skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read this article last night, then promptly took his "stop listening to me" advice. Unsubscribed from his RSS feed. See ya, Joel!
Is There Such A Thing As Too Much Ajax?
The Best and the Brightest Led America Off a Cliff
Erlang Forum (github/delicious integration)
Its my site, but you'll notice no adds. Its about building the erlang community.
I read this as "Java is dead" in the sense that it isn't evolving any more in any useful way.
Am I reading Slashdot?
DC/Baltimore Area? Here you go: http://www.dctechevents.com/
I thought it was cool that the author mentioned Hemingway. He linked through to an article, "Ernest Hemingway’s Top 5 Tips for Writing Well" (http://www.copyblogger.com/ernest-hemingway-top-5-tips-for-w...), which contained this little gem:

"Hemingway was famous for a terse minimalist style of writing that dispensed with flowery adjectives and got straight to the point. In short, Hemingway wrote with simple genius.

"Perhaps his finest demonstration of short sentence prowess was when he was challenged to tell an entire story in only 6 words:

"For sale: baby shoes, never used."

Every now and then you come across code that's as good as that, and when you do it's a wonder to behold.
When I read that, I knew this was just some dated satire.

It was sort of amusing 5 years ago, but now it's just "hyuk hyuk authoritarian teachers who don't know anything hyuk hyuk".
I'm not a Java programmer, at least at the moment. But if what the author writes is accurate about Java keeping all sorts of cruft because Sun doesn't want to break backwards compatibility, then it's interesting to note that one of Java's alleged strengths when it came out was that it kept all the good parts of C and C++, without having to maintain backwards compatibility by keeping the ugly parts.
re SQLAlchemy: How is it inaccessible? Are you referring to the docs which even after a year of using I find frustrating? What does SQLAlchemy it lack compared to Cayanne?

I'm not trolling. I've only used raw SQL and SQLAlchemy so I'm basically orm blind atm. I'd like to know what I'm missing :) tia
Wow, that is one of the worst articles I have ever read by Gladwell.

I generally think Gladwell is overrated, but at least provides interesting anecdotes. I was sorely tempted to quit reading it about 2/3 through, but then I thought "maybe he'll tie together the 'football quarterback selection' story with the 'teacher selection' story in a meaningful way." But no. This would have been more interesting as a piece about either just college football quarterback selection or just the question of incentivising a high level of primary/secondary school education. In the context of the article, they're really not the same question

I'm not against open ended questions and unresolved endings, but the analogy was strained, lacked interesting content. And I am interested in both college football and the "quality of US secondary school education" debate...

The Gladwell love-fest is getting out of hand. I've enjoyed his writing to date for the most part, despite thinking that it was not quite as groundbreaking as some people seem to insinuate. But now, anyone will publish him just because he's Gladwell.
That's why volcanologists make the distinction between "dormant" and "extinct."
Dallas: http://www.dallas-csharp-sig.com/DFWUserGroups.aspx

Mostly microsoft focused meetings but a little ruby also.
You misunderstand the technical meaning of the jargon term dead. In a discussion like this one dead means in stasis.

It certainly does not mean "dead" as in "not being used". Such a term -- let's call it "the True Death" -- would be nigh-useless in a discussion of computer languages, because very few successful languages reach that state. The code doesn't rot. COBOL lives. FORTRAN most definitely lives. Lisp is older than everything and it is very much alive. Pascal might be an exception: You really never hear of anyone writing new Pascal code. Perhaps it is approaching the True Death. Or perhaps some of the more obscure assembly languages of decades past are Truly Dead. But I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't. There are people writing Atari 2600 assembly language right now. Maybe even more than there were in 1982.

The discussion is complicated by the evolution of languages and the desire to rehabilitate old trademarks. Applesoft BASIC is far closer to the True Death than "Basic" is, because Microsoft stole the name and applied it to a rather different creature. "Lisp" cannot die, but you could point to one of the thousand dead dialects of Lisp and call that dialect a "Truly Dead language". Eventually you get trapped in a pointless semantic debate, like the one you flirt with here: If the JVM is alive but Java is dead, is Java alive?

