skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Okay, so if HTML and CSS are so horrible then how do you propose we create websites? We're talking about the web, man! You've got to use HTML if you're going to work on the web no matter what. I see nothing bad about HTML or CSS. Every language has its shortcomings but that's because it can't be all things to all people.

The really awesome and a,axing thing about HTML and CSS is that we as web developers are innovating the way things are done online so much that the specs can barely keep up! I think it's great that we're outgrowing each new version of the spec so quickly. That means things are getting better, faster, more powerful.

We've taken these tools and bent the rules to create things that the languages weren't intended for. The languages haven't failed because they were never meant to do things that people have found a way to make them do. And now that these possibilities are out there it only means that the languages will evolve to accommodate the things we're doing with them just like html5 and css3 which I think are amazing leaps forward!

JavaScript isn't perfect but it works and it can get better. I don't get what your problem really is with these things. You say JavaScript is bad and slow but the rest just sounds like uninformed hating.

What's your solution? Replacement languages for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript so that not only do we all have to start from scratch with new languages but then wait even longer for browser support? You certainly do have balls barging in here like a troll with a half assed argument that states the obvious but misses the entire point of the new technology. These things are awesome for the same reason you say they suck.
You can already remove a bunch of the bad parts via "use strict".
http://ihackernews.com is a bit nicer
> If you're trying to "scale" with it, you don't know what you're doing in the first place

They said they worked with the company behind CouchDB and were not able to make it scale. So while you might accuse Canonical of not knowing what they're doing, I doubt you could say the same of the founders of CouchDB. Here is the official announcement [1]:

> For the last three years we have worked with the company behind CouchDB
to make it scale in the particular ways we need it to scale in our
server environment. Our situation is rather unique, and we were unable
to resolve some of the issues we came across. We were thus unable to
make CouchDB scale up to the millions of users and databases we have in
our datacentres, and furthermore we were unable to make it scale down to
be a reasonable load on small client machines.

[1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2011-Novemb...
Online display ads that hardly anyone hates: just a dream?
Chiens dressage
Did you finish double-checking yet? It is.
Please tell me that was sarcasm, man. It's one thing to support someone having the balls to come out and courageously support an unpopular but just position. Unfortunately his comment was just flame bait and not even close to courageous.
I think the Hacker News HD application is great.
No. It's not even an article, it's slashdot. In the post someone links to an article on some website which again links to the canonical mailing list. https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2011-Novemb...

There John Lenton lays out in not so many words that "for the last three years we have worked with the company behind CouchDB to make it scale in the particular ways we need it to scale in ourserver environment. Our situation is rather unique, and we were unable to resolve some of the issues we came across..."

This sounds like a fair assessment to me. No "myths created", no "ignorance perpetuated".

I would also say that for every kind of technology at some point it's fair to say that it does not scale or is not sufficient in other ways.

Or to say it with couchDB: relax!
URDU SEX STORIES: Party K Baad
E-Cig Video
Exactly. Distance in time means greater uncertainty of reward, and greater uncertainty means lower motivation to go after it in the first place.
The very first thing I see in the article? An ad about creating free flash websites. They could not have chosen a worse article to put that on :)
I'd still take the bet.

In the world of bacteria, there is no need for the SEC, lawyers or fear of liability. It's the fact that their needs are so few - they can seemingly live almost anywhere under almost any conditions - that makes them appear so resilient.
> The thin and fat arrows, by comparison, are used in the exact same contexts. This makes them much more error prone.

You can say that, but in practice it doesn't really happen. They look somewhat different, they do somewhat different things. It's programming, ya know?

Not that I'm trying to make you like it or anything-- of course you have the right to your own aesthetic sensibility.
"there's a 42 year old [account|support|...] manager living in the cubicle. How will this software get him laid [or at least not get his chops busted]?"
Newt Gingrich and the president's power to assassinate US citizens
super mate! yeah, try it without the box. ill have some free time tomorrow so ill try to do a little mockup if you want :)
Even that's not safe. I remember a lot of angst when I upgraded someone's IE 6 to 7 about the missing menu bar.
Any plans on releasing the code for your framework/orm?
codecademy.com NOT codeacademy.com.
dunno, kinda like the awesome button. you can make next and previous buttons on the left and right sides of the video, and the history on the bottom, without the box; just like a regular history. thats how i would do it. but great project though :)
Well, either programming language researchers such as simon peyton jones are wrong, or developers such as google employee working on appengine, guido van rossum is wrong.
I think what nirvana is worried about is that this will get simplified to "CouchDB doesn't scale" for developers who don't know all the circumstances. It's the slashdot blurb that landed in the front page of HN, not the sober list post.
He's not trolling. He's just pointing out that Python is not Java, and the Python culture is not particularly in favor of using instances of user-defined classes where built-in types will suffice.

