skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's why I, personally, prefer to put all my investment into languages like Scala and Clojure.

Scala and Clojure, for their problems (which are not severe, but not to be ignored) have the advantage of being closer to the languages and approaches of the future, in which building comprehensible systems at very high levels of complexity/intellectual intricacy will be even more important relative to performance of executables. I expect that the problems of these languages (including performance) are going to become much less major over time, just as performance gaps between Java and C and between C and hand-written assembly have nearly disappeared.

Spending another 5 years in Java means you're preparing yourself for a 1996 job in 2016.

Why Scala and Clojure? Unfortunately, the 10-year forecasts for Haskell and Ocaml aren't great. I wish they were, because those are great languages. The reason: libraries and tooling matter, and they seem to be mattering more as the years pass (while differences in performance between languages narrow and matter less over time).

Hiring and talent: It's true that you can't hire 50 Scala programmers per month. On the other hand, most startups are far away from being in a position to hire 50 programmers per month at all, much less 50 good ones. Choosing an "esoteric" language works both ways. On one hand, it reduces the total pool of ready developers. On the other hand, I know companies that use Haskell and Ocaml and are able to hire 60-75% of their in-office interviewers while remaining selective; this would be impossible for a Java shop-- there are just too many unqualified Java developers. Choosing a language like Scala or Clojure will do a lot of the filtering for you.
I write my To Do's on a blank piece of paper, but in half an hour they are magically hidden between a bunch of numbers, silly equations, arrows and squares. I do not enjoy doing it (afterwards, heh).
easy to click link: http://numuboard.com/
Iterationless Development: the latest New New Thing in software development?
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HR's job is to hire someone at the very least amount possible.

This is almost always wrong.

It is more normal for HR not to care about the pay at all - their concern is sourcing candidates, and often their performance metrics relate to candidates placed. In that case they are quite happy to see you overpaid...
You can make as much as $1 per visitor by targeting specific keywords in your titles. Things such as "Canon T2i Amazon Coupon" or "Canon T2i Amazon Discount Code". Yes, coupon and discount code related keywords are highly competitive, but not when you add "Amazon" to it... that's because no Amazon discount codes really exist, thus not a lot of content for those keywords...

but you still funnel visitors to Amazon and get paid when they buy it... And since they're searching for Amazon stuff, they most likely will buy it from Amazon.
It might be a pun referencing Atom ( http://hackage.haskell.org/package/atom-1.0.11 ) which is used for control systems, but not nuclear ones, AFAIK
I don't see how someone writing Java in 2016 would be stuck in a 1996 job.

Is the same true of someone using C or C++ today?
Food for thought - would we have the PocketProtectorPlex fucking up usability across half the web now if it wasn't for Zuckerberg's "everything's going great, let's start a land war in Russia!" mentality and drive to own identity across the entire internet?
At my company HR signs off on the offer, but is not directly involved in the negotiation. The hiring manager is given a range to operate in based on the grade he is hiring for.

We make the hire/no-hire and grade decision after interviews then the manager handles salary negotiation one-on-one. If a good candidate pushes the envelope we have to get Senior VP approval to go over the limit (rarely happens) or we try to make up the difference with stock grants.

Given the current challenges of hiring qualified candidates, particularly at the higher ranks of individual contributors we generally laugh at our colleagues who make low-ball offers to good candidates (and then promptly outbid them).

If you DO successfully push the envelope your subsequent raises will be small. We try to push everyone towards the center of their pay grade so newly promoted individuals (or poor negotiators) generally get a couple of good years of pay raises regardless of company-wide economics. People at the top end of the pay range typically get no increase at all.

HR doesn't own the salary budget. It is actually assigned by business unit (VP/SVP). If there is significant surplus then it just gets rolled up to hiring more people.

HR bonuses are partially determined by company performance metrics and partially by individual performance determined by their manager (based on what, the devil only knows).
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Does anyone believe that this is done algorithmically? All the examples I checked seemed to be really poorly sync-ed, & as a DSP engineer I don't believe this task to be incredibly difficult...

would also be cooler to have a seating chart to click around to make sense of perspectives
House votes to end country limits for skilled workers seeking green cards
Wow. HLSS was the source of a whole lot of fun a few years ago. Thanks!
This is one of the coolest things I have seen. While there are some little bits of feedback, I can admit that I spent the last 30 minutes watchings concerts, amazed at how great this felt.

