skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> if/else, for/do/while

The thing is, these are different in Clojure than in various other languages (although more in common with other Lisps). Constructs like "if" are expressions which return values, which will confuse you the first time it comes up if you don't realize that everything is an expression.

Then there's "for/do/while", where "for" in Clojure is not a loop at all because it produces a lazy sequence. And the equivalent to "do/while" (loop/recur, which enforces tail recursion) is something of a last resort where other sequence functions have failed.

I agree with you 100% that the learning material is a little dry. I don't know what kind of material would work best...
I've never ever heard of a "mod" affecting comments or somehow modifying the karma of a given comment. I'm sure that PG would not give a mod that power (though, he does alone hell-bans which I find in poor taste considering how many legitimate comments I've seen dead-on-arrival).
Don't forget to take notes in the form of a cheat sheet (or find a cheat sheet someone has already made). It's so easy to remember what was done in a tutorial without remembering how it was done in terms of keywords, etc.
It's still over 1% among the ~50,000 sites I track at W3Counter. That said, IE 6, 7 and 8 are all on a downward trend.

If this keeps up two years from now virtually everyone will be on IE9/10, Chrome or Firefox.

http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php & http://www.w3counter.com/trends
"The MicroPHP Manifesto" is actually "The Lone Programmer Manifesto".

Programming in today's world means working with other people's code. All a framework does is provide a set of design patterns and standards that a group of programmers can adhere to. This encourages code reuse and allows you as a programmer to create "black boxes" - components with a well defined programming interfaces that behave in a consistent & predictable manner.

Real-world example: I'm currently working with a custom-built CMS programmed in PHP. I'm the second man on a what began as a one-man project. The CMS author wrote a bunch of database functions (essentially wrappers for the deprecated mysql_* functions) and dumped them into a file. Now, the author wasn't aware that you can (and should) lazy-load database connections - so every time you need to talk to the database, you have to manually connected using `cms_db_connect()` AND select the database with `cms_db_select(CONST_DATABASE_NAME)`. As pretty much every page initiates a database connection this code is EVERYWHERE.

And this is only the tip of the iceberg. There's also a half-assed MVC implementation, ubiquitous usage of inline CSS, un-encapsulated code, and a butt-load of quirky behavior. Now if the original author had take a little bit of time at the beginning and researched a proper framework or used an existing CMS our project would not be behind schedule - and it would be far easier to add another developer into the mix. All this meaningless complexity because the original author took the "simple" route of not working with a framework authored by third parties.
#Enter_at_your_own_Risk Cyber Awareness Magazine Issue January edition Released
That's not a good advice. It is extremely hard to find problems in your own implementation, even if you're experienced in doing that.

Better advice: Find a mate (or a group), and find out why the other's implementation is broken. And go through some case studies first (see e.g. colin percival's postmortem in http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-18-tarsnap-critical-...)
For what it's worth, I suspect IE8 is going to stand out much more than IE7, which very few people will upgrade to (IE7 doesn't exist for Win7 I don't believe, so as people upgrade to Win7, you will see surge in IE8).
Startup Row was an invaluable experience for Eldarion last year. I'd recommend it to any eligible startup.
This seems low for me for .NET. But then I live in the bay area, where everything is way too expensive.
I'm glad I don't have to maintain sites anymore which target the chinese market.

IE 6 was a true pain point, but still, I've gained tons of knowledge on how to debug rendering issues.
I've also noticed that very few of my CS academic colleagues are on anything social other than Google+.

The biggest feature it needs is LaTeX escape formatting. I'm sick of seeing "$\mapsto$" in posts instead of a nice arrow.
More likely the Android 2.2 or 2.3 browser.
Mozilla Public License (MPL) Version 2.0 Released
The original Transformer (TF101) has always had a locked bootloader. The key for the first revisions was leaked by someone inside Asus, allowing ROM flashing. Asus changed the key and now people with newer TF101s cannot flash their own ROMs.
Then let me make it a super extra fun year :)

http://sachagreif.com/the-design-freebies-list/
First get one small, but representative project under your belt. Don't focus on rate yet, but keep the scope small so that you don't work for peanuts for too long. Use it and your hobby projects as a portfolio.

