frugality is important.

But there is also a strong need to evangelize one's product during physical meetings or chance encounters. Without getting too geeky (like emailing one's contact info to another, etc.) what do HN'ers typically do?
For the past 8 years I've been designing .NET enterprise integration solutions and I love it. I love the problem solving that is required and working on getting square pages to fit seamlessly into round holes. Recently I switched companies and was working with jQuery and PHP doing front end things like UI validation and was losing my mind. It's not the pencil and paper type of challenge as integration design.
A Tale of Two Concurrency Models (Go and Erlang)
Amazon cloud is not the only cloud service out there, I think spreading the bridges over multiple company's/countries that have similar products would make it more sustainable.
I think there is some validity to your hypothesis.
Off the top of my head, crawlers or html fragment caching and or/rendering.
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Thanks, ICANN: colleges start registering preemptive .xxx domains
Thank you for this. jsDom was the only other server side DOM implementation, and it's garbage (buggy).
I guess understanding why purely language bound code (which most likely accounts for 95% of the packaged code out there), e.g. an object system, would need testing across the cartesian product of all versions, all OSes and all archs, is beyond me...

I guess when you have a language that doesn't have a specification, you require things like this...
Its a well structured, well thought out language that somewhat feels like an extension of a lower level language, like C. Generally, companies working on big projects want developers who are comfortable with a wide variety of programming concepts, including using interfaces, modular code, etc and Java, and its ecosystem, helps to reinforce these types of practices. Static typing is also critical for a larger application, something like PHP is really just a scripting language for front-end display and if thats all you have used you are probably missing out on a lot of larger CS concepts
You make Java's decline sound almost inevitable. Perhaps it is. But Java retains significant performance advantages thanks to the (by now) well optimized JVM, and SaaS has actually helped it replace more elegant languages like Ruby in contexts where performance is critical, since the whole code base doesn't have to be thrown out, and Java can be dropped in strategically.

A good talk on this is "Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM" by Twitter's app services chief Raffi Krikorian http://ontwik.com/rails/oreilly-oscon-java-2011-raffi-krikor...

The fact that Twitter just hired Oracle's Adam Messinger as its new CTO seems to be a strong sign this direction is continuing. http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/07/twitter-nabs-former-oracle-...

Certainly languages like Ruby and Python will continue to post performance gains as their interpreters mature. Certainly the migration of e.g. Lisp (Clojure) and Ruby (JRuby) to the JVM will accelerate these gains. SaaS will allow a mixture of languages. And surely other language platforms will be Good Enough for many startups and for smaller apps at large companies.

But at the edge of the performance envelope, among memory managed languages, Java still seems to be a big winner, at least if the folks at Twitter are to be believed.
Good job. I think one of the most important things you did is you knew who your customer was before you started your application. It seems obvious, but most apps in the app store have no target customer.
Aaah, gotcha.

The problem there is that there are already several arrows pointing to J. So if I change J then I have to update all of them too. And then have them regression tested.

(It's usually the cost of regression testing that causes the most crustiness.)
Meanwhile at Daring Fireball

crickets http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8E_zMLCRNg
Dustin, those were good times. Glad to see you frequent HN. Hope everything is going well for you now.
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I did ignore the assignment. I was new to college, expected it to be a place full of exciting bright people, all feeding off one another's enthusiasm for knowledge. I'd hoped for, I don't know, some acknowledgement or something.

What I got was a seat in a lecture hall, and a drone ignoring my work.
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That is an interesting hypothesis. I have no medical citations to wave around, but it Makes Sense To Me, An Ignorant Layman(tm).
The main reason that specs become so important in PC purchase is because with the IBM compatible PC there needed to be some way to differentiate between a bewildering amount of brands and models. There needed to be a clear reason as to why a $1000 PC was worth more money than a $500 one.

The problem was that there seemed to a spec war a few years ago (still continues to some extent) with computer companies trying to get as many high numbers into their ads as possible. For example allot of ads saying stuff like:

3Ghz CPU , 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD , 128MB Graphics Card for Only £300!!!!!

Of course this would actually mean you got a Celeron , lots of basic slow RAM , a low speed IDE HDD and a shared memory graphics card with minimal acceleration features but of course it would sound impressive to the less savvy buyer who had a basic notion of what the numbers meant but who didn't really understand performance overall.

