skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If this guy showed up at Australia's border with no return flight, incorrect visa and everything else he screwed up, I'd wager he'd have the same experience.

Do your homework, be a smart traveler!
It really irks me when crashes are made out to be the result of user actions, or some inescapable act of god. Excepting the very rare hardware fault, crashes are caused by a programmer error. PERIOD. That is all that really matters from the user's perspective. There may be some way to work around the bug by tinkering with things, but nothing the user does can ever cause a crash.

Also, it wouldn't surprise me if iOS apps crash more than Android apps, because iOS doesn't have virtual memory. When an iOS app runs out of physical memory, it gets killed. This was allegedly a design decision.
Wow, i didn't know any language had something like that. Can't say I'm surprised that it's a feature of Scheme/Lisp.

If OP said "Numerical Tower" in the first place I'd probably have looked it up and understood what he was talking about. Thanks for the info anyway. Learn something new every day on HN.
My point is that those images were probably converted wrong, so of course they look bad.
As an entrepreneur, I'm wondering how the MacLanes got an article written about them like this in the WSJ. It's a major, major PR boon for their clothing business.

Are there any journalists or PR folk here who can comment? Or entrepreneurs who have had coverage like this for your own company(s)? How can other founders accomplish something similar?
Wow. This is pretty weak. Then again, they're the "most popular plugins of 1 month". Seems pretty faddish to me.
Most languages have most of the listed features. The most interesting uncommon idea on that list to me is model of time. But only when it allows reversible computing. I don't know how practical that is though. Anyways I've separated out the parts of the list which I think are less common. And listed examples off the top of my head so by no means is the below meant to be exhaustive.

The uncommon ones:

* Units - F# and Frink

* homoiconicity - Lisps, Prolog, Io, Factor, Pure?, ...

* macros and extensible syntax - the above list, Nemerle, Dylan

* Unification - Prolog, Mercury - logic languages. anyone with type inference. anyone with predicate dispatch, a full example of which I do not know. F# Active patterns and scala extractors are close.

* Error (managing numeric Imprecision) - Best I can understand I can only note that I have seen people treat similar concepts with monads. So haskell and any language which allows easy monads. So scala, f#, haskell, clojure, nemerle

* Math types - Axiom/Aldor. To an extent, dependently typed languages - not practical. yet?

* Polymorphism - Although it sounds more like structural typing. So OCaml, Scala. Also F#, haskell partially.

* Aspects - Metaprogramming makes this relatively easy and clean to implement. so anyone with macros too. Arguably, monads are another way to follow the same philosophy.

* term rewriting - not common, very niche and not mentioned, but pure-lang allows this and for abstract math programming it is a really fun & powerful concept.

* pluggable types - F# has this as type providers. Gosu open types. I have used it in F#. At a start, it is a very awesome way to consume an api.

Less Uncommon:

* pattern matching - most functional languages. to a small extent the java.nexts

* Immutable values - most functional languages

* Parser - parser combinators or any language which implements PEGs e.g. Nemerle

* Design by contract - eiffel and as a library in most languages

* laziness - the usual functional suspects.
Not to mention that it has been proven in many studies that what people say they would pay for something is never an accurate representation of what they would actually pay. The actual amount is almost always found to be lower.
I have no sympathy. This sounds like an unprepared traveller, who confused his story, and then was denied due to the suspicious nature of his story. I know, start-up rush and hustle, but do your homework. Customs and border protection are very formal, and it's your responsibility to explain your story clearly and accurately the first time.
I'm a foreigner that has crossed into the USA 25+ times, about half of those at land borders from Canada (where I live, but I'm not Canadian)

>the border guard starts in on me hard. I mean he had it out for me. I still have no idea why I rubbed him the wrong way, but he sure didn't like me.

This happens to me 75% of the time I try to enter the USA.