Go to a few meetups to build your contact network. Against the intuition, developer meetups can be a surprisingly good place to find new gigs. Startup meetups can work too, there's more biz people there, but in general startup gigs are usually not very good freelance work: high expectations, small budgets, lot of people biz people who know too little about software dev.

Sooner you get to big customers with bottomless pits of money, easier your contracting life will get. This was the biggest lesson for me. For big customers, you can do projects that save them big bucks. Boring, maybe, but pays the bills and you can use the free time to do fun things. So if you want to get your contracting life off the ground, don't focus what is fun, but what is most profitable.
So if you want to make $120,000 year, your hourly rate would be $120.

And when you're considering what you think your annual income should be keep in mind that you have to cover your own vacation, insurance, self-employment tax (depending on where you file), and assorted other expenses.
Consumers Flex Online Muscles
So am I to understand that the new easy way to success in blog writing is to a) steal someone else's once-popular catchphrase b) avoid doing any real research or "naming names" c) asskiss those names whom you've actually become acquainted with d) offer unsolicited, unobjective and unhelpful advice and e) profit?

Only travel writers are lazier.
>Is that not hacker-friendly enough?

You're focusing on hardware when everyone else is talking about software. The point is that Android can be made to run on arbitrary hardware because it's open.

> but since it's "open source",

Explain the use of scare quotes. Android is, by every reasonable definition, open source software.

By any reasonable definition, Android as an operating system was more open than WebOS from day one. I can build a complete, working Android system and run Android applications on it if I want. You cannot do the same with WebOS.

>The Pre was (more) open hardware with a (mostly) open system, rooted by default with no carrier lockdowns.

Except you were locked into Palm (and only Palm) hardware by the license. The Android platform is completely portable; the WebOS platform is not.
If the clients you're dealing with are scared by person/day rates, stop working with them

I agree, there are no other industries where a professional will take on the business risk of another party with the exception of legal, and when they do they expect 30% of the case winnings. But for the vast majority of legal they charge for every hour worked. There is no reason for freelancers to work on a project compensation basis, they are shouldering unnecessary risk, that is usually due to the client not understanding development. Per project pricing immediately sets the freelancer up to have to defend against every change that inevitably comes in. Unless it is routine work, I rarely take on custom development work as anything other than an hourly arrangement.
and just for the rest of the IE figures from this particular site in the enterprise (sorry, not comfortable releasing actual session counts, all I can say it's in the hundreds of thousands of unique users):

Dec 2009
IE6 Share: 37.3%
IE7 Share: 32.8%
IE8 Share: 13.9%
Dec 2010
IE6 Share: 15.5%
IE7 Share: 35.2%
IE8 Share: 31.9%
Dec 2011
IE6 Share: 6.8%
IE7 Share: 24.3%
IE8 Share: 43.5%
The article had, early on:

"I can’t speak for other disciplines, but within computer science, I’ve always felt that these meta discussions were inadequate — in terms of volume, vigor, and format. They happened mostly at conferences were largely limited to more senior/well-connected researchers, and lagged behind some of the serious problems that have accumulated such as restrictive publisher copyrights and very low acceptance rates at journals and conferences."

So, the claim here I noticed was:

"some of the serious problems that have accumulated such as ... very low acceptance rates at journals and conferences."

So, a big topic in that community was a "serious" problem getting published. So, I outlined how to get published. Simple.

In a word, my outline said to 'mathematize' CS. That suggestion is potentially earth shaking, likely not already in the community, and should be a welcome contribution.
The best solution I have found is to use a non-US (UK, France, whatever) VPN service and sign up for the NBA International League Pass Broadband (http://ilp.nba.com/).

