skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For me, web development seems like the exact opposite of desktop development.

In desktop development, you learn the underlying foundations first (the programming language, files, networking, graphics, GUIs, etc), then weave them together to build your application. It's slow, but worth it -- often the concepts are universal. How many times do you have to re-learn file IO?

In web development, it's really easy to build the finished application quickly but not understand any of the foundations. Look at how many "rapid development" frameworks there are out there; most of then are fast to install, and the result is usually awesome. And plugins! There are plugins for everything, and they work so well! But the foundations are intimidating -- especially because there are so many layers of abstraction piled on top of each other. Where would you start? The browser DOM? How JavaScript is interpreted? How your database implements transactions? The more web development I do, the more I realize how freakin' tall the stack is...and how little I really know about it. Kind of scary.
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I believe that is the first time I have ever seen anyone say XHTML would make something easier. (Just one example: http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/minimal-html )
Same here. I think the return to "do whatever you want and we try to interpret it correctly" was wrong. Code in XHTML is way more readable, maintainable and easier to learn (IMO).

I still write my HTML5 in correct XHTML Syntax.
Just installed this on my Verizon Galaxy Nexus. Worked like a charm. Up and running with my free $10 credit from google. Just need to try to find a place to try it out tomorrow.

Edit: Google has an app for that. https://market.android.com/details?id=com.mastercard.paypass will tell you where you can use Google Wallet.
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Due to CVS's (or RCS's?) text-based file format and conversion of line endings when checking out a repository, migrating binary files across operating systems can cause mangling of bytes whose value equals that of CR and LF.
Anything you don't know is hard. Four months ago I switched from web development to native iOS work and I couldn't stop complaining how much harder it is - "Who on their right mind thought that creating and managing UI elements in code is a good idea". Fast forward to present day I still find creating UIs in HTML to be faster but the gap is not that big anymore and I really don't care one way or the other.
Stop trying to force yourself to come up with ideas and just live your life. Nothing in life is so serious that you should be sweating yourself over it, save maybe an incurable disease (which you can't cure so again, don't sweat it).
Is WebGL the future?
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Perhaps I'm misreading your post, but RAD environments for desktop applications have been around for over a decade. I wasn't exactly an early adopter and I remember dragging and dropping a button onto a form using Delphi 4 under Windows 98. And then you could drag and drop to resize it and formatting it was so easy a 13-year-old could do it. I didn't have a clue about Win32 API or the graphics drivers or bitmap buffers or memory buses and it totally didn't matter.
Partychat — migrating from Google App Engine to EC2
Thanks for the link. I'm always looking for articles involving monitoring infrastructure.
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> A real dev can pick up a new language and syntax in a week ...

So am I not a real developer because it took me longer than a week to get a hang of Haskell? Hell, it even took me many months before I understood JavaScript well enough to find the right mix of patterns and practices to write solid code in it.
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I thought it would look like a sine wave on a circle...Well but that totally unexpected.
Do check the guys other writings they are really very interesting.
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It is important to write what we eat to be mindful eaters.
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Except that we don't see corporations taking someone else's music and selling as their own. File-sharing applies to copyrighted software too.
Love the quote, thanks for sharing.
Doesn't that require a gyroscope? Most devices that would work with this only have accelerometers.
2. Humans can manually keep track of versions of code! (1960s)

As everything, to begin with there was no software.

“At my first job, we had a Source Control department. When you had your code ready to go, you took your floppy disks to the nice ladies in Source Control, they would take your disks, duly update the library, and build the customer-ready product from the officially reposed source.” (Miles Duke)

Balderdash! Floppies were first available in 1971. They had decks in the sixties. They had paper tape. But they didn't have floppies! So, using the terminology of decks, the author scores a validity check!
"You deprive them of the sale"

read:

"You make the classic mistake of assuming that somebody who is willing to consume media for free would also be willing to consume it for a price, and that therefore anybody who gets it for free is a lost sale. This simply is not the case."

The entertainment factor here is wearing off. I'm out.
> It's not helping my ego.

The 'blow to our ego' here is the realization that maybe you're not as awesome as you think that you are, and all of the "I could haves" are really lies, because you couldn't have. At least that's my interpretation of that comment.
Sadly, I think it's gotten to the point where we need a way to lie about the screen resolution as well.