I always compare this to people who compare the performance of 2 cars by quoting the engine displacement as the key figure for performance without considering induction method , valve configuration, fuel delivery etc etc. Of course cars at least have numbers like bhp and torque and bhp per ton which at least provide something to compare, I often have people show me 2 computers of similar price in a catalog and ask me "which one would be faster" and there is no way I can really answer that question with much confidence.

It was also important of course because many pieces of software , especially games would have a "minimum requirements" portion on the box.

Apple computers have always been less spec focused in their marketing , mainly because there are fewer models to choose between, so a simple Standard/Pro/Pro++ works just as well.

Of course specs are still important really , this is evident in how much hype is given to the CPU etc of a new smartphone when it comes out. Even apple have a "tech specs" section for each of their computers on their website , and usually give options for faster CPU , Extra Memory etc.
When lots of android tablets hit the market I can't really think of many others ways in which people will distinguish between them apart from obvious stuff like screen size and weight (which are really specs themselves anyway).
You need some heuristic which can be used for answering questions like "If I buy this tablet , how likely will it be to still be able to run all the newest graphically intense games in 2 years time"

The only thing that I can think of that has really changed recently is that more stuff can be offloaded to "the cloud" rather than computed locally, obviously in those cases local hardware specs become less important but specs like latency and bandwidth (especially upload) of your ISP / telco provider suddenly become more important.
By "UK schools", it'll almost definitely be referring to GCSE (general certificate of secondary education) qualifications. And in this case, in ICT (Information Communications Technology; which doesn't contain any/no real programming).

So a couple (real) ICT GCSE exam can be seen here:

http://www.ocr.org.uk/download/pp_08_jun/ocr_31318_pp_08_jun...
http://www.ocr.org.uk/download/pp_08_jun/ocr_31316_pp_08_jun...

They actually do contain a bit more 'technical' stuff than when I did ICT GCSE (~7 years ago I guess?), but there's still not much.

As for this story, I agree with an earlier comment that there might be another side to this. None of my ICT teachers (as far as I know) knew how to program, but at the same time I can't imagine any of them would have failed a clearly-good piece of coursework.
The story was written as a quick response to an email on a list, not an article for the front page of hackernews. Please excuse the obvious errors (of which I am sure there are quite a few)
I don't know, I think specs still work fine for cameras. Not the megapixel number but the resolution of what it actually picks up. Also noise levels and shutter speed.
If they think this PCB is "packed" they haven't looked hard enough at a smartphone teardown. Go look at the iPhone 4S teardown:

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone-4S-Teardown/6610/2
The success of rapid development is more a function of the team, than of the language used. It is wrong to blame Java for the failures of poor developer teams.

Java is stable, has plenty of libraries, lots of tools, is friendly to refactoring, testing, and it is not such a bad language. Just take a look at the tools developed in java by good teams (eclipse, apache, joss, spring and so on..)
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Do they really need that many selectors - it can't be good for performance?
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There always seems to be a pretense for these kinds of laws. And the internet is always the scapegoat. You never hear of politicians wanting to set up permanent police checks on the highway because criminals use the highways. Or set up checks to verify lawful use of electricity from the electrical grid because someone might be using it in an unlawful activity. The public wouldn't stand for that. And they shouldn't stand for this.
>>No more my $self = shift

E.g.:

use Method::Signatures::Simple;

method get_file_sizes(@files) {
# ...
}
I was just about to say the same thing. If you look outside the innovator & early adopter markets - to the early & late majority markets - you'll find a lot of confusion over specs. They'll glance them over, then make a choice by:

1) The brand

2) The price

3) The look & feel of it

4) A friend's recommendation

5) A salesperson's recommendation

They might glance at specs, not to make a hard analytical comparison, but to rule out what they fear might not be a good machine. Then, with their top choices, it's other factors that influence their purchase decision.
Nah. Those are the reasons that an organization would like to list for using Java. But "kls" nailed it above. It's mainly inertia and labor availability at this point.