Similarly, you almost never see type checking; code typically just calls the method they expect to be there and hopes for the best. If you come from Java culture, this Is Not Cool, but it's Python, not Java. (I personally prefer Perl's roles for duck typing; I get type checking, but no implementation requirements.)

Anyway, I'm sure you worked hard on this, but it's one of those libraries that feels like it doesn't belong, like Twisted. You can ignore the Python community and be successful, but don't expect unlimited praise for doing so.
If anything, I've found the experience has gotten better over the past few years, in that "notability" has been almost entirely trumped by "verifiability". These days, if I write an article with a few solid sources, I don't get hassled at all. I just wrote something a few days ago on an Ottoman-era castle in Greece, citing an offline (and not even very easy to get) book, and nobody hassled me.

I mean, you don't have to believe it, but I would guess that if you pick up a solid book, and write some well-referenced articles based on it, you aren't going to have problems either.
Hacker News London: November 2011 - Videos
App Stores (not just Apple's) have also served to erode the perception of value any one app (or game) provides as well, IMO.

Fun fact -- I have never bought a single app on Amazon's Android App Store even though I fire it up every day to see what I can get for free. Why buy an app for $1-10 dollars (even if I may get that amount of enjoyment/practical use out of it) when it MIGHT BE FREE tomorrow?

The same thing holds to a lesser extent on those giant Steam sales. I never buy any games on Steam full price even if I want to play them badly because I know if I wait a few months I'll be able to get them for pennies on the dollar in some crazy sale or other.

As a consumer this is great for me. As a developer, not so much.
In my experience, bigcouch isn't mature enough for prime time, yet. Admin of it can get very tricky.
I wish it was that simple.

The last time I was at my mom's house, I downloaded and ran putty (a standalone ssh client for windows).

She said that after I "installed" it on her computer, it started running really slow and that I needed to uninstall it.
Chrome Getting Native Gamepad, Webcam, And WebRTC Support In Early 2012
Dave Herman: The Future of JavaScript
Well on the other hand, if they can already do this with just CPU, it can only get better as they unleash the power of a GPU as well, right? Especially as you say, voxels are pretty well-suited to parallel rendering like that.
Some resources:
peepcode.com (not free)
youtube or itunes videos of cs classes, e.g. Stanford's CS106X

For me what's worked best has been to read a book or two on a language and immediately start using the language on a problem I hope to solve. This works really well for languages like Ruby, Python, JavaScript, where there's lots of additional online help available on blog posts, stackoverflow etc. The online help is great when you get stuck on a bug or on a part of the language you didn't read about.

I would suggest building to learn. Find a pain in your life and build a solution for it. It doesn't have to be a big pain; it could be something trivial but you should have some sort of vested interest in a successful completion.

Good luck.
Iphone Game CandyPot went on sale Thanksgiving offer..Enjoy Holidays
Was anyone harmed? ... I'm joking of course. So they were frustrated for a second and then you showed them how to get the menu bar and everything was ok, right? Why was there a lot of angst, and why was it unsafe?
I thought the most interesting piece in this series was the article about how autism can be a positive advantage in some areas of human activity, including science.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v479/n7371/full/479033a...

It reminds me of Temple Grandin’s line:
“Who do you think made the first stone spear? That wasn't the yakkity yaks sitting around the campfire. It was some Asperger sitting in the back of a cave figuring out how to chip rocks into spearheads.”
Very clever. When I first started using Linux, I always wondered why in the world anyone would use the "Redmond" skin for the desktop.

Of course, it's for subterfuge. :)
Can you share some experiences with F# in bigger projects? I'm a little bit worried about the accessibility of larger code bases with global type inference. I would say that I have a pretty good grasp of the language in general, but I usually feel lost without IDE support or comments because heavy usage of things like currying and type inference assures that the signature of a function is pretty meaningless.
The Neufeudal Degeneration
If it's just the choice of language that's the issue, try wmii. The default config is written in Bourne shell, but all of the actual interaction between the config and the wm is done through a plan9-style api, so you can configure it in any language you want. The Ubuntu package comes with sample configs written in Python and Ruby in addition to Bourne shell.
Ubisoft Blames Piracy for Non-Release of PC Game "I'm Alive"
Exactly, how does a programming language scale or not-scale? Ruby might be slower and hungrier (memory) than other languages but it's the applications that might or might not-scale.
I'm a very small-scale, amateur programmer, but that sounds like over-engineering to me. Getting variable values into strings is often necessary. A programming language shouldn't make something common hard, just to enforce a particular view of best practices. Note: I'm not saying that "make it a method" is a bad idea - in general or in the case of a specific project or a specific size of codebase. But I don't like the idea of the language enforcing such a restriction.