I can make my iPad browser pretend to be anything, and it's not enough. I imagine web sites are also checking, e.g. for a 768x1024 browser window and adapting accordingly. It is actually relatively easy to do this with "@media" in CSS, for instance.

All this extra "smart" code takes site developers more time to write, it's more data to download, and more work for the browser to do. Funny that the result would be to damage the user's experience after all that effort was put in.
I think the author is conflating two issues here

1 A sense that he does not finish things

2 That he should be further along in life

The second is nonsense as there is no set point where anyone should 'be' in life. Some contribute early, some late, some after they are dead!

The first is a real problem, one I've struggled with. The way I've attempted to overcome it is, when I got my next idea I wanted to try out I told myself the goal wasn't to be successful, rather it was to finish. I wanted to see something done and launched no matter how terrible I felt it was.

I found that overcoming the initial abandonment period required two things

1 a partner

2 skin in the game

With your next great idea, I'd advise you prioritize finishing it and invest in the above two points to get you there.
There's a definite difference between "pick up the syntax" of a language that doesn't have (m)any new concepts to wrap your head around versus learning new concepts embedded in a language.

Javascript has closures and functions-as-first-class-objects. Haskell has monads and all that jazz (I haven't used it yet). I'm guessing you didn't take months to learn the syntax of javascript, but to think in javascript.

It's similar to the difference between being functional in a natural language versus being fluent in said language.
Wow, I hadn't watched the video before. 8 and a half minutes of techno music with small blurry text and no examples on the site is a lot more than annoying: it's a complete turnoff.
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Seeing how the internals of Python are designed, I can't help but wonder how programmers don't flock to lisp compilers. The dynamic language without a GIL problem has already been solved, as has the optimization problem. The amount of work needed to build libraries like Django or Rails on common lisp or scheme is a fraction of the work needed to improve cpython/pypy/ruby to the level of sbcl, ccl, or one of the many high quality scheme's.

Do people just not care about performance? Is GIL locked performance just good enough? Do developers hate parens enough to justify the huge sacrifice in everything else?
I wrote a little response for you, which I hope will help in some small way. You're a really brave dude, and you're clearly not alone. (http://danielcrenna.com/post/14394588037/code-soloist-19-int...)
> And it should be his right to do so, and this right should be protected.

While we're at it, there should also be no poverty, everyone should have a place to live, and be safe from violence, etc. But this is the real world and people need to figure out how to deal with that, unfairness included.

There simply aren't any working solutions. Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. To computers, everything is a number. You tell the computer that no one is allowed to say "5" any more and they'll say 2+3. Or 6-1. Or 10/2. You block those and they'll find infinitely many other ways of saying it. It's binary. All or nothing. Half a solution is nothing. Zero. No good. One copy is enough for everyone.

The game is completely, utterly unfair. You have to control every computer. Once there's one unrestricted copy, it's game over. That's why people are not eager to accept "solutions" that merely screw a lot of things up, but do not, will not, and cannot fix the problem, any more than all the effort put into anti-spam has stopped spammers, in spite of 99.99% of the techies in the world hating them with undying passion and working night and day to stop them.

When's the last time you got no spam at all? The piracy thing is harder because people actually want to pirate and nobody wants spam. So why would anyone accept something like SOPA, which will drag tons of innocent sites into the crossfire while accomplishing nothing? I responded initially to someone blaming the techies for not coming up with solutions. The reason for that is because there are no technical solutions.

The only real solution to piracy that anyone has managed is not to play that game. Forget the copyright game, you're just going to spend your life swearing at pirates and wasting your energy on things that do not make money. Instead, play a different game where you build up a fanbase that supports you. It has worked. I have shown actual, living, breathing examples of people who have become successful playing that game instead. If copyright were abolished tomorrow, it wouldn't even matter. The fans support them, not some knock-off or pirate.

I can't for the life of me understand why someone would instead keep at the old game. Don't they want to be successful?
You should end up smarter after many years, shouldn't you?

Yes, except for the pesky problem where your mind weakens and often falls apart entirely after not that many decades.
>The piracy thing is harder because people actually want to pirate and nobody wants spam.

Spammers want spam. And there's more money in being a spammer than there is in being a pirate.
In honor of Bill of Rights day..
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5th generation of the iPhone5 is going to realease at oct-2012 . worldshout are spreading on the Internet about the iPhone 5.
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Everyone interested on the matter should read that.