The best one was when I had my usa-plated motorbike in Canada, and came back into the USA with it. The border guard yelled at me, literally yelled at me for 2 hours about how much trouble I was in. "You gunna get it, boy", etc.
Whenever I politely asked what law I had broken, I was told to "shut the hell up, smartass".
(I broke no law, and was eventually allowed on my way)

Another time in front of about 40 people the border guard booms "Can you read, Boy?". To which I replied "yes, sir", as he threw my passport across the room, hitting me on the chest and falling on the floor.

A while back I was flying out from LA to Melbourne, and upon looking at my international plane ticket, the border guard said "where's Melbourne?". I was then forced to sit in a dark room, by myself for 4 hours, until another guard came along and said "looks fine to me, on your way"

>he was trying to get me to talk and contradict myself - which I have to admit is pretty fucked up.

This is the case every time I cross the border.

For the record, I'm white.
Literally the worst developers I've ever known are the sort that would eat this kind of thing up.

The worst developers in my opinion are those that appear highly proficient and effective until they're asked to actually produce something, then never produce anything of value whatsoever. They're infinitely worse than those who are clearly ineffective from the beginning. They're talented but immature; unwilling to do anything they don't see as a game; unable to see everyday tasks as games.
"I'm going to try inserting <p> tags every few sentences to see if I can make sense of his rant"

- super tempted to make a bookmarklet for that later on.
It's right there, go to http://careerapi.moneydesktop.com/docs
> Thats right ladies and gentlemen, if I told him the truth he would fight for me, but agreeing to his truth is in conflict with my originally story, and thus I have committed fraud

Yikes. You really walked into that one. The more I kept reading the more I was cringing. The good cop, bad cop routine, letting you sit for hours, "let me talk to the supervisor" thing.
Pursuing learning in this area will only make you extremely angry. Government at its worst.
If the maid's pay is 60% of the factory worker's pay, then you break even. I also ignored the time cost of shopping every 2 years to keep things simple.

The only point I'm trying to make is that durability and preservation of material goods is often overrated, and replacing things every few years isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Clojure and Scala are both there, except on idiomatic libraries (you might have to use Java libraries).

Clojure wins on simplicity of syntax (Scala has a rule that operators ending with ':' associated to the right, which makes an incredible amount of sense once you understand the language but is annoying and arbitrary to beginners) and homoiconicity. Scala wins on pattern matching and robustness (static typing). I'd use Scala for a game, because it's fast (both in terms of human and CPU performance). Both are great languages.
> what kind of training involves setting up a US corp?

Y Combinator. The company he mentions has a post on the front page right now mentioning "[their] Y Combinator experience". Calling it "business training" seems an overly simplistic description, but I don't think it's technically inaccurate. It's certainly the wrong thing to call it at the border.
The last two or three iOS updates caused quite a few crashes until some updates rolled in, and beyond that I still get some every day. Most of the on my iPad, mostly due to the fact that I use it a bit more and with apps that deal with more data (e.g. GoodReader) or network traffic (browsers, Flipboard, Alien Blue).

But that's anecdotal evidence anyway, and with my usage pattern you'd just need a few "black sheep" to really bring down the average.

My Android usage isn't that heavy, so not really comparable. Not that many crashes this far, but especially in the early days quite a few freezes.
> down to Mountain View that inevitably led to some serious misunderstanding at US Immigration

I'm curious to hear what the problem was as I recently had some problems getting into the US.
He is the founder of YC-funded upverter. At the time of the blog post they were still in stealth mode and didn't want to reveal this. A story about their YC experience is currently on the HN homepage
I missed apt-get a teeny tiny bit but Homebrew is amazing. I'm not really into customizing my system all that much either so it wasn't that either. It's Lion that has me a little upset.