MPAA: More of this, less of SOPA. If you give us great ways to get content, we will pay for it.
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Why does the Netflix "Tech" Blog have the word tech in quotes? Is there some irony I'm missing?
> Convince some small school

This is exactly right. We built our own app for our medical school. Still live, tmedweb.tulane.edu. The professional schools (law, medicine, business) are smaller, and generally have the money and flexibility to move on something like this. We were turning away schools before several of us graduated. Downside of developing in med school: instead of graduating into a self-made job, you go to an internship in a hospital and the whole world outside the hospital ceases to exist.

Tulane has doubled down on the project and hired a developer fulltime to run it. Who got which chunks of code, I still don't know. It could probably stand a complete rewrite though.

points that worked for us:

you (the professor) and your course coordinators, TAs, etc, don't realize how broken the BlackBoard paradigm is, how it clouds your thinking and slows you down, until you try something else. Lets do some click races...

Your students check out every time BlackBoard is involved. Anything would make them like you more.

You really can access usage statistics. Just not with BlackBoard. Hey, dean, you want to know which professor downloads correlate with improvement on board scores? We can ask questions like that.
Reduce Back Pain By Practicing Yoga
You're right, it's not quite impossible. However, the idiomatic ways of doing things in Scala tend to be very bad for performance if you're in a tight loop. For example, if you have two arrays that you need to iterate through simultaneously, you need to zip them together. In order to regain the performance, you end up having to do something like the while loop or use recursion. This is similar to the problem of doing heavily numeric code in Clojure before release 1.3. You could get Java-like numeric performance out of Clojure, but you'd have to abandon doing it in any sort of ideal way.

One example where something was impossible in Scala is that to implement a Parcelable for Android. This requires the creation of a static field, which Scala doesn't allow. Now, I won't argue that an API that requires such a construct is good, but it might be necessary for your application. I believe Scala now contains special code in the compiler just to support this peculiarity in the Android API.
So.

Should you use Scala? Is Java better?

(You’re asking the wrong questions.)

That's the attitude of a problem solver, not a purist.
They may have had meetings about how far they can push it, but I'm not so sure about the money bit. Facebook has actually shown a remarkable amount of restraint when it comes to making money. It's in Zuckerberg's DNA - the guy just doesn't seem to care that much about money.

For instance, if Facebook was trying to maximize profits it could have fairly easily rolled out an off-site ad network ala adsense that is FAR better targeted (based on FB cookies) than adsense could ever be. They could displace Google practically overnight. But they've resisted doing that and instead just continued to make enough money to run and grow the company at a healthy clip.

I'm not a Facebook apologist - some of the "mistakes" are really scary and unconscionable, but I don't believe the motive is as simple as profit maximization.
should be fixed - sorry for the inconvenience, was upgrading a few things
I think that 1-3 are necessities now. I don't know if 4 is.
easy to click link: http://findsignal.com

Er... should make it easy to sign up, twitter or facebook maybe. Tot no body fill up the full forms these days.
While I don't hate it... it does look familiar... http://i.imgur.com/fEHbB.jpg

I just hope they make every page consistent. What annoyed me about the current navigation is that the links move around, and Reader is tucked far away under More.
Reminds me of "Awesome, I Fuckin' Shot that", a Beastie Boys concert filmed by 50 audience volunteers and edited together:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awesome;_I_Fuckin_Shot_That!
This post is not about Scala and/or Clojure vs. Java.
Very cool. What about other applications? News reports?
> The spectre of our Perl codebase was too much, sadly.

Just curious, though -- was that Perl codebase written and factored correctly, or was it already a big mess when you got it?
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curious, why winforms over wpf? Are you intending for more cross-compatability that way?
Spot on. But oh, the feeling of a well-placed deagle headshot through the wall corner...
Why Small Businesses should get in the Cloud
Speaker Wall Mounts - Hangman Products Speaker Hanging Kit Installation Video
Cohen is doing customer development by being on site. If BB is so atrocious, they probably haven't been doing enough.
Thanks for the feedback, I agree actually. We've been talking about changing the color scheme to either be all dark or all white but haven't pulled the trigger.
Instead? No. Also? Sure!
It's all algorithmic but the flash player only seeks to the nearest key frame (every 2s) so that's why it isn't flawless. This can be overcome ... but I'd prefer to work on the seating chart thing - thanks!
The choice is hardly one after 10,000 hours. Video games are addictive and satisfy short-term pleasure. My guess is that becoming awesome is sometimes just a matter of "addictiveness".
Shift+Delete on those entries (or Shift+Fn+Delete on a Mac) to remove them. :-)
If you are just looking for keyword streams, they're available for free: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-api/methods
Ask HN: Share the tech wealth (in Ruby)
I'm a entrepreneur with a business background (I know!), working on learning Ruby. I've done some online courses but would love to have a real person help me get up to speed. Does anyone know where one can find a ruby coach / tutor?
Dan Brown spent time learning crypto and this is what came out.
Pretty cool. Looks like they are a 500 startups project, formerly Veokami. Guess they used some of their funding to buy a better name! http://www.startupsmart.com.au/growth/veokami-among-500-star...
Problem is HP makes money by selling ink. They, like most other printer companies, would rather sell the printer hardware at a loss and make tons of money off selling tiny amounts of ink for $20-40 a pop.

