skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can do rapid development with Java--it's less a condemnation of the technology and more the process that happens in big companies.

I've worked on contract in large and small companies, and the amount of paperwork to go through in large companies is ASTOUNDING. For example, we once had to get a test account created in the test domain (not even production). It took 23 emails, 4 IT requests, and 6 hours to complete--and that was the "accelerated" path.

But bureaucracy is only part of it. The real reason it takes a company to build something so freaking long is testing. Not just test-driven development (that's crazy talk, by the way), we're talking testers. Lots of them. Now, I'm all for testing (yay testing), but companies go to the extreme. I've had more than one of my projects take three to four times as long to test as they took to develop. Sometimes you luck out and get really good testers, though, so then life is peachy.

But to answer your question about why companies use Java, it's because it's widely taught, and programmers are thought of as interchangeable pieces. They can bring over a ton of people from out of the country for cheap labor, or just hire a bunch of D+ CS students and put them in cubes and give them detailed specs and just let them go at it. There's no thought to it--they're cogs in a machine.

Also, sometimes technology choices are just at the whim of people higher up--they have a favorite technology and push that as "the way," even in situations where it doesn't quite fit. Such is life.

To sum up, companies are slow to develop because of overhead and bureaucracy, and they use things like Java because they want cheap programmers, not good ones.

Edit: I should clarify something that came off as really presumptuous and pompous. Java isn't a bad technology, per se, and there are plenty of great programmers who use it. My point was that Java developers are easy to find cheap, so that puts a vote in the win column for larger enterprises.

That being said, there are a lot of really good reasons to use Java, and if you know Java really well, you can put together a CMS as fast (if not faster) than somebody slinging PHP or Python or whatever their language of choice is.

My main goal was to address why enterprise development is often considered slow by startup standards, and what causes that. I know a few really great Java programmers in big enterprises, and I know they often get frustrated by the glacial pace of enterprise development.
You are certainly right, I'm not a technical experts, and the average contain of HN is usually enough for me. If I would need some too specific stuff, it wouldn't work.
I've been playing with Mustache, as it works in Ruby and JavaScript (and something like 13 other languages.) Have to be a little careful to ensure that you only pass objects to the template, of course, so you don't bleed any language-specific stuff into your template.

But what I've tinkered with is very exciting.
Perl blah Perl Perl Perl? Perl! Also, did I mention Perl?
Show HN: Rate My First Hack
In my experience 24 was pretty fun (we LOVED the main character) until they nuked the fridge in the later episodes.

Same thing with Warehouse 13.

But that wasn't boredom-related. Perhaps you just don't match with this series and should have stopped earlier.
A new British study finds children with high IQs are more likely to use drugs as adults than people who score low on IQ tests as children.

I stopped here. The title should be "Drug use linked to High IQ". That's completely different.
Since you come from a .NET background, you can take a look at F#: it is based on OCaml, but fully integrated with the entire Microsoft stack. Most of the compile-time checking benefits of OCaml apply to F# as well.
It's actually skore, but I see where you got confused ;-)

And I obviously agree - Depression often means feeling overwhelmed by responsibility. Being better at managing it really does help.
All roads lead to Uzbekistan.

I think this would be a great way to see differences in map projections.
The tricky bit is that YOU still need to follow the news everyday. If Joel On Software has a new post, it surely will get posted to HN, but if you are on vacation, you will miss it. RSS would let you see it when you come back.
The thing I admire most about Perl is that the libraries written for it tend to be more complete than what I've seen in other, similar languages. I think this is due to its age. This may not seem important, but when you need a complete implementation of something you'll likely find it in a Perl library before you will in a Python or Ruby library... just my experience.
I knew it was coming, but that last line was brutal to read.

Signed up!
Next time i'll make the ecosystem bit blinking and pink.

Maven repositories are just that: Repositories. They store file and display some metadata.

CPAN shows documentation from the code of a distribution itself. It also provides a bugtracker. When installing things from CPAN via cpan on the command line, the tests of that dist are run. Users can opt to install Test::Reporter, which then uploads those test results to cpantesters.org. Many people do this, across many OSes and Perl versions across the globe. Authors of dists get emails of failures. Users can look at nice matrices displaying the passes and failures on their platform combination. On failures regression analysis is performed automatically to try and pinpoint possible failure reasons. Since metacpan there is also a public API to an ElasticSearch database containing all the metadata about CPAN dists and their authors. So you can for example, find all dists written by authors living in your town.

Et cetera.

I could go on, but i think i made my point.
Reminds me of the time that I wrote an essay on spam and the instructor circled the title and wrote "the food? Explain".

She was an English PhD student teaching a course on computers in society.
> ... spending the kind of money to attract truly brilliant minds to enlighten the small percentage of young geniuses therein probably can't be justified ...