First off, Lion has replaced GCC with LLVM which for the most part is fine but I was doing some work with Ruby that I started on my Linux machine then when I cloned it on my Mac (which is where I do the majority of my work) I had problems with Rubygems and RVM. This was due to me having the latest Xcode 4.2. I was getting a weird Posix error because some gems needed to be compiled with GCC. So then I had to remove Xcode, get GCC as a standalone install and I'm still stuck with errors. Most things work but the other day I just wanted to deploy a new Octopress blog and rake generate throws a long list of errors at me. So that was the first time I was truly upset with Mac.

Then the other little things are:

- inability to save or rename files without a name (as in .htaccess). I always have to open my main text editor for that as you can't rename files that way nor does TextEdit allow that

- no more "Save as"

Showing hidden files got a little harder too and then there were some general quirks that made it seem like the OS was babysitting me and not letting me just do what I knew I wanted to do. For the most part I'm over those and I love my Mac to death but I'm still pissd about how much of a chore it is to get RVM and Runygems working in Lion.
You should use MacPorts or Homebrew - Googling suggests that Homebrew at least specifically supports php with freetype.
Fishy but not unexpected. Online publications always switch off comments when they see a huge traffic bump and realize they have made fools of themselves and are being told as much in the comments.

For example, a few weeks ago the NYTimes Public Editor made a blog post about whether it should be their policy to note in articles when public figures are obviously lying in their remarks. (They're worried about seeming like the liberal media and they think they should "fairly balance" truth and fiction on issues like climate change or what percentage of planned parenthood's money is spent on abortions.) This resulted in immediate outrage from the commenters and vicious comments. Not profanity -- articulate rebuttals that just made the NYTimes look like idiots. Comments switched off. Later they attempted to walk it back, poorly. Same articulate rebuttals, NYTimes look like idiots again. Comments switched off even faster. Not even sure why they enabled them on the second post to begin with.
All I want: Smalltalk with tail recursion and a process model like erlang (implies immutable values).
It is not the points, rather it may be an indicator of a trend among the demographic of individuals. For example say I participated in a car club, where all members where experts at vehicle technology and then over time said BMW jerks took over more and more, the information would start to reflect their preference (BMW tech) and thought process and at some point there will be a event horizon where it seems like all car club members are jerks and all information was being presented by jerks who think so little of opposing viewpoint that they would disable your car, for something as petty as making a point that maybe a particular Mercedes technology is superior. I personally don't like information that is biased by ego. I am not saying that HN is close to that, but it was not long ago that the thought of someone systematically down-voting another member in HN would be unheard-of. My point was not that I am on the cusp of leaving but rather I share the concern that with HN's growth we have to be aware of possible decline in quality and discuss ways to ensure the quality that HN provides.
Ask HN: Why did you start programming?
I'd love to hear why you started programming. It would be especially interesting to see how many people had similar reasons. Me? I was inspired by a Foxtrot cartoon.
Homebrew is great. Macports is good, too, if you like seeing which programs will segfault due to the version of OpenSSL it currently includes.
Ouch, I'm not sure what that says that I immediately wondered if you were a minority.

Oh, and I had a similar experience re: Melbourne. I'm a US citizen living in Australia, and was landing in San Fran for a 3 week visit about 8 years ago. As required by law, I travel on my US passport in and out of the US, so no problem right? But no, I start getting the third degree about what I do with myself - "I'm a student at the University of Melbourne" - "What is that? A college? What's Melbourne?" - err, where I just came from, and its best known University.
How does it matter whether ESR is (or was ever) relevant or not?
I usually rip the bandaid off as fast as possible once I'm sure it has to come off. Be honest with him - in the long run you'll both be better off.
Day 4 no doctor
I find it interesting that two of the most exciting languages that exist right now are built on top of the VM for one of the worst ones.
Yes, that is exactly the distinction I'm talking about. And I agree this is something that's pretty difficult to measure, probably impossible to measure precisely.

I completely agree also that the language can have an impact on the abstractions you choose. Some abstractions are obvious in one language and obscure in another. I wouldn't defend Java against a better example than in the original post, it certainly has its weaknesses. But I find that most examples just show bad Java code, not that Java itself is bad, which is not enlightening and frankly becomes tiresome.