Record labels used to be a way of getting access to top equipment, producers, marketing and studios. This is all cheap nowadays, so why keep the old middlemen?
I'm happy that you said this so eloquently. Accomplishment and fulfillment are not the same. I had a little draft of a response (which I won't post, because you cover everything better) and it included Van Gogh's last words, "The sadness will last forever". Clearly this great artist was not fulfilled, sadly.

I also wanted to add that the impulse to create 'amazing art' perplexes me. The best anyone can do is to create art. 'Amazing' pertains to peoples' perception of the art. There is a short but very good part of Vonnegut's Timequake where he discusses this with his brother Bernard that may be relevant (http://books.google.com/books?id=cr93q_HVXb0C&pg=PA165#v... - chapter 43, though pg 166 is unfortunately not available. "I like what Mozart did, and I hate what the bucket did")
Sites like Grooveshark or Megaupload are distributing other peoples' work, directly making money from the distribution - it could be called selling. You can make the same argument against torrent sites like PirateBay too, they have tons of ads around the site (and that's one of the arguments against them in Swedish court). They may be in loss, but that doesn't justify their actions.

I agree with second part - that's why BSA is pushing SOPA, too. Yes, I agree that BSA itself does things that are verging from borderline legal to illegal (see earbit's article, just substitute BSA and RIAA).
You're also rampantly committing the naturalistic fallacy. What's natural tells us nothing about what's right. Even if we have made a perfectly fair society (which we certainly haven't) and discover that there is some difference in outcomes that is explainable by genetic differences, that doesn't mean we should accept the result.

This is what's frustrating about these conversations, the worst is always assumed. Given that I absolutely do not believe that "natural" implies "right", I'm annoyed at the accusation, which comes up with some regularity even though I (like most others in the "not-only-nurture" camp) specifically disclaim such a view and never said a single thing about what is right or not.

If some people are genetically likely to be less good at math, should we cancel their math classes? Or should we give them better ones? I say the latter: as a society we want people to understand and appreciate math.

First, let me be clear: I think that the evidence that women are genetically worse at math is shoddy, at best. I think the evidence that their performance is less variable is very robust, but that's a very different claim.

Second, if either one is provably the case, then no, I very strongly don't think we should just throw our hands up. I think we should try to look at what causes the difference in statistical distribution of talent and figure out how to exploit/correct it - it's evolutionarily inconceivable that math talent is directly hard-coded genetically, so it's got to be emerging as a second or third order effect of genes, perhaps related to stress response (learning math is a process of experiencing micro-stresses over and over, and dealing with them in a way that makes you learn rather than get frustrated or angry - the "mathy" emotional state is a very delicate balance, even in people that are good at math). This is true even if the male/female gap is not genetic, since it's pretty clear that there is some sort of heritable component to math ability. Figuring out how this sort of thing affects performance could be very helpful, because even though it's partially innate (and somewhat based on brain chemistry), it can often be directly trained.

But if we declare by fiat that performance in math is primarily guided by factors outside the student's head (which is implicit in the "sexism keeps girls out of field X" argument), then we'll never figure out what's really going on, and we'll never discover how to help people that aren't predisposed to be good at math get better.
"Pick up the syntax in a week" is a huge black flag in my book because it indicates the developer doesn't really understand why his paycheck shows up every 2 weeks. Expertise is learning an environment's vernacular, gotchas, and detailed ins-and-outs of the frameworks/apis. It has nothing to do with passing a Programming Language 101 class.
Like million of humans. Congrats.
It.does.not.matter. :-)
Every once in a while, another developer has that revelation: http://berislav.lopac.net/post/4726275775/of-course-web-deve...
Beneficial and neutral mutations are essentially left out of the equation - they would spread to 100% of the population, so in the steady state, the probability of mutation newly creating a beneficial mutation has to be 0% (since it's already present in every member).

The motivation for ignoring beneficial mutations (and back-mutations to beneficial states) is that they're extremely rare as compared to deleterious ones - most selection pressure in nature is aimed at merely preserving the functionality in the genome, weeding out new deleterious mutations rather than supporting new beneficial ones (though that is a critical role in the very long term, of course).
This shouldn't be here. There's a new programming language out every day. I hope Zidie is successful but posting an incomplete website with most pages having some sort of "coming soon"/"under construction" message isn't inspiring.