Many American states run boarding schools for this purpose. Some have a complete school during the regular school year, some have summer programs for students who are not deranged overachievers, and some have both.
A Scottish study found that IQ is stable, over a 66 year period. http://homepages.ed.ac.uk/ijdeary/papers/SMS32_98.pdf

Also, just because one can game the test, or make its result less accurate, it doesn't mean the population level data is much less accurate. I'm reminded of the Body Mass Index - men, by strength training, can put on lots of muscle mass and become classified as "overweight" or even (rarely) "obese" without being fat. But the fact is that most "overweight" men are in fact fat, and not muscular. The fact that a test for an individual can have reduced or zero validity, does not necessarily threaten the validity for the overall population.

If everyone were to start gaming the tests, things might be different. Then again, being able to game the test might be a highly IQ dependent task, so the IQ test remains an IQ test.
If anyone has any questions, I'm here to answer them. The book basically took 18 months to write (on and off), and I wrote most of it while traveling around the world for a year.
> This is the omnipotence paradox[1]. I often help friends and relatives understand why my religion (or lack thereof, actually) is `Tooth Fairy Agnosticism' by asking them whether or not God can create a stone that He can't lift.

Lol, I've heard little kids ask that at church. Never heard an adult seriously ask that though, usually just as a gag.
yes, living together gives you the ability to learn very fast if you're able to work together. If you can work and live together for a month without killing each other, then you have a decent chance of accomplishing something.

I went through this personal experience. Lived with the person for a month and I decided to go it solo because I realized it was better that way.
"Computing" is not the same as "ICT" as a subject. Though it's true the that Scottish Higher system is almost uniformly better than the English and Welsh "A" Levels/GCSEs, there is also something resembling Computer Science on the latter's curriculum ("Computing"). Here it is (for the AQA board):

http://web.aqa.org.uk/qual/gce/ict/computing_noticeboard.php...

The trouble is, and this is true of all areas of the UK, is that the Computer course is not offered and "ICT" is offered instead. ICT is the "Microsoft Office" qualification that people are referring to. If you're 16-18 and want to study "Computing", chances are that your school doesn't offer it or the staffing is painfully poor. At my university, a few years ago, there were only a tiny handful of people who'd taken a good quality course in Computer Science in college or sixth form.
All of those have a long way to go yet to match the CPAN ecosystem. See my reply above.
How to start an Online business
In Time (2011) Xvid
In Time (2011)
TS | AVI | English | 1h 41 min | 652×272 | XviD – 1355 kbps | AC3 – 128 kbps | 986 MB
Stars: Cillian Murphy, Amanda Seyfried and Justin Timberlake
Writer: Andrew Niccol
Director: Andrew Niccol
Rating: 6.8/10 from 12,417 IMDb users
Genres: Thriller, Sci-Fi, Action
I.M.D.B info
NodeQuery is a realtime server-side DOM API
Contoh Kata Mutiara
Specs have always been somewhat meaningless for consumer oriented products...e.g., "You buy horsepower but you drive torque."
Assuming you aren't a troll.

Manhattan - like most US cities have streets/avenues based on a regular grid and numbered consecutively Streets East/West and Avenues North/South.

So you can continue the numbering scheme across the entire world. The angles are due to the fact that the streets are aligned with the island of Manhattan rather than geographic north.
Lake Wales, FL woman attacked by dogs
Some initial site feedback:

* The tags should be links so that I can click one and filter on all projects with that tag.

* Where is the search box? I assume that I just don't see it, but if it doesn't exist then that should be project #1 on there.
Spark ▁▂▃▅▂▇ in Python
Fair enough. The story wasn't about getting a A or not though; it was about the student being failed initially, and the teacher (supposedly) saying he was failing the student because he (the teacher) didn't understand how it worked or even what it really was.

Look, the purpose of the project (any project) is to meet its stated evaluation criteria. Sometimes those are vague, and then the project will surely fail; sometimes (like in standardized testing) they're not, and in those cases purposely doing something contrary to the project objectives would be a sure way to get the project to fail (or, in a school test, get a failing grade).

OK, one can propose that it's a poor way of 'teaching' (and I'd mostly agree with anyone who'd take that position), or one can propose that the criteria that are used to evaluate students are wrong, or many other positions. And although I'm not intimately familiar with the UK system per se, I am with a number of systems who have similar properties (but I'm not in a position to judge how they compare to the UK system).

Still, the picture as it's being painted in the article is so one-sided as to become unbelievable. My more abstract point is: it's easy to (as an outsider) complain about teachers, government officials, workers at large companies, workers at small companies etc, but the reality is that there are many much more nuanced considerations than 'they should award points based on the real skill!' or 'they should work faster!' or 'they should be more lenient in applying policies!'.