On a related note, I think a lot of people underrate the influence of tools on code quality too. They might complain Java IDEs are a crutch that merely let you work around the language's weaknesses. I think they're a lot more than that -- when I start working in a seriously powerful IDE for the first time I was surprised how much it influenced my coding. Powerful automatic refactoring just makes it so trivial to do the Right Thing (give something a better name, factor out a method, etc). Beforehand I would have said that all you need is discipline to create code of the same quality without the IDE. Now I'd say even discipline and good intentions have their limits.
I've been repeatedly shocked about how many of my friends give me crap for liking Android and then talk about their apps crashing frequently. I can't say I've had a single app crash on my Galaxy Nexus and that includes running nightly CM9s.
I don't see what people get out of Property List Editor style interfaces - syntax highlighted JSON is easier to read once it goes through a prettifier, and surely writing JSON is drastically faster with a text editor.
Another way to do it without having to install anything extra:

curl "http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_... | python -m json.tool | pbcopy
A lot of this list sounds very much like Postscript:
* Code is stored in an array with the execute flag turned on. Therefore functions can be easily edited (or assembled) as data. First class functions all the way.
* The environment is a dictionary (associative array), which can be swapped with another dictionary at any time (not just at function entry points).
* Garbage collection is standard

I was thinking that it may be an interesting project to write a general purpose Postscript (non-graphics oriented) interpreter, with a decent library, full continuation passing support, a different way of handling the "current dictionary" stack (to allow for static in addition to dynamic variable support), and a swappable parser to allow for additional program definition styles (infix or prefix in addition to the default postfix notation). Just something kicking around in the back of my head for a while.
He asks "How do you get out of the 'hacker' mindset?"

I can't see a reason he'd want to do so.
I had to solve a problem with which nobody would/could help me while working at the university help desk. I coded up my own little solution in php (3) and MySql (3). Yeah. I was one of those.
Yes to all of this. I always rehearse what I'm going to say entering any country legally. They will grind you to find inconsistencies and sometimes you just say honest mistakes that will take you to a second round of interrogation.

For example: after a series of tough questions, the border was just about to stamp my passport, he held the stamp in the air and then asked "have you been in the US before"? And I flustered, because I said no, but I corrected myself because I had crossed the border at Niagara Falls for a day trip. I explained this to the agent which granted me an extra round of questioning.

But I felt most offended when I went to Canada (I'm a Canadian citizen and I hadn't been there in years) and the agent asked me what was my reason for going to Canada. As if I needed an excuse.
Seriously though, when I first found HN I was wondering what I had stumbled in to. A few days later I was hooked. Now over a year later, when I read the term hacker about someone doing something illegal I react weirdly to it.

Most people still don't know what silicon valley and HN mean when they say hacker yet.
I wouldn't hold my breath. For the most part, if a developer can't be bothered to clean up their memory manually then they probably can't be bothered to use ARC properly. It's not trivial: http://longweekendmobile.com/2011/09/07/objc-automatic-refer...
I'm Australian, so I see where you are coming from.

Living here in Canada, so close to the border with the USA, it's totally different. It's so close and easy, I drive to Alaska twice a month in the summer just to get good Thai food.

And from my own experience I can tell you this - he may have been denied entry to Aus or at least had a few issues, but I'll bet my bottom dollar he wouldn't have been belittled and made to feel like the scum of the earth for hours and hours.
Those are just two examples I could come up with on the spot, I'm sure there are cleaner and more mainstream ways to spice things up. I thought that if you're taking the pi out of Google, you might as well commit to it. I think that quite a few people already consider this slightly bitter and/or envious.
That happens all the time when sites republish stuff. They get the plain text to republish, but not any links or formatting.