The International Pass has no blackouts and you can watch the All Star game, playoffs, and Finals. The US Broadband League Pass does not give you access to playoffs or the finals.
Ideal would be get in touch with Google Developer relation's guy.
Passport (http://passportjs.org/) is worth investigating as an alternative to everyauth. Its primary advantage is a modular architecture focused solely on authentication, which is fully decoupled from routing and template engines. Many people find this approach more flexible and easier to integrate.

(Disclaimer: I'm the developer of Passport.)
Waza: Heroku's First Developer Event (SF, 1/11)
IE8 will be the new IE6. IE9+ are the ones that only run on Windows 7.
This post bothers me a lot, because it misrepresents a very large movement in American music while at the same time decrying the value of community-developed frameworks. Black Flag is a great band, but their "fast and simple" approach to playing music ran into a lot of the same problems that tech startups find when they, too, decide to take a "fast and simple" approach to web development -- those being high employee turnover, extremely low profitability, and a lot of in-fighting.

Black Flag made a lot of junk because they couldn't get the band to cooperate. They had to keep re-doing the same songs over and over because their lead singer kept changing. Talk about a good analogy for unnecessary rewrites! At one point, when the artistic direction and ego situation became especially dire, one side of an album was all spoken word, and the other side was all instrumental. In the end, they just ended up becoming another "metal" band with albums like "Slip it In" towards the end of their discography. Black Flag is a great band, but this post completely misrepresents what they did and what it means, if anything for software development. If it's the story of anything, it's the story of an entrepreneur who kept paying for all the corners he cut.

Rush wanted to write complex albums that dealt with a lot of layered meaning. There was a lot more planning and attention paid to what got laid onto their tracks. In exchange for their hard work, attention to detail, and planning, they were well compensated. They played arenas and sold a ton of albums. Black Flag played VFW halls, and I'll be damned if most of their fans these days didn't just torrent their discography and be done with it. What would you want for your business? There will be no hipsters to fondly nostalgize your unsuccessful web application.
Parrot and Perl 6 really suffered until Pugs started producing a standalone test suite. If Perl 6 on Parrot had had that in 2000 or 2001, things might have turned out differently.

I normally agree that throwing away working code and starting anew is the wrong approach, but trying to rewrite the Perl 5 internals to support Perl 6 would have taken at least as long as Parrot and Rakudo have taken; it's really that impenetrable in places.

Your phrase "in danger of becoming useful" is quite perceptive though; I wish I'd thought of it.
I believe that newer luthiers can somewhat cheat on certain properties of instruments. One example is the density of the wood. It is very difficult to find wood that has been aged hundreds of years. The cellulose tends to compress yielding a much studier material. I believe the original Stradivari were made much thicker and compressed over time.

Newer instruments skip this step and just make the wood thinner. The instrument sounds just as good but does not have the same sturdiness.
"There is a worldwide shortage of real, viable talent. Companies are falling over themselves to attract and retain dev talent."

I have to say I find that hard to believe.

Now, to be fair I don't actually know if I am talented or not. It is impossible to accurately judge oneself, though I like to think I am. I've had the opportunity to play lead on some pretty big and successful projects for some major businesses using many of the technologies that are said to be hot right now. A present co-worker said something to me along the lines of "I have worked with a lot of programmers, and you are by far the best of them" and it seemed genuine. Take from that what you will.

Anyway, I've entertained the idea of working with some other organizations. Some have not been interested in me at all, and the rest were no longer interested after a short chat. Nobody has been interested in seeing the actual quality of my work. I'll accept that I just don't have that talent, but given the above, it seems to me that it is really just my marketing skills that are lacking – Which makes sense; I spent my spare time becoming a better programmer, not becoming a better marketer.

Given that, I remain skeptical of the talent shortages. How much comes down to companies just having no clue about how to hire people?
Text is nicer.
Hm, we're using gondor.io for an open source project, not sure what is implied by "... We've built the hosting and deployment infrastructure known as Gondor. Now all our efforts are coming together as Arnor."

I presume Gondor.io will continue to exist as it does now?
Its a paywall. Just I have to pay with info rather than money. It is not free.