At any rate, now that we've established what we mean: Yeah, Java is arguably "dead". It has reached an equilibrium where anything you might do to change the design creates more problems than it solves: It breaks back compatibility, or it creates an impenetrably complex monster that only a relatively small number of people can understand. It's also very easy to argue that Microsoft Windows "died" around the release of Windows XP: Since then, the company has devoted uncounted thousands of programmer-hours to create an OS that much of the market has concluded is no improvement over XP. That's what static equilibrium looks like.

But this doesn't mean that we won't have Java and Windows to complain about for years and years, if not decades and decades. In software the dead do not truly die. They just stalk the earth as vampires. (I originally wanted to say "zombies", but that's wrong. Zombies are slow and stupid. Undead languages, on the other hand, are often amazingly competent and smart despite being technically dead. They've got a lot of experience.)
Exactly.

I was so excited, too. "Does it have a mini nuclear reactor?"
www.catonmat.com is a CS themed blog that gets posted here from time to time and is quite educational. The writer is a physics BS who self taught enough CS to get through all the interviews at Google(but was not hired at the end).
He didn't ask to learn programming, he asked to learn CS. He isn't getting a PhD in discrete math, he is reading a discrete math book, which is a bare minimum for learning CS.
I think it's a 15inch laptop so it's not huge. But, just compare the screen to the books, keyboard, or mouse, it's freaking huge.
I'm confident that SQLAlchemy has the potential to be the best database abstraction layer out there. However, I found the docs impervious and frustrating. Some of the examples are given in a way that's quite unhelpful - they could be constructed to distinguish the way it works from other assumptions you could make and generally they're not. When things break, the error messages are unhelpful.

I eventually got to the stage where I had a product built on top of it, working, but I still didn't feel like I knew the framework fluently. I've never been in that position before. Frustating, because it means if I do more work on that codebase I'll either have to struggle through again or else throw it away and write on top of something else.

ORM is supposed to be good for nailing the right schema and then abstracting it away without a performance hit. That's what I get with Cayenne. I found the opposite with sqlalchemy - it's more difficult than it would have been for me to have just written the queries inline, or rolled my own simple ORM. I think it's because it's just too thick - unusual for a python framework - usually they're the opposite.

It's been a year since I looked at it so I'm a bit vague above, but I gave it a go for over two years on and off.
I think it was "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
This is a developer build -- unreleased to the public. Once OS X gets released, then its perfect. Sort of like how what the Pope says is true because the Pope says it.
It's kind of a gray area. If we received negative reactions, we'd stop, but so far the responses have been overwhelmingly positive.
I think also that it greatly influenced the play by having the four GMs make recommendations. Had they (MSN) instead let players choose any move on the board, then the game would have been much shorter and much less interesting.
0-day exploit for Internet Explorer in the wild
Wow!

Insightful! I guess I happen to be the very rare counterexample in that at some point in every interview process I've been through, I've been asked questions like the ones the author says won't get me hired.

And I've never been asked "can you do this job?" (not so bluntly anyways, though obviously you are evaluated on that to some degree)

Those questions don't mean you are not getting hired at all. They are (for better or for worse) standard practice by HR personnel. They might not tell you anything about a candidates capacity to do a job, but a lot of times personality fit is just as important. And I can tell a lot about a person by their answers to really stupid questions (even if they are canned, planned out, rehearsed responses).

I want to work with cool people and have the pleasure of doing so. If competency was the only factor my firm asked for when hiring, I'd probably be working somewhere else.

Ability is a necessary, but insufficient condition for employment, in my opinion.

THATS why the employers ask you the questions that "Mean You're Not Getting Hired"
One thing which it fails to state is that this was a major event for casual / hobbyist chess players. I don't have any statistics but every friend of mine who played chess was taking part in this.

So I suspect that the majority of those who voted moves regularly was a majority of people who understood the game and could follow the logic.

I don't think it can be overstated the sort of impact recommended moves had. This was largely a game between each GM and Kasparov with people voting on who to follow. As I said in another comment, had there been no recommendations, the game would have probably been much shorter and much more juvenile in complexity.
I know what's going on behind the scenes, but I still find it funny that an article praising Python just a tiny bit and then bashing Java is surrounded by advertisements for Java books.
Because It is a desktop software, not a web application.
You might be surprised how much salesmanship has to go into writing academic papers.
Plus, the top pick always goes to the worst team in the league the previous year.

