skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am utterly incompetent when it comes to inventing a good design. Almost every single module I designed has had its interface rewritten. In many cases, there have been several rewrites of the same interface because I did not manage to get a good design going even on my second, third or fourth attempt. Mind you, after two or three rewrites, I end up awesome APIs.

So, I need a tool that helps me rewrite modules as easily as possible.

One limitation is my words-per-minute figure. A language that is short, in the sense that very little code is required to get things going, is a good thing. Javascript and OCaml qualify, but Java, C# and PHP do not because of the boilerplate involved in many operations. I guess the latest versions of C#, with lambdas and type inference, are becoming acceptable.

Another limitation is the risk of getting something wrong, and the only solution so far is having a good automated testing suite. In every programming environment, there is a sweet spot to be found between too little automated testing (you waste a lot of time hunting for bugs) and too much automated testing (you waste a lot of time writing or re-writing tests), and what matters to me is how efficient that sweet spot is. For instance, Java/C#/OCaml provide me with "undefined variable" detection for free (just compile the thing) but Javascript and PHP do not.

When written in a pure functional exception-less style, OCaml detects almost all major classes of errors simply because of its type system. Many of these would require unit tests with complete code coverage in languages like PHP or Javascript (such as calling a member function that does not exist) or Java or C# (such as preventing Null Reference errors) and some of them cannot even be verified with unit testing at all (such as forgetting to check that you are allowed to do X before doing X). In fact, I suspect the automated testing sweet spot in OCaml is precisely to have no unit tests, except for dealing with external APIs or very complex logic (regular expressions...)

Not everyone can write pure functional exception-less OCaml (or do so happily for ten hours every day), but I can. As a result, I decide on the first design that seems to be compatible with the requirements, and perform at least one or two major design changes every week. These changes involve changes to at least 5-10% of the code base (with the odd 60%) but seldom take more than an hour to perform, and so far the automated testing has caught all the errors that cropped up.
Intel celebrates 40 years of processor production
I'm in South America, but I do work for a big company.

I believe that we use VB6 and .NET because that's one of the two main platforms student learn (the other being Java), and programmers can be treated as interchangeable pieces. You're certain to receive thousands of applications for a job posting, and get outsourcing cheaply and easily.

Are the results good? I believe they mostly aren't, not because of a flaw in the platforms. And yes, change is sloow. There are too many stakeholders for anything.

I've heard of agile development with Java or java-likes, and .NET as well, it's not a platform thing.
The don't-sweat-it-you'll-be-able-to-connect-the-dots-in-hindsight approach to life is both forgiving and encouraging in an almost avuncular way, especially when you're going through a period of intense personal turmoil that accompanies rejection. But then again, it suffers from a heady dose of survivorship bias.

And so the question begs, how do you know that you're on the periphery of a cul de sac, and all you need do is retrace your steps and begin with a clean slate? (This would definitely not have augured well for, say, an Airbnb. Then again, languishing in mediocrity or persisting in a stagnating job is like a slow death.)
Since it runs faster than a neuron, with fast context-switching it could be possible to model a human brain using such a device using fewer than 100 billion - perhaps as few as 100 millions? That leaves the 1000-connections-per-neuron issue - a switch 100 million long and N wide to shunt simulated impulses. So that work remains.
I had a high-school teacher that told us you could write a SSN on an envelope and the postal service was required by law to get it to the person. He claimed to have tried it out by sending himself a letter, but it took many months to arrive.

You'll notice from my hedging that I only half believe the story. Also, it may be a true story, but may have happened in the '50's or something.
Amazon EC2 + Tor = ...
Google is fighting it. It threatens both Youtube and Google search. I haven't seen them fighting it in public, though. But they should fight it openly and try to gather more support.
Amazon’s cloud is the world's 42nd fastest supercomputer
Please. They have always been meaningless.

In the 80s we were trying to compare Amigas, PCs and Macs. Well the PC had faster scrolling in its word processors, because it used text-mode graphics (the entire screen was 4KB, so it could scroll fast). The Amiga and Mac had wysiwyg, but rendered slower because of that. You picked what you felt was important; UX or compatibility.

What was the point of comparing 80x86s with 68000s. What was the point of comparing RAM when the software using the ram was different. Or how about screen resolutions? I had a PC with 1024x768 pixels which was more than the Amigas, but hardly any software used the resolution or supported it. My friends' amigas had tonnes of software -- That all ran of floppies.