To accomplish the goal of knowing how my congresscritter (really?) matches with me, I should not need an account. If I wanted you to contact them for me then OK but to call the site useless without an account just makes it so.
Question really is whether supporting it costs less than 1% of your total revenue. John Resig has said that very little of jQuery source is IE6-specific. That is to say, supporting IE7 and IE8 is a pain in the neck, and IE6 comes along for the ride.
This was a fantastic step by step guide for people who have absolutely no design sense, like me. Thank you!
I'm okay with newer pages not being viewable by browsers more than 10 years old. Upgrading your browser every half decade or so seems eminently reasonably, if only to ensure you get all of the security patches that are no longer being backported to EOL browsers. Of course, with browsers like chrome, they are auto-updating all the time anyways - so it's not like you have much of a choice.

What is more important to me is that older web sites continue to be browseable (to some degree, bit perfect rendering isn't essential) 20 years from now.
I don't think Dahl takes credit for all of this code:

"Based on src/http/ngx_http_parse.c from NGINX copyright Igor Sysoev"
I'd like to mention that even as an employee, focusing on and emphasizing value makes it a lot easier to get paid more than focusing on cost/hours.

Example: a company I worked at spent about 2 years trying to get a project off the ground. It would involve hiring a bunch of consultants for $1.2MM, not to mention all the senior management time that was involved in approvals, spec interviews, etc.

6 months after I got there, they still hadn't managed to even get the project started. I spent a few days asking around to find out what the company actually wanted to achieve with this project. I then spent 2 hours implementing something that gave them the exact result they were looking for.

When negotiating a raise, do you think I mentioned how I spent a week building an Excel Pivot Table? Or do you think I talked about how I saved the company at least 2 million dollars and successfully completed a project that they'd been trying to start for nearly 2 years in under 3 months? (In reality, under a week-but I didn't want to make it sound too easy).

And that's how I became the youngest Sr. Analyst at the company before I left :)
If they show me the game on MLB.tv - $9/mo basically for the foreseeable future.

If they make me subscribe to cable - $0/mo forever. How much does the MLB make per cable subscriber is the question I cannot answer.
I used subprocess in a program as recently as this afternoon and I'm quite baffled about the amount of negativity it attracts. Sure it's not quite as simple as `ls -l` but it's not too far off and in return it gives you far more control. Is there anything in particular that you found hard or confusing?
This Is Not Your Father’s Spring – A Learning Project
Learning REST with Spring - the articles focus on Persistence with Hibernate, JPA, Spring Data, on RESTful architecture, Discoverability and HATEOAS, and on Securing the REST service with Form, Basic and Digest authenticated, all with Spring 3.1.
Listen to this!!!

I need to remind myself of it more often than not, but it was once again driven home to me last week. A new (prospective) client wanted something (an electronic design) so trivial I couldn't believe he was even asking. But the point was that it represented real value to him (read: stuff he can resell for lots of $$$) for me to connect two simple parts together with a bit of wire.
I'm not a mod; I downvoted your comment because you were attacking the OP - worse, his whole category - and not what he was saying in his post.
I'm not trying to troll, but is IEN really just IE6? Has 10 caught up to Webkit/Opera/Firefox? One of the main reasons I feel that why IEX will be IE6 is its lack of support for webGL
I wouldn't let it accumulate. Those extra hours are your profit.
Is this an internal web site, or one with a broad number of external enterprises (multiple companies) accessing it?

More interesting in the latter case, less interesting if this is the internal wiki in some MegaCorp.
Aaron's post on The Mindbody Prescription covered some of these issues.

http://aaroniba.net/articles/tmp/how-i-cured-my-rsi-pain.htm...

I'm a skeptic myself, trained as a scientist with degrees in physics from Harvard and Caltech. The technique from the book seems like it couldn't possibly work, but it did. As noted before, YMMV.
Fun?