The reality is that most enterprise projects are generally so many layers of lasagna code that JVM performance is about 20 down on the list of things to blame for poor performance.
Yeah, get off hacker news and back to work.
I have been doing Java for a long time, and while I personally prefer more modern languages I have found that if I have to load up and work on someone else's code, my life is much easier if it's in Java because the tooling (specifically refactoring support) is so good. So even if I inherit an old, awful, "big" codebase, I have a good chance of wrestling it into shape by pushing it around in Eclipse or IDEA, with some reasonable guarantees that I haven't broken anything along the way. So the fact that I'm not entirely doomed in this case (as I recently felt when I inherited 300k lines of very bad Python) is a good selling point.

So as a common-denominator for large codebases with average-quality developers it makes sense in the long term, although it's not terribly fun.
> Omnipotence means God has limitless power (or better, his power cannot be improved), not that he can do anything, whether logically impossible or not.

I'd like to write a well-thought-out reply, but I'm a little confused. How is `power' defined (for God, that is)?
This article was posted a few days ago. I'm a competitor.

Having built the same kind of company from the ground up, I have good reason to suspect that most of Dwolla's transaction volume does not come from mobile payments, if the $350 million / year number is accurate in the first place. Some revenue comes from Bitcoin transactions, which the article doesn't mention, creating the false impression that Dwolla is already a mobile payments juggernaut. It isn't.

Dwolla does not integrate with any point of sale systems to the best of my knowledge, which means that the title of this article is basically fantasy.

Dwolla is also breaking California law by operating in a manner that allows California users to use the service without a money transmission license. (Having an investor that processes transactions for banks does not make Dwolla exempt. Anyone who doubts this should read the list of exemptions: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=fin.... If Dwolla were considered a bank it wouldn't need a money transmission license in Iowa, which it has.)

I'm not a fan of that law, so as of yesterday I've sued the State of California over it.

https://www.facecash.com/legal/brown.html
I am amused by the site being down. Going back to WordPress, he presumably forgot that a cache plugin is pretty much required. Not that Jekyll is perfect, but that's one area where it's pretty much impossible to beat.
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Yes, 100%

A startup can't generate revenue or even continue, without the spread of word of mouth, which is a BIG way to get new customers.

I've been there when you don't have a business card and it does 2 things:

- You look really unprofessional

- That's one person that will never remember you again.

I would advise vistaprint.com, they give 250 free business cards, you just have to pay shipping. Here's the link: vistaprint.com/thankspandora
There are a number of reasons why you might want to use jquery directly from the server. Some off the top of my head...

-You can keep your application code hidden from prying eyes

-You only serve up ~120kb of javascript to the client no matter how intense your application is

-You can get better response times for realtime games and apps since what your user is doing is tightly coupled with what actually needs to react (the server).

-You can write 3,000,000 or 10 lines of application logic and it will not affect the speed of the client's device.

One flaw is (potentially) in coming up with a new way to cache redundant requests properly.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. Your points are valid.
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中性脂肪の量は少ないほど健康的？
I am very pessimistic, because it seems governments just won't stop trying to pass such laws

And by definition, they have deeper pockets than us -- they can afford to push it farther than we can, because in the end, they control the guys with the guns who can come and take everything away from us.

A few years back I was involved in a local controversy. The local authorities made three tries to pass a referendum, being rejected each time. Finally, on the fourth try, they were victorious. There was no difference between what was proposed in #3 and #4, except:

1. They changed voting hours, so that polls were only open in the afternoon; and

2. They sent postcards to the entire town (paid for by us, of course) containing information that was objectively false. [1]

-----

[1] Not relevant to this discussion, but the referendum was for school construction. The proposal contained a bunch of frills such as expanding the cafeteria. The false mailing I mentioned explicitly stated that the proposal was for classroom space only, which was patently false. But the mailing was timed to arrive the afternoon before the vote, when it was too late to do anything about it. And they knew we couldn't afford a lawyer, and the amount that could be done ex post facto was limited anyway. No one ever held them to account.
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It certainly will be work to port to the native Firefox on Android. The good news is it's not too hard. The bad news is you have to port... again. Like you said, Firefox Mobile already caused an add-on shift when multi-process was created. Now, we have removed the multi-process, but also removed the XUL front-end. The end result will be a great Firefox Mobile, but once again, we are asking add-on developers to re-work their add-ons. I know it's no consolation, but I wasn't too happy that we threw away 2+ years of work either.