In the 90s it was PowerPC vs. Pentium debate. We never found out which was faster, and we didn't really care.

Specs are useful if the software/system running on it is identical. They didn't become any more meaningless or meaningful than they were 20 years ago.

What we want now is the same thing we wanted 20 years ago. Responsive software! The specs will not tell you if it is responsive or not, but it can often give you a hint as to which of two devices with identical software is more responsive.

It is just that you cannot easily compare apples and androids, just as you couldn't compare Macs and PCs, or even cars from different brands using specs.

... This is nothing new! But perhaps people are just realizing it... again!
The instructor was correct: you didn't complete the assignment. Printing the stack (i.e. from within the code) is not the same as finding where a value is stored in a dump (i.e. when the code stopped running and might not even be available). What you did is arguably a lot more advanced and required a lot more skill than the assignment, but even the best philosophy essay shouldn't get you an A in a history class.

The mistake here is thinking that college is about demonstrating initiative only in class. Classes are just the structured part of the educational process, but the whole college environment is set up for there to be an unstructured part as well. If you have that much energy and talent, do something outside of class but in that environment like Gates and Brin and Zuckerberg did.
Thanks for your advises, in fact, I hesitated to write it in French, the easy way...

So I will carry on practice, I could try force myself to think in English as you said, good advice. Thanks.
The New Romanticism
Thats an interesting point about employees. I've seen a Java team take 6 months to hire 3 new developers in London. That's before development even started :)
If you get a chance to do a workshop with Massimo, go for it! The guy is an absolute legend and you'll come away from the workshop brimming with ideas for hacking projects.
Jon_Mroz: Connect with me on Facebook - http://t.co/EXP245r2
"Unread item overload" is why I started using the PostRank Extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pnngeaoibaajihakbn...)

It plugs into Google Reader (and even HN!) really well, and can quickly help you pick out the best links from 100's of RSS items easily.
Hear hear, Perl developer here.
I've used C/C++/ObjC/Java/Erlang and I just love Perl for gluing it all together.

I must admit my stack is outdated, I still use CGI::Application, though I love Moose.
I haven't kept us since catalyst, etc started to appear. CGI::Application works really well for me.

The other day I implemented push notification and geolocation bases functionality for a client in a couple of days.

To them it looks like magic, but to me it's just awesome that there are libraries in cpan to do just about everything making it a real time saver.
Reading these comments I am reminded a thought i had sometime ago. It was that in a not so far future computer languages may well but so easy that they would be taught to everyone, at school, along mathematics and French.

Working with python recently I think it could be the closest to that aim. I have a friend who taught python to his 13yo boy, i plan to do the same with mine.
At least in my OS/X terminal using the "Monaco" font (which I think is the default), the final one (U+2588) doesn't descend as far as the rest of the characters. It really produces some ugly output with that one included.

Including the space character means that you lose a nice baseline if the input is fairly sparse, so it looks less like a bar graph and more like just some random blobs.
Tell your HR: how to find/hire a hacker
Unfortunately, the sad truth is that market forces will dictate that there are few competent programming instructors for high school. If you're good enough to teach and critique real programming projects, you're also good enough to get a job paying at least twice as much as a teacher.

For the teachers not necessarily motivated by money, they would probably prefer become university professors where they can do research and work at the cutting edge.

I'll make the guess that most of us here were self-taught to a large degree. Therefore, the realistic solution to the problem is probably not to get better teachers (which you can't do, since you won't pay them what they're worth). But to connect students to learn from each other. Exactly what the author of this post is doing.
Some context: First, I most definitely do not think I'm God's gift to man. Ive seen kids with skills leagues ahead of my own who are true masters, my skills in comparison are basic.

Before I started the assessment, I asked for the mark scheme to make sure my project hit the criteria for a passing grade. We weren't asked to build in powerpoint, but most opted to do so for lack of a better option. I asked if it would be a good idea to build an iPhone app for the assessment and the teacher of my class said "Sure if you can, give it a shot". I have no idea when the teacher became aware that the project would fail but at no point was a concern raised with me until final marking.

I didn't build a complex project 'just to be different', I instead thought "Well here's an opportunity to learn to do something I didn't know how to do before". Id been developing web things for a while but hadn't dipped into native code up until that point
Note, the meetup is tonight, Tuesday the 15th.
This is a universal problem: teachers who are actually technically brilliant within their area of competence can't get paid enough to make it worthwhile to teach, nor will they be valued enough to make it mentally and emotionally rewarding.