Why do you go on walks? Read fiction books? Hang out with friends? I think one of the ruts a lot of hackers (myself included) can fall into is thinking that everything that they do needs to have a point to it that furthers some long term goal. Somethings can be done just because you want to.
I love me some ML/Haskell, but the article is about small C programs. Small utility programs is the domain where C shines. C is dead-simple, ubiquitous, and fast. Just the tool-complexity of Haskell alone makes C the better choice for these kinds of programs.

Over the last several years, I've experimented with rewriting some of my small C programs in Haskell or ML, and vis-versa. Amazingly, the C programs often end up being shorter, simpler, and significantly less headache (for these small programs). I am very comfortable coding in all three languages, so I think I'm pretty unbiased.

Reading the code from the article, the Haskell code is much better written than the C code. I think the author is making a mistake in thinking the better code is a result of the merits of Haskell w.r.t C instead of just the result of the clean rewrite plus being more experienced with Haskell.
Absolutely!

Think of Arnor as a layer on top for people that want to use other people's code for their site.

Arnor itself just deploys to Gondor and you'll always be able to deploy your own code to Gondor completely independently of Arnor.
Launched three month project: iPhone Course http://www.LearnApps.Org
Googling for regular expressions puzzle turns up a few more of a slightly different but related flavor.

It would be fun to develop a taxonomy and categorize the different recreational challenges that people find amusing, basing the categories on the type of "aha" and skillset required to solve it.
My guess is that Arnor will be tightly integrated into Gondor. One-click install of apps similar to Heroku.
Problems getting published in CS was a big point early in your article, and that is what I responded to. For more on this point, see

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3421033

below.
San Francisco (H1B, INTERN welcome):
Klout is in growth mode for most of 2012 and is currently at 30 engineers. We are looking for research, backend, frontend, QA and generalist engineers. Our requirements for various positions: machine learning, java, hadoop / hbase, scala, and node.js. We have a goal of becoming one of the Best Places to Work in 2012.

Jobs here: http://klout.com/corp/careers
Hackerspace Global Grid
Wouldn't be surprised if the reason is similar to South Korea's:

http://sietch.net/ViewNewsItem.aspx?NewsItemID=163
>I don't like how inaccessible HTML5 and CSS3 techniques are to older browsers.

Because these technologies came into existence after these browsers were made. Such is progress.

>I like how we try to make sites accessible for the blind

This is a law, and being blind is rarely a choice.

>sites that were build to render on IE6, will continue to render just fine

Because they were built with two codebases, one for regular browsers, one for IE6. Double the work for that 1%.

>experimental browser vendor-specific code

Browser specific code? Yes, if that code doesn't become standard. But IE6 required a lot of browser-specific code. The hopes are that the browser specific code gets the recognition for its usefulness and becomes part of the still-in-progress standard.

>Is that progress?

Yes.
Creating a subprocess can be complex, at least if you expose all the different subtleties. If you've ever used Java's APIs to run processes, you know that Python's aren't the worst ;-)

There are lots of interesting corner cases, for example how to join stdout and stderr properly without blocking on one stream while the other is overflowing.

On the other hand, almost nobody ever needs this. Ruby's "output = `command`" probably covers 90% of the use cases with the most trivial API imaginable. The hard part obviously is exposing the advanced functionality without compromising on the simplicity.

Almost all programming communities can learn a lot from Ruby's "if it's too hard, you're not cheating enough" approach (dhh quote I believe). Yes, the process could return an exabyte of stdout data, but do you really care? Is that really the problem this API should try to solve, with all special cases? That's not good computer science practice, but surprisingly effective.
Interesting... you say I'm billing like a graphic designer; I think I'm billing like a lawyer.

To be clear, if someone calls me up and says "I want you to do 10 minutes of work for me", I'm going to say no. The sort of consulting I most enjoy is where I'm going to be doing 50+ hours in total, spread over many months. It's not project work; it's expert-on-call work, and if I had to quote a project rate every time someone wanted to ask me a quick question, they wouldn't ask quick questions.
Tags + filtering would be sooooo useful