Having said that, my first language was Perl, and I'm still a fan of TMTOWTDI and making common things easy.
Could be time to update their OS too...
Thanksgiving Myths
Definitely. A Bachelors gives you the foundational knowledge in a field. A Masters should bring you up to the level of the current research. A PhD requires you to create new research.

A Masters degree is a great way to get the background to understand current research without the time investment of a PhD.

(Or do a PhD in the UK - 3 to 4 years is normal)
Designers: Get Paid By Being A Primadonna
Staying with IE6 is arguably less safe, considering all the popular sites (Youtube & Facebook among others) that no longer support it.
That's very cool. Right now many experts are turned off by the unfriendliness of the system as it stands today. If that can be remedied, it will be a great boon to human knowledge as we'll see an increase in expert contributions.
It looks pretty, but I'm having trouble loading any article sans seppuku (3 out of 4 taps crash Safari when browsing onswipe/hackernews). If I can get an article to load without the kernel assassinating Safari for memory pigginess, attempting to swipe or move around the page will crash it, too. :( No other memory issues browsing other non-Onswipe web sites or using other apps; I'm on a 1st gen iPad running 5.0.1.

If you guys aren't stress-testing this on a 1st gen iPad with a goodly number of apps resident in the background, I'd really recommend adding this to your test matrix...
The documentation page actually helps, thanks. Interesting that the entire DB serving this site is made out of flat files. Arc looks interesting, I'll give it a try if it's not too painful installing it. Would you know of a another less painful, very minimalist, web oriented lisp dialect?
That, however isn't a free upgrade, unlike with web browsers...
A nice sativa and a chill environment.
What's any language, if not a mish-mash of its predecessors?
at least that's one advantage being an orphan, not having to do tech support!
Fantom is an interesting language go and try it out! I don't think it has much traction but it is simple, easy to understand and contains some thought provoking ideas. You can get to know most of the language and most of the built in libraries with a few evenings playing with an editor and reading the online documentation.

Also go and look at Ceylon and Kotlin (please, please JetBrains get some code out for Kotlin soon!), they both also contain lots of interesting ideas but are more complex than Fantom.

In fact Fantom, Kotlin and Ceylon all have two features that I like, null safety and a module and dependency system baked into the language.
Vendor prefixes have failed, what’s next?
Interesting, I thought bzImage contained a bzip2ed image - vmlinux.bin to (I assume) vmlinux.bin.bz2. This shows vmlinux.bin.gz.

I really should RTFMakefile, but I'm too tired after eating lots of turkey...
You can use Apples own UIAutomation tests for that: http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/1646-how-to-use-uiautomatio...
I've thought about writing a book on that.I've had to implement bits and pieces of PDF,PNG,JPG,and TTF and learning this stuff has been fascinating.

I did write one article and also did a short video on this stuff, but could think about expanding that if there is sufficient interest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLnOD1qC-Vo
http://practicingruby.com/articles/shared/oelhlibhtlkx

My work so far has been in Ruby but I'd probably want to at least look into how to do this sort of stuff in C or some other low level language, because things like alpha channel splitting in PNG is painfully slow :-/
This happens because of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coulomb%27s_law.

Mythbusters should definitely try this!
How To Be The Best Entrepreneur In The World
Was the mistake the merchant made "using Groupon?"
Bash is just a Monad
Just as easy as it is to compile and install anything on nix ...*

I hope that's tongue-in-cheek, because compilation is definitely non-trivial for any sophisticated piece of software with lots of external dependencies, especially if they're not available in the package manager that happens to come with the distro you're running at the moment (and it's even harder if you don't have sudo/root access on your box).
Protip: Often on sites using OnSwipe (or similarly intrusive mobile views that don't really help), it's hard to find the option to turn it off, or the option when chosen doesn't persist.

So, I usually switch to browsing such sites inside the excellent iCab Mobile browser, with its User-Agent changed to indicate desktop Safari. Usually works – though there is a report in sibling thread that OnSwipe, in its quest to infuriate, sometimes uses some other iPad-detection mechanism.
That would have been "cute" 3 years ago, but now Firefox sucks more than ever before. Hell, IE 9 is actually better than the latest version of Firefox and Mozilla just keeps digging their grave deeper.

1 year from now Firefox will be the next Netscape Navigator and be nothing more than a pale memory.
20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web (Book)
That's what okcupid and other dating sites are for though. A huge part of Badoo is facilitating casual hookups for which it works really well.
I cannot get the OP to load, based on its title I thought it was either a web app or desktop app to create thumbnails?
Firefox pretty much is Mozilla's main browser now to be honest. The original Mozilla Suite was renamed SeaMonkey.
When you say HTTP API, does that mean you had C++ http server, C++ http client, Python http server and Python http client?
Tipue drop, an Apple-like search box
This sort of decision is exactly why an independent judiciary is needed. Copyright is not in any sense a "fundamental" human right. Freedom from prior restraint arguably is.