The sobering reality is that most people really are just average and spending the kind of money to attract truly brilliant minds to enlighten the small percentage of young geniuses therein probably can't be justified by any politically acceptable means.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: other imperative scripting languages feel like incomplete subsets of Perl. And the community is fantastic.
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Phonegap:

http://docs.phonegap.com/en/1.0.0/phonegap_camera_camera.md....

http://docs.phonegap.com/en/1.0.0/phonegap_geolocation_geolo...
Chrome extension: Jailbreak the Patriarchy
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I've been looking for what they're advertising, so I'll see if it delivers. I feel like community needs to come first -- if HN did something like this, I'd be more confident in it.
I showed this yesterday at the NYC meetup Hack&Tell and it seems to have blown up since then! Thanks for the post.

My favorite part is that the avenues converge at "Manhattan's North Pole" aka Kazakhstan.
What's At Stake In the Net-Neutrality Fight
Sociallybuzz Gives Businesses $250 in Free Advertising Credits
This.

At school I was consistently the one who tried the "alternate" method. By which I mean; when setting a task to the class there was always a heavy suggestion of "how it should be done" or "the tool to use". Often with a "and you also might consider if you have the time..."

My approach was always to play with that alternative (which was really thrown in for us to say "we considered it" in the report :)). And as a result always used to suffer.

Sometimes because of unfinished work (but, hey, I was exploring something difficult!), or because it was unexpected. By about 16 this was massively disheartening; I've always had a deep interest in exploring a problem rather than having it laid out on a plate, but whenever I did the school frowned on it.

A lot of kids have this problem; when I teach clubs/classes now I get them expecting to be marked to a set scheme, having to hit certain keywords to get the marks.

On the face of it, sure, standardised marking has strong advantages when class teaching. But the objectives are too rigid and do not allow for individuals who are developing an understanding, rather than following the script.

The saving grace was 6th form (aged 17/18) where my Electronics teacher convinced me to try something really ambitious and explorative (for a 17 year old newbie engineer!). Mostly it went wrong - but our team got the highest marks in the class. The comment I distinctly remember being on our report(s) was: "I have no idea how you got that second part to work, but it was brilliant!"

Guess what I did at university
It isn't the Threat from the Cloud but the Inefficiency of Traditional IT
Well currently we guide the customer. We can knock out a brochure site in around 2 days on our system so we don't want to lose that. We just want to make everything faster and try to steer away from lining Microsoft's pockets every ten minutes.

VS2010 was a disaster of a product in my eyes and instead of fixing it they just released another 1. Which of course we have to pay out for again.

I don't mind paying for a product, if they fix the bugs in the one you currently have!
Your point about over-trivializing is a good one. I had a hard time figuring out what sector to use as an example.
From http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-s968/money

Specific orgs supporting the bill:
Microsoft, CBS, MLB, NBA, NFL, Disney, Bose, Nike, etc, etc.

Specific orgs opposed to the bill:
Google, Yahoo, VISA, AmEx, and some foundations, groups, non-profits...but that's it.
I must say this should be an interesting thread if it takes off, I can't say that we have seen many of these reverse I need a partner threads, but many times I have thought well I really don't want to sell and thought about doing the exact same thing, build the product and then try to find a sales / business development guy to move it. If you find one please post on how it works out, I don't think you and I are the only ones that have had this idea, so it would be interesting to hear how it works out.
What We Don't Know About Suicide
They succeeded in sending mail to his last known address, which was his old company. He simply failed to set up forwarding from there (although he tried, it apparently didn't work) and didn't pay attention to what get sent there.

The phone equivalent would have tried his dorm and that would have been that. He never would have even known that they had tried to contact him.
Enron: Conversations about Evil & Football
There’s nothing that can’t be said about any other scripting language from their respective fans.
Well, Engadget is using an interesting definition for "never" there.
Should cofounders live together when first starting a company?
Curious if it is typical to live with your cofounder. I have been living with mine (in a college dorm) and I notice it increases the amount of time we discuss and innovate on our idea.
Digital Marketing Start-Up Thismoment Raises $7.3 Million in Funding
I'm a non-technical founder too. One thing you have to realize and realize quick is that your idea means next to nothing.

Few people who are good programmers are going to be interested enough to help you unless they know what it is you are doing.

If your idea is that good then you can bet there are people already working on it. Sure, leave out the special sauce, but we need details and you are really cutting down your chances when you require one-on-one specifics. If you manage to get X views on HN you'll get X/2=Y who are interested and Y/3 who are willing to email you!