This is key. Growing up in Tampa, I watched a lot of high draft picks have great careers after they left the hell-hole they got drafted into. I've always felt that getting picked as a QB in the late first round would be best, because you could be on a good team, rather than start right away and get pummeled in the 0.003 seconds you have in the pocket.
Loan Modifications Are Complete Bullshit | The Real Wolf of Wall Street
400 points is actually more like a 90:10 advantage, but that's a minor point.
I got them from the Microsoft website. They post all their filings on it.

If you really want a day with numbers then I'd start here:
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/ar08/index.html
Actually I wouldn't be all that happy with my password sitting around on the server for an entire second. In computer time, for want of a better phrase, a second is actually quite a long time. Perhaps switch to 'the instantwe receive it it gets encrypted'.

Having said that I agree you don't really need it on the start page.
Google Patents Gears
> I just looked on Apple.com, that was the starting rate for a Mac Pro.

Sorry, I was making a joke about the extra zero you had in the price. You had put $28,000 rather than $2,800:)
Google Zeitgeist 2008
The topic was inability to measure and rate people for a given profession. The recent (and ongoing) discussion about why great programmers don't get paid more is equally relevant. It's about information asymmetry which prevents efficient allocation of resources. But my sentence there was nowhere near as entertaining as Gladwell's anecdotal writing.
One thing that confused me: Why can't the author bring himself to write the word "Python"? He spells it alternately "PYTH0N" and "Py_thon". Is this some sort of anti-SEO? Or a reaction to seeing "LISP" in print too many times? Or some sort of inside joke?

Edit: Hmm... The article appears to be somewhat dated, if not a little exaggerated... With no new posts in the last two months, it seems Lemonodor.com is no longer the "Slashdot of the Lisp world".
I'm a hardware guy, so I've got a different approach. I'd say, drop the algorithms book. Start with a book called "Structured Computer Organization" by Andrew Tanenbaum. After you read that book, you'll feel like you actually KNOW a lot more.

And after you read that book, you'll probably know a lot more than half the people here about how computers really work.

To compare the approaches:

- After you read Cormens book, you may be able to prove that quicksort is faster than bubblesort.

- After you read Tanenbaums book, you will know where the arguments are stored in memory when you call a function with multiple arguments.

Everybody has to decide which is more important for him to know, I know which was more interesting for me.
HP laptop battery doesn't last for 26,280 hours, is still cool
Another NYC calendar:

http://www.nyctechevents.com/
Two great open source databases: a comparison
Joel didn't like Gladwell's anecdotes because Gladwell tries to turn them into science that can be repeated when that's not usually the case.

Joel's anecdotes are for your entertainment. He never implies that you should do it his way or that there's some greater meaning to whatever he's writing about.
Not insightful at all.
Chrome has been in development since spring of 2006. It has been around much longer than it has been public.
Write some code. It sounds like you are reading a little too much about math. Not all CS is math, otherwise we would all just be math majors.

People keep mentioning the Wizard book (SICP). It sounds like it would be perfect for you. I think it veers too much on the side of theory for most people, but it sounds like you have no trouble with that.
The website is gorgeous and the interface is fantastic.

Honestly, the main problem with this website is that gourmet tea lovers don't use recipes. They buy rare and expensive teas and use time-tested ancient brewing methods to get the most out of their treasures.

If you want to cash in on a niche connoseuir [sp?] market, you need to cater to the people who are willing to spend the big bucks to get quality teas. People looking for cranberry chai tea will produce a lot less revenue than those looking for a rare cake of pu-erh tea that is over 80 dollars.

I would say to angle it more towards quality tea and reviews of such tea, not a search engine for recipes.

Check out teaforum.com to learn more, and if you have any questions, ask.
Ask HN: Will it be a good time to launch a webapp in next 2 weeks here at HN?
Hi all,
I'm planning to launch a webapp here at Hacker News for review in 2nd or 3rd week of Dec'08. But I was wondering if I should postpone that plan because I suspect there will be less members here due to holiday period. So there will be less Hackers to give valuable feedback.