Politicians will never recognize this fact because the copyright-based media not only contributes heavily to the financing of their campaigns but also brings those campaigns to the electorate. This is why, in the US at least, it's always the court system that saves us from the worst legislative assaults against free speech.
TIL: HTML Parsers in every flavor
A musician is someone who can communicate to other people via musical instruments. You are a musician, you just might not be a very good one.

Similarly a songwriter is someone who creates songs, so you are a songwriter, you just might not be a good one.
I'm sure there will be another Bitcoin. I'm also sure the founder is smart enough to know (e.g. in his note about Wikileaks) that something like this must be introduced in stages. In fact, the design of Bitcoin (e.g. the sharp inflationary tendencies stemming from lack of supply) more or less guarentee that it will be adopted by a few enthusiasts but not make it to mass consumption. Frankly, I think Sir Nakamoto also knew this from the beginning and considered this nothing more than a test run.
Reveal The Shocking Truth About African Mango Plus
But dozens of these already exist for Flash/HTML5 which seems to make far more sense than Silverlight.
The server is having issues keeping up with you guys! Stop visiting so much ;) Just kidding, thanks for illustrating with have server issues... I'll look into it!
Who don't already have Flash? Does such a situation actually exist anywhere?
This is a HTML5 batch thumbnail generator, so nothing is processed on the server side. We restarted the server, try again when you get some time :)
25 Black Friday Deals for Web Professionals
Google+ Was Never a Facebook Competitor
I'm surprised there isn't more discussion (in general, on the internet) on the relationship between the autistic spectrum and programmers.
Holding Out For A Hacker
Because it looks like the type of syntax a Haskell developer might create...
Sorry, I read the part about HN making it difficult to format your post, but I still don't quite get your point. I think it's pretty simple what was proposed: everything between the stars is included.
> It goes against everything they teach you in Econ 101 -- the expected utility theory is wrong.

I was rather under the impression that prospect theory was descriptive and not normative. Prospect theory ain't gonna save you and your hyperbolic discounting from being money-pumped, and one of the interesting bits of Ainslie's book, IIRC, was discussing how economic incentives and penalties did shift people closer to normatively-correct discounting and away from preference reversals.
Google quits plans to make cheap renewable energy
I think that the FCC under Michael Powell would've approved this with nary a second thought. His M.O. was paying lip service to the disruptive adaptive powers of free markets and modern technology when people accused him of unfairly granting natural monopolies. IIRC this happened when he exempted cable ISPs from common-carrier regulations.
What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory
The REST with Spring series
The REST with Spring series discusses the process of building a RESTful web service with Spring.
Nah, the spear was probably invented by some kind of ancient Feynman, who also got all the girls.
Judging by the huge volume of emails and comments on the blog, retweets and all that good stuff the article generated, I feel pretty good about the article
It's strange because the generator is HTML5 flat-file... maybe it's Wordpress? Meh.
I bought a fairly large (750 KV) VDG kit on eBay a couple of years ago just for the lulz, and I soon came to appreciate how unpredictable and unintuitive electrostatic phenomena can really be. Not only was the charge-transfer mechanism between the belt, rollers, and brushes completely different from what I'd always assumed, but the macro-level effects were sometimes downright confusing. In some ways, the operation of a Van de Graaff generator is even harder to internalize than that of a Tesla coil.

I expected longer discharges in dry weather -- nope, it does better in moderate humidity. I expected styrofoam peanuts to be consistently attracted (or maybe repelled) when thrown at the sphere, not to be attracted at first and then rapidly repelled at some small distance from the sphere. I expected the strongest discharges to occur when the generator was operated with no large objects nearby; instead, positioning it within a few feet of a tall wooden bookcase results in sparks (in any direction) at least 25% longer.

So I'm not too surprised at tales of strange force fields in a cellophane-tape factory. I am surprised that the rollers didn't have grounding brushes all over the place... but given my experiences with the VDG, for all I know that would have made things worse.
+1 Ubisoft. I hope to see more companies to do the same thing :)
Maybe then users will learn to use free software instead of pirating.
2011 Google developer day - all slides and links
Java Web Start Bugs: Offline Edition
I read it back before I settled on OKC.

I am still not interested in an older woman (or a fat one, or a fundie or a single mom). If I wanted to date my mothers friends I would give them a call.
I think that was already explained by the, "...who have Silverlight installed for Netflix or company stuff." part.
"For the uninitiated, WebEngage is a simple customer feedback cum short survey tool for websites."

Maybe "cum" has been adopted as the new slang, but it just seems out of place.
Guide on adding game mechanics to your web app
Is there really a difference between heat generated by friction and heat generated by gas compression, at the end of the day?