I want to see it in the wild, I want tutorials and examples, and I want to be more confident that this actually will be updated in the future. Plus the video just showed some random coding with a soundtrack and was barely readable. None of this makes this project look very compelling or enticing. Plus, from the code I see, I don't see anything that makes it worth going through the extra step to compile it to PHP. It's pretty much PHP as it is already.

I hate to be negative and I wish them the best but hyping this thing before its ready is doing them more harm than good.
I think a platform that makes developers struggle with implementation details and browser quirks is a dead end, no matter what Adobe does.

In my experience, there's a low signal to noise ratio when learning HTML/JS/CSS. A lot of it is learning hacks, as opposed to getting a general sense of how computers work. Flash/AIR are very good in this regard. If Flash disappears tomorrow, I don't think his skills would go to waste.
if only more people would think that way... the world could be a better place.

Self reflection, criticism, and being able to detach yourself from things that control our though and behavior.
How to say this without trolling?

This isn't the RIAA's country, it's not Google's country, it's not Microsoft's country, and it's not Yahoo's country. It's our country. Until we, the people, accept our responsibilities and stop this from happening, it will continue to happen. More corruption is not the answer.

Look at it from this perspective: as a practical matter, today, corporations have significantly more power in politics than individuals, and media companies more than tech companies. If something isn't done right freaking now, SOPA will pass from committee in three days.

There is nothing you, as an individual, or we, as a collective, can do against the millions of dollars spent on lobbying and campaign contributions by the media companies in the next three days. Talk of what "ought" to be will not solve the immediate problem.

An analogy: suppose you are poor (or bootstrapping), and you are $150 short of making rent for the month. Rent is due in five days. You can talk on and on about how you should have got a better job, didn't iterate on customer development, etc., but if you don't come up with $150 right now, you will "die." So, you might go to a payday loan shark, get a cash advance from your credit card, or sell something to make rent and live another day.

What's my point? When your very survival is on the line right now, you have to do whatever you can to live to fight another day. That's where we are now with media companies and the Internet.
Python's pseudocode-like readability is a big asset which you are selling short when you pretend like the appeal's just some kind of irrational paren hate.

Have you found some devastating performance problem with Python that you want to share? Because I'm not aware of one, as long as you don't try to write Java code in Python. If you want lots of concurrency for some special purpose, I can recommend gevent as a very nice option.

If I have a performance problem it's usually due to a tight inner loop and in the rare event that it can't be fixed based on judicious profiling, it is not really a huge problem to write a little code in C. I don't understand why I would have to switch to LISP to deal with a rare performance problem.
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Didn't know Rails was a language... interesting. I'll take someone that writes down ruby on their resume over the same rails experience any time!
I honestly find it easier to build UI elements from the ground up over using plug-ins, because like with any other code if you are the one who developed it you understand it.

I too have been turned off by lightbox and slider plugins for jQuery, and find it easier to just come up with that kind of thing myself rather than jump into someone else's codebase.
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necro said pick up the language and syntax -- I took "the language" part to mean the concepts of the language outside of the explicitly mentioned syntax. With that said, I felt addressing his comment was necessary since writing idiomatic code is not something that should be expected from a weeks worth of experience in a language.

In essence, I'm agreeing with everything you said, just wanted to clarify the reason for my post.
Heatsynclabs is open even outside of the hours listed, I would check twitter, many of the members post on there when they are in the space.

When I still lived in Phoenix I would visit there often (I know many of the founders of HSL from the college I went to).
An HTML.

As an aside, what increasingly bugs me is the number of programmers who seem to have bought the urban myth that "An green apple" is grammatically correct, and have proceeded to pepper their project documentation with awkward and incorrect statements.

A comment on the issue[1]:
There is a bizarre urban legend of sorts that you're "supposed to" use "an" if the head noun in the noun phrase it determines begins with a vowel sound, rather than the first word in the noun phrase, giving rise to claims that "an green apple" is somehow "technically" correct. Here is a blog post of someone who seems to have gotten this idea. And here is the discussion on Language Log about that blog post.

In any case, the rule is that you use "an" if the next word begins with a vowel sound. Vowel sound is crucial here because many words that begin with vowel letters do not begin with vowel sounds (e.g. user) and vice versa (e.g. hour).

This makes it a kind of sandhi rule for "intrusive N" in English for indefinite articles, avoiding hiatus between the article and the following word.

[1] http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/152/when-should-i...