That being said, I wish you the best of luck
"IQ is heritable, but the catch is that it may, in fact, only be heritable through the mother's half of the genes contributed to the child [1]."

Do you have a source for this that isn't, um, from the Simpsons? Geneticists have an equation for estimating the response to selection, the change in IQ from parent to offspring, and it uses an average of both parents' IQ. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability#Response_to_Select... for the equation.

IQ is somewhat more malleable initially, but it seems to converge on a point set by one's genetics, by adulthood. The APA estimated heritability in childhood at .45 and .75 by adulthood.
10 Signs Internet TV is Ready to Disrupt the Industry
Steve Case: Crazy You Have To Be Accredited Investor, But not Accredited Gambler
Nokia Asha 300 Touch & Type Mobile Price in India, Features & Specifications
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"never" vs. "completely" seem to suggest that they were talking about the same thing i.e. the device holistically. The fact that they partly contradict themselves just reinforces the point about subjective reviews, particularly from websites that are pageviews led.
Thanks for taking the time, I have never heard of OCaml to be honest.

This was the purpose of this question though and so far it's inspired some good results

There will come a time when we take a massive leap of faith and change completely how we work but I don't want to jump in.

I will take a look at OCaml and see if it suits our needs as a company

Thanks again
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I agree that good sites publish rarely. Some site get in the Hacker News front page at every publication, even if they publish once a month, because they stuff are excellent. I'm not following them with RSS, but I still aware of them.
Hi

WH was launching in May. We are now over 7000 members have had 200 projects through and 600 pledges of help. I have had 11 newsletters out before the one today.

This is just a project I did on the side. It just so turned out that a lot of people liked it so we expanded it a bit so people can access it online.

This is my attempt to bost the community part of WH :)
Mine is the same (maxed out everything). So I guess I just got lucky or something (maybe some fans are noisier than others).
Perl is also an awesome language for web automation and testing, esp with WWW:Mechanize and LWP.

Also the kind of freedom or strictness Perl offers to users is just unique. It's like slider on top. Building a website or project? then use strict, and warnings and objects. Want to write a quick and dirty csv parser? well just paste your code in the command line. How cool is that!
Hacker News for the Humanities?
A simple question that probably has no simple answer: does anyone know of any Hacker News clones or analogues whose focus is the humanities—literature, poetry, music, philosophy—rather than CS and startups? What I'd love would be a site built off the same Arc app, because HN has the most pleasurable interface I've used yet in such a context. But it's not a dealbreaker.
I think it stems from the fact that you can almost always find a Java library for whatever enterprise product you're looking to work with. I have yet to find a major company (not a start up) that did not release some sort of Java API to its product. Just an observation and my experience, not rooted in any "scientific" study
Google may finally launch its music store (and music file-sharing) tomorrow
I love the Uzbekistan conspiracy.
Sadly not true enough for many languages.

But I think equally true for the languages considered its successors: Ruby and Python.
If you have to solve a general problem, your approach is fine. But if your specific task consists of precisely formulated steps, it's easy to see how you failed. In your case, you essentially boycotted the work that was handed out to you.

I had the fortune of taking the CS high school course in Germany at a time when nobody knew what computers actually were and a 486 was considered a high end workstation. The good part of this was that CS teachers made up their own curriculum. Our teacher gave us some theoretical background lectures, and then he assigned to us specific problems to solve in code. We were graded on functionality and, for extra credit, the elegance of the code - it didn't matter too much whether we did things by the book or not as long as we did them right.

CS courses are heavily standardized now. I figure most teachers haven't got a clue what they're doing, so this is probably a good way to ensure a minimum quality level across the country. But of course, that's what you get: the minimum level of quality. Either you give teachers free reign, with wildly varying results, or you standardize the lifeblood out of a subject. As a society we have opted for standardization on the lowest common denominator.
What DB are you using with it?

How does speed measure up?
Having studied maths and computer science, I've seen something happen like that in both fields.

In a real analysis class, we were asked to give an example of an irrational number, without proof. My friend wrote "sin(1)" and, even though we were all convinced that it was correct, the teacher felt that it was a bit too "clever". My friend should have gone with the old sqrt(2), but he decided to be a little more original.

The teaching basically told us to prove the claim, at home, and to find a convincing argument. Then he went back to the exam and gave my friend the points that he deserved. It's not that he couldn't prove the thing himself, it's that he didn't feel like wasting his time because of some student's funny answer.
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