It shouldn't happen, but it does - a lot.
I updated the title.
I just thought the comments are more interesting than the actual question.
12% after taxes is an incredibly difficult return to achieve (you're talking around an 18% return y-o-y). If someone promises you this rate of return make sure the fund manager's last name isn't Madoff.

You are much better off paying down your credit card debt. Sorry I wish I didn't have to sound like Suze Orman.
I get iOS app crashes all the time -- and not just third party applications. The app store seems particularly buggy and in the 5 months since I've had my iPhone; crashing on multiple occasions.

The worst problem I've ever had is some kind of corruption in the photos app. I thought perhaps it was a corrupt file but I couldn't launch the Photos app to delete it. I couldn't launch the camera app either. There's no way to delete any of the camera roll photos from iTunes either! I went over a month like this until I used a third party desktop application to delete every photo on the phone -- and that didn't work. So I started deleting random cache file in the file system before it finally started working again.

iOS apps crash pretty silently -- they just disappear. That might make the appearance of crashes much smaller.
Ah, this explains why they're a for-profit.

Also, just checked Udacity's site--they have a whole host of new courses slated for 2012 besides the Search Engine/Robotic Car competitions.
Heh, isn't that what the RSA breach was at first, too?
I can't stand Windows. I don't hate it out of some fanboy fetish as that's not fair. With Linux and Mac is can do pretty much anything without jumping through any hoops. As a web developer you're basically dealing with Linux on the server in most cases and most open source tools are built with Limix in mind as the final destination. Setting up a development environment with just about anything is very consistent and easy on Mac and Linux.

Try getting a basic AMP stack running on Windows. It's a pain and full of non standard practices. Even if you've found it easy to do, you probably have to deploy to a Linux environment for production anyway. Being sure everything works when moving from WAMP to LAMP environments can be risky.

But, of course, that all depends on the complexity and specifics of what you're doing. Everyone's mileage varies. It's been my experience that Windows is great.. if you're both developing,mtesting and deploying to production using Windows all the way through. Otherwise it's Mac/Linux all the way for me. But again, you can say the same of Mac/Linux. But why would you develop on Mac/Linux only to deploy to Windows anyway?

As for Visual Studio, I have Win7 and VS2010 on a machine I use every 6 months or so and I feel like I'm being smothered. VisualStudio wants me to write code in a way that locks me in to the Windows environment and that just not where I belong. I feel like the other platforms' IDEs just get out of your way and let you write code.
The thing that struck out at me on first read was the new officer that was "working hard for you, provided you told him the real truth". Smelled fishy to me.
Same but I don't have any adblock on, I think someone had copy and paste fail.
Is this really so hard that it sets the bar higher to the point that it really works as a filter?
https://www.nordstromsupplier.com/NPG/EDIcompliance.html

It's basically Electronic Data Interchange through which they make orders, track shipments etc.

Here is how a typical one looks like:

http://www.nordstromsupplier.com/Content/sc_manual/FLS%20810...
I will add an anecdote here. I have crossed the US-Canada land border many times. I've only ever been 'chewed out' by Canadian Border Patrol once. I've had this happen multiple times from the US Border Patrol and I'm a US citizen.

The Canadian Border Patrol has always been calm, patient and understanding in my experience. The US border patrol is hit-or-miss. Some people are nice (once I was only asked two questions, and wasn't even required to show my passport, back in ~2005), while others obviously have a chip on their shoulder and are just looking for someway to nail to the wall... no matter how small or insignificant.
Also currently on the home page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3545548
The strength of Java for many years has been the platform, and indeed the surrounding ecosystem, not the language. In that sense it's no surprise that there is a lot of effort going in to providing better languages on that platform.
Detroit, 12 fonts that can be layered in several combinations
title should read: 'Brent Lang, Film reporter at TheWrap.com, totally clueless about the meaning of "hacking"'
I liked homebrew until I needed pygtk. I don't know of any good way to install that but with macports and boy is it a pain to install without a package manager. And once I needed macports. I also like to have a recent version of gcc. This also required macports.