This thing is a thermal printer so the only thing they could sell you is paper and you can't really charge a large premium on paper.
I'm guessing you are referring this:

"2. Don't ever use scala.collection.mutable. Replacing a scala.collection.mutable.HashMap with a java.util.HashMap in a wrapper produced an order-of-magnitude performance benefit for one of these loops. Again, this led to some heinous code as any of its methods which took a Builder or CanBuildFrom would immediately land us with a mutable.HashMap. (We ended up using explicit external iterators and a while-loop, too.)"

Overall Scala<->Java interop is pretty seamless, and aside from some annoying things (for loop becomes foreach with a closure, break & continue are done with exceptions, etc) it's quite easy to treat Scala as a more concise Java with very similar performance.

Rather than using a Scala collections wrapper for the java.util.HashMap he should have simply used the Java HashMap as-is. Yes you must do hashMap.get("key") instead of Scala's shortcut hashMap("key"), but so what? You're talking performance-critical code already, wouldn't you want to avoid the wrapper?
I'd love to hear your feedback, Mitchell... And thanks for the kind words.
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Skills and Connections are not enough
It should say "Documents CONFIRM TSA Proposal To Body-Scan Pedestrians, Train Passengers". I mean, it's not like it's a secret.
You forgot Fortran, BASIC, SQL, x86 Assembler, HTML, HTTP, TCL, Python, Ruby ... 15 years ago was 1996, we've got a lot of crap to purge.
That whole using-personal-information-to-burn-people thing is still (barely) in living memory in Europe. There have been riots in Germany over the government trying to take a census - with good reason.

Privacy is more important than a lot of shallow people imagine.
So my carrier can see what numbers I call, see my text messaging habits and see what websites I visit, all tied to a unique handset ID?

This is preposterous. Next thing you know, they'll be using this information to send you a bill at the end of the month based on who you call and how much bandwidth you've used!
The lack of proper non-Java support in the Hadoop world is maddening, and Zookeeper is a prime example of this. It's a heterogenous world, people! How many people are missing out on Zookeeper because it lacks proper Python or PHP support?
Howcome the FTC isn't all over this?

Because 6 months haven't passed, is that it?
Vatican’s Top Exorcist Says Yoga Is Satanic
Nokia’s spectacular 4D electro light show in London [Video, LUMIA launch]
Just like bittorrent required Microsoft and Google to become popular? I think you're underestimating the value younger generations hold to free as in speech.
Honestly, this is how uninnovative Google has become.. They get excited over introducing a drop down menu!

I know Apple are known for overhyping basic functionality. But, seriously? A DROP DOWN MENU THAT breaks UI for touch screen devices.. Sigh.
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Facebook’s Signals Baffle IPO Experts: “It Can Make Its Prospectus in Plaid”
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Agreed, wholeheartedly. And the media isn't helping, enforcing the idea that there are two parties in America: Republicans and Democrats. Countries are not divided like that anymore, and perhaps never have been. Government will always be about the powerful versus the powerless. And the politically-influenced media renders most of us ignorant (I consider myself pretty aware, but who knows what I haven't found out yet; I learn new, shocking things every day!).
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Great concept and like how you can change views! Been following them since they were veokami.
Here's another story about the vans from the year before: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/08/24/full-bo...
Ask HN: sysadmin as a service
http://www.opsly.com/

Have a sysadmin log in to your server and complete a task.... e.g.: set up nginx and virtual hosts, set up openvpn on two nodes, internal dns, etc.

Thoughts?
Okay so question on this one.

- required to prevent anyone from accessing a user's material more than 30 days after the user has deleted his or her account;

Does this include people that have already deleted their account? Does this also include Government agencies and such from seeing the >30 day deleted data? I'd like to know that after permanently deleting my account all my stuff is gone, but I don't really see anywhere that says that's true. Meaning the site is still destroying my privacy even after I've decided to have nothing to do with the account.
This has been a great discussion all. Being a tech guy myself, I agree with the majority of you. Its pointless working oneself (to death?) for someone else like we do, especially when the end result isn't even cast in stone.