And actually, to play the devil's advocate, I would have to agree (at least in principle) with anyone who would argue that the student's failure to understand and play by the rules alone should be reason enough to not give him an A. The project was (if I read between the lines) not 'develop something multimedia, anything you want, as cool as possible' but rather 'develop something multimedia-related taking into account the things we covered in class over the last semester', even if maybe it wasn't stated that explicitly. The successful person is not the one who will make himself a victim when he goes pseudo-lawyering (btw anyone else head to re-read the 'sudo' line a few times to understand the kid meant 'pseudo'?) to interpret the rules of the game to make them fit his definition; it's the one who has the skills to understand the explicit and implicit boundaries within which he can move. (or, by actually convincing others that his interpretation is the right one, which the kid obviously failed at, so that's a situation we can leave out of the discussion ;) )
M$ needed to use all their ammo to counter Android. It already crossed 52% marketshare http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1848514. I am able to see their (M$) desperation but it never going to help them.
Yes we are working on both :)

Running as fas as we can.

For now you can click the match my skills to find projects that are looking for the skills you have.
> He threw out the mark scheme and did his own thing.

That's not what the article says. It says the brief was to "design and create a multimedia project", which he did.

It says that most people went with Powerpoint, but it doesn't say that's what was asked of them.
Here's one form of protest I'd like to see:

Assuming Google wants to take a significant stance against this bill, they're in a unique position to raise people's awareness of its awfulness. They could put some text on the Google homepage and/or a link to a protest page informing Americans about this threat. (Google might need to set up their own page, to avoid overwhelming an external site with traffic.) Other creative possibilities come to mind:

- Changing the "I'm feeling lucky" button to "I'm feeling very unlucky" and linking to the protest page

- Posting a terrifying, yet appealing Google Doodle that links and lures users to the protest page

- Announcing and then holding a scheduled, minute-long search outage, where all search traffic is redirected to the protest page (which would include an explanation of why searches were temporarily redirected)

Technically savvy users might be aware of SOPA and the threat it poses, yet the "average" American is probably unaware of what their elected representatives are doing to their digital future. They need to know, and hold their representatives accountable.

----

Disclaimer: I am not an American, but feel a need to speak up, given the huge effect U.S. law has on the whole Internet.
genuine question - why do people put up with stupid, arbitrary "rules" like these? FB is not "necessary" for life (it is not a drivers license or any other important identification requirement that is "needed"). Rushdie is famous enough that he can interact with his fans by having his own site, or in other sites (twitter) which don't have such stupid rules.

In short, why is FB so important? There are phones, emails, twitter and a whole lot of other means of communication.
you want two items that have the same result from the first hash function to have different results from the second hash function, with relatively high probability.

if f1(x0) = f1(x1), you don't want f2(x0) = f2(x1) to happen very much.
Little Book of Learning
There's still value in a college education
As someone who did take the Computing A-level this is exactly it.

I also took the lesson on writing some simple ASP - the teacher (who was the headmaster, oddly enough) knew his limitations and knew enough about me to entrust that particular lesson to. But it would be a ludicrous prospect in any other subject!
It's mostly an ecosystem thing. Large companies follow the lead of their vendors and Oracle/IBM/HP all push Java. There is a vast array of third party tools and software packages for doing boring enterprisey stuff like monitoring and integration. If you want to integrate or extend one of the big ERP or CRM systems that is mostly Java. At this point there are lots of people that can be hired with passable Java skills and most consulting outfits have large Java programs. Admittedly this is something of a positive feedback loop that got started because the big vendors stared it 15 years ago.

As for team delivery speed it is certainly possible to deliver quickly. The dynamic languages have definite advantages over Java. There is less XML/property/configuration stuff to manage for instance. But the Java frameworks are actively developed and they get better all of the time too. Delivery speed is mostly a team and organization thing. Large orgs can take forever to deliver the simplest of things. It can take forever for people to decide what they want. You might have to get permission from three different VPs. You may have to schedule a series of meetings to have a decision made and it can take a couple of weeks the find time when all stakeholders have open time on their calendars. You may be dependent upon cooperation and resources from another team that isn't really motivated to help you because they have their own stuff going on. So it's not really a technology problem, it's a management problem.
Future of Storytelling: Transmedia Best Practices from Filmmaker Sean Hood
Are there any Windows SSH programs that display? I get nothing but garbage or "." characters for any of the symbols.
Most people, given a no-strings-attached basic income, will NOT use it as an opportunity to educate themselves and become entrepreneurial; instead, they get LAZY and fiercely protective of that state.

Not having a job isn't about being a social outcast, it's about not producing enough value/wealth to exchange for the cost of continuing existence. As an old book famously observed, "He who does not work, neither shall he eat"; that's not punitive, that's the economics of biology.
Movies. Handtools. Paintings.

They may seem a disparate set, the connexion is subjectivity. Movies and paintings both speak in different ways to different people, and everyone knows they may like something their closest friend hated.