I am happy that the new, native approach will address many of the problems that caused users to avoid Firefox on Android. This means more people will install and use Firefox, making it a more compelling platform for add-on developers.

We plan on writing some tutorials and documentation on porting add-ons to native Firefox on Android, but the basic information is:
# Same add-on system. We didn't invent anything new here.
# No multi-process. You can use the classic ways of interacting with web content.
# No XUL UI. We can't overlay, or use DOM access for any UI. We have implemented several services using native UI and created a simple API for manipulating some native UI:
# nsIPromptService and nsIAlertsService are available and use native services
# NativeWindow is a new helper object that supports managing menu items, door hanger notifications and popup toast alerts (more coming too)
# JS XPCOM components can still be used to override and implement Gecko platform behavior
# Jetpack support is still in the works.
I'm actually very sad that people don't understand the power of RSS. Of course you have to be stupid to push Reddit through Google Reader, but that does not mean RSS is dead as much as email is dead because we have Facebook messaging. While that analogy sounds outrageous, think about it: you won't kick yourself because you missed the top post in Reddit from the morning (maybe it annoys you that you don't understand the windfall of followup posts) but I sure as hell don't want to miss the one important publication that got published in a journal about my research. Sure, my unread count is now 2000, but I can still rest assured that my procrastination will not make things I haven't read to just disappear.

I used to really love some subreddits, especially r/askscience. I used to be able to just put an RSS feed and never miss a single question I could help with. But now its overwhelming; I can't do anything about it. So I just didn't even bother going there for a while. Until I figured out ways to filter the posts in the subreddit and feed them into RSS (I used http://ifttt.com/ for that btw) and now I can at least try to answer questions of my interest.

While social aggregation sites are good to go through while munching dinner, when you need to consume data for real knowledge acquisition, I don't think you can beat RSS. For that I hope RSS never dies in spite of all the ignorance around it.
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3228816
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From what I've seen of at least Python, it can't really touch CPAN (yet?). It is not the same width of neither modules nor infrastructure (CPAN Testers, etc.).

And the lack of code blocks irritates the life out of me. But I get why it is a common education language, like Pascal in its days.

Edit: Mithaldu wrote this up well.
Have you tried Imager[1]? It's what I'd recommend these days, but I don't have experience with image manipulation in any other language so I can't compare.

I agree that there need to be better ways to find modules. I have high hopes for MetaCPAN in this regard.

[1] https://metacpan.org/release/Imager
Well, I think the idea is that you will plug it into a TV that you probably already have in the house. Thus both the HDMI port and composite TV-out. Keyboard and mouse still will be required though.
I know everyone here is busy, but call your Representatives on the phone. http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml

Protesting is fine. Donating money to the EFF is fine. But truly angry phone calls by constituents are extremely powerful.
I have a similar non-technical background (UX/design) and was curious how you were able to not get frustrated and outsource the development work rather than doing it yourself. If I was in the same position, I would get too restless and want it built right away.

Any advice on how you got through that situation? Thanks.
I have the guts to agree with this. He did NOT have responsibility but his words do have an effect..

Do our words have an effect on others? I think most intelligent ppl would say yes, even if the effect is small. I mean, you can't have your cake and eat it too... so the parent is absolutely right.

When you are depressed, small things that may seem trivial like not answering a phone call, responding to an email, etc becomes a big deal as they pile up.. little by little, depressed people lose faith in both humanity, and themselves. It's very easy and convenient to say we don't have time, and very very very easy to say "talk to me when you're in trouble", but extremely hard to actually walk the walk in our busy, occupied lives
What made you decide on the $199 price point?

Additionally, do you think the $199 price point might it out of reach for a lot of people who would benefit from the app but who have tights budgets?
It is. Corporations exist for the purpose of maximizing their own profits. Government policy making should be about maximizing the people's well being. These might sometimes be related ends, but they're far from being the same thing.
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Chegou o Microsoft Office 365
>why in the world would you vote this down?

Because it's spreading misinformation that could prevent people from becoming marrow donors.

As a way of balancing this, here: http://marrow.org/Home.aspx

They'll send you a free kit. You swab your cheek, mail it back, and then you're in the registry.

Take five of your minutes and give them to somebody that needs them.