But every time I think my job sucks, its too hard, my boss sucks etc, I think of this guy. I took this pic in India when they were laying a road near where I live. It was 100F and 100% humidity. The guy in the picture was carrying hot rocks and tar in a metal pan and spreading them across the road:

http://i624.photobucket.com/albums/tt328/hmbsandman/carrying...

In general, I am thankful and immensely grateful. If you are reading this you should be as well.
seating chart is a good idea, or at least direction of the camera.
Excellent thoughts here. My background is in a field... well, probably the single most risk-adverse field there is. Which is why OP is seeking a nominal POV. There are certainly months to years of profitable wear left in the tires and some chance of sustained success. But experience is not my basis for judgement. It is clear that many before me have abandoned this post and there are pretty strong indications that the company is trying to shed this liability.
Yep, that's us. I miss Veokami sometimes, but my cofounder and I were two of about 4 people who could actually pronounce the name :p

Incidentally, Switchcam.com was only a little more than $1k, which was definitely worth it.
I'm using the stream, but using track filtering. So far it's working very well for my purposes. You are right in that different use cases might need the firehouse and that's where services like gnip and datasift really come in handy. It's too bad that there's not a middle ground.
Yeah if they are taken back it is usually done by force or revolution, seldom pretty.
I wonder how many businesses fit this description behind the scenes. I can imagine some programmer working on the Sony Network thinking "wow, the security for this thing is crap, we are going to get hacked any day." I wonder how crazy a place like Paypal might have been in its early days. Those guys probably had no clue what they were doing and probably made a lot of mistakes which would make us cringe.

It seems like this company has actually done a lot of things right. They have customers, they are growing and they have trust. You are learning and getting good pay. Aren't we all just disasters waiting to happen? I would just stick with it. If the hits the fan, grab some popcorn.
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If I may, David Foster Wallace (as so often) said it better:

> “But it’s better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing…the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one’s mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think. Note the way”up close and personal" profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life — outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what’s obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It’s farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very small…[Tennis player Michael] Joyce is, in other words, a complete man, though in a grotesquely limited way…Already, for Joyce, at twenty-two, it’s too late for anything else; he’s invested too much, is in too deep. I think he’s both lucky and unlucky. He will say he is happy and mean it. Wish him well."

http://www.esquire.com/print-this/the-string-theory-0796?pag...

(A quote I come back to on occasion, thinking about my essay http://www.gwern.net/The%20Melancholy%20of%20Subculture%20So... )
Those numbers are shocking. $0.00029 per streamed song. I just back-of-the-enveloped my iTunes library, and with 8649 plays, it's worth $2.51 on Spotify.

That's disgusting, considering the value I've gotten from it.
Yeah -- the particular application that this is derived from needed pretty wide compatibility out of the box, so the projects are targeted to .NET 2.0.

But this is also helpful for DesktopBootstrap. If someone wants to retarget to a higher .NET version it's very easy to do. There's only one winform in there (the tray icon)!
who gives a shit!
> Still, because there will be no increase in visas issued, there will be losers. Hosin “David” Lee, president of the Korean-American Scientists and Engineers Association, said the bill would force engineers from South Korea to wait an additional two years in their immigration process to get green cards.

Didn't expect that.
I am strangely reminded of that episode in 30 rock where tracy realizes he can just pay a fine to make obscene comments and do obscene things on TV ...
In HN's defense, the original email contains relevant information, and it should get attention. Of course, it has to be understand in context, as things change (specially after such thoughtful email) and not every app has the same constraints as the Yammer.

Not all of HN's discussion is keen on it, but often some of it has good signal.
Languages are but a tool to build things. What specifically about Scala and Clojure, do you feel, make them closer to the languages and the approaches of the future?

While one should keep abreast of current technologies (and languages), there is still plenty of work that requires knowledge of C from the system level to SAAS platform technologies and implementations. It is a 35+ year old language.

If your argument was "learn these knew languages for the advantages the provide given the likely emergence of X, Y or Z", I would buy it. Saying a newer language is a path to the future? Lacking.
The problem is that there were other almost-providers who worked for free, didn't get paid, and aren't happy.
Safari doesn't have any selective blocking capabilities but there's always 3rd party browsers for that. Check out Ghostery for iPad which is focused on privacy & blocking 3rd party trackers:

http://purplebox.ghostery.com/?p=1016022066
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Yeah, basically Indians and Chinese gain but everyone else loses.
Probably because it's an informal short form of "Technology." It does seem kind of weird as I'm used to seeing "Tech" used as a word in its own right but it's the likely reason why they did it.