It's even more of a clear cut with handtools. If you don't get the right one to fit your task, any talk of quality/speed is useless. The best concrete drill can't replace a carpenter's hammer if what you need is to extract nails.
24 Hours In Dubai
How to Find, Create and Sell Cookbooks and Recipes from the Public Domain
Here's a port of it to Python already live:

https://github.com/kennethreitz/spark.py
I don't get why Pfizer, Adidas etc are supporting this. What do they gain out of this?
There's no such thing as the Waterfall Approach (and there never was)
I don't agree, this is a gross over-simplification and the comparison with Coke and Pepsi doesn't work.

Drinking a soft drink gives you an immediate, hard-wired response. Tasting something is, well, relying on your taste buds for one. How does this translate to something like working with a computer? It's just a dishonest and intellectually lazy comparison.

Mac or PC, Laptop or Desktop, Battlefield 3 or browsing the web. If your grandfather with arthritis and bad sight buys a 11.6" MacBook Air with a 1366×768 resolution and a pixel density of 135 good luck evading him at future family ceremonies if you're the head geek of the family.

Also, I don't know about you guys, but I certainly don't want to be held accountable for a guy ending up with Norton Antivirus just because I went "you want a pc, uhh, it doesn't matter, just go with anything".
Did anybody ever tell you that you tend to over think things? lol! :)

I guess all your variations also apply, but that was never intended.
Monitor your site by SMS at wholesale rates
Provide 24/7 chat support to site visitors.
Cumult is simply a chat widget powered by humans. It takes 60 secs to set up. We are trying to put real people behind the engine so startups can benefit from our interaction with their site visitors. They pay on a per session basis so it will work out a lot affordable.

Keen to hear your feedback!
That looks like a great ad on.

Does it come with source? My 20 second review didn't show up anything and I've become very leery of letting any plugin that I can't read the source get added to my browser.
So it is non-market forces then. In a real education market teachers wouldn't have a salary that is function of time, but of the resolution of supply and demand. Parents, knowing that their child is interested in attending a school with a solid programming platform would pay more to schools that diverted resources towards this area. Those schools would be encouraged to locate competent teachers which they would do so with a combination of increased salary and possibly increased research time (or startup hacking time).
Your teacher was 'compensating' the feature set and creativity against the lack of documentation, a trade off.

The point that was made above was that in the UK we as teachers don't have that leeway. We have to grade according to criteria for different aspects of the assignment.

I would have made you put a proposal form in first explaining your feature set, and why you needed those features or what they added to your project. If we had to, that proposal would become the documentation!
$stats should be $minmax
Just want to point out that you probably shouldn't expect special treatment when partnering with a "ruthless douchebag."

So it might make sense to consider a pair of them...with the other acting as your attorney.
Wow. I did not expect this blog post to blow up like this. I wish it was under less auspicious circumstances.

On a slightly related note, does anyone know how to fix the e-mail subscription widget in WordPress? I'm getting complaints that it is giving 'invalid e-mail' errors when people are adding valid e-mails.
Will do. Although I'm general against "Product People" and Designers - who very much like 13 year old female Justin Bieber fans only know Photoshop and not Cocoa, CSS or, Javascript (notice the "or"'s and not "and"'s - lotta boxes to pick a tick on).
To be honest I'm against non-technical people unless they convince me otherwise.

That being said, I believe the actual sales part requires certain skills that I lack (even though I am totally amazeballs)

Might have filtered people off with the style of writing and the attitude. But that's only good.
Please correct me if I'm wrong about this, but last I knew, it is generally frowned upon for non-YC companies to use HN as a job-posting board ( with the single exception of the monthly "Hiring" threads )
What should I make for dinner?
New startup accelerator Groundwork Labs launching in Durham
This. ;)

When I'm mentoring fresh-from-school developers at work I constantly have to try to get them to think for themselves. They seem to want me to lay out the entire problem+solution and tell them (almost) exactly how I would solve it, so all that's left is for them to implement.

I try to encourage them to develop an understanding of the problem, and poke my head in for pointers/quick tips "you're doing a billing system, better have transactions for everything", rather than "You'll need these 3 tables with these 5 fields, and you'll need to surround these methods in a database level transaction"
The Churn Burn: Bulletproofing against cancellations.
Checking in of "commented out" code
The brief is just that. The mark scheme undoubtedly suggests a more restrictive approach into how you produce a project in line with that brief.

It's like listening to the first sentence your client utters ("I want a program to calculate my expenses...") and then creating Excel when all they wanted was a calculator. For better or worse, it's not about doing whatever you like, and hiding behind the brief when there was a more detailed set of specs is immature.
What happens if you make the stipend contingent on educating yourself somehow?
Raspberry Pi reveals the final PCB design for the $25 PC
Marketing your Import-Export Service
Progress without metric is just noise.