What do you think? Shall I postpone the launch for Jan 1st/2nd week? Or shall I go ahead and launch in Dec 2nd/3rd week?

Thanks for your inputs.
-Aditya
I only noticed it on the second glance, but that's Hacker News on the Dell laptop screen.
flash is a public document spec and Adobe allows other people to build editors and even players (which has been happening)
Oops! Yes =)
50 Fun, Free Web Games to Make Your Brain Smarter, Faster, Sharper
Crossword puzzles, word games, logic problems and other games can also help your brain stay fit and healthy, and there are plenty of fun ones to try online during your down time.
thanks! that's really good feedback. integration with other established networks is definitely a plus.
New Turing Omnibus - it's pretty much the best overview of CS theory for non-CS people.
Some languages have more strengths (or more weaknesses) than others.

If you want to claim that every language is useful and good in its own special way, you may have to accept that COBOL is primarily good at being compatible with old systems based on COBOL, and Pascal is useful mainly for failing to teach computer programming in the 1980s.
With Gmail, if something is wrong in the code, they can fix it and everything is fine in a matter of hours/days. With Chrome, if there's a problem in the code, they can fix the bug, but then it could be months or years before people actually upgrade Chrome.

Desktop software requires a higher standard because you can't just fix things that are wrong.
Unfortunately there's almost no special support for Django on EC2.
Stop Sharing Your Twitter Credentials
the .swf format is open, but the .fla format is definitely NOT open. that makes it impossible for third parties to build competitors to adobe flash cs3/cs4.
They're trying to systematically determine what works and what doesn't. They've got to review a lot of different teachers in the same and different situations. A teacher who wants to do better would greatly benefit from specific, actionable recommendations. Creating tools that can be used for deliberate practice is useful work, especially if the results can be widely distributed.
Man lives with female robot
Two possibilities come to mind: Satire, as mentioned by other people, or the original teacher is lying about having used Linux. As anybody who has been around on the internet (or BBS or Usenet or...) for a while has learned, some people take a very scorched-earth approach to argumentation, and if lying about having tried Linux bolsters the argument, in it goes, regardless of whether it's true. (Maybe.)
too little and maybe too late

Definitely too late for kids already in school, but I would wager that humans will be educating their kids in schools for hundreds more years (maybe more). This would be like Edison giving up on the light bulb because it was too late for the kids who had to go to bed at sundown.
"Java has gone stagnant" makes for a much less punchy headline.
Darwin's analysis of the pros and cons of getting married
It wasn't really about teaching or football. It was about how being unable to measure performance causes a poor allocation of human resources. Top programmers not getting paid for the value they produce is the exact same problem.
Marissa Mayer’s Advice On Who To Hire
What does this guy know about loan modifications? If I'm not mistaken he's one of the "bad guys" from the "Boiler Room."
I know it's popular to hate Java at this point, but there are really a ton of things that it does well... solid scalable reliable backend servers would be one.
I can understand the subtle anger in the response... but belittling someone is not the way to win new converts.

conversely, i've seen worse responses
I lay the bodies of my relatives in shallow graves.

I laid my relatives to rest years ago.

I don't have relatives.

My story changes from year to year.

I enjoy telling my story and explaining my business model to my family, whatever I am excited about at the time is normally easy enough to relate to something they do or understand.
Java is "unpopular" with people who follow the hyped languages.

That's in no way the same as it being dead. It's everywhere.
Still heartbreaking every time I hear it.
As a heavy user of Flex for my start-up, I have to, heavy-heartedly, agree with the main point of this article.

Wake up Macrobe! Ajax, as loose and amorphous and crap as it is still today, is going to eat your lunch!

Flex Builder should be free and open-source and Adobe should encourage people to improve on it. They could steal much of the effort that's currently going into other RIA platforms by being more openly supportive and aggressively marketing that openness. The fact that they don't do that is simply mind-boggling.
http://milw0rm.com/exploits/7403
Flaaaaaaag
Marissa Mayer: Google Search Wiki To Soon Include An Off Button, improve search results
The two variables are:

* Current usage - how much of it is deployed.

* Growth - how much it's being used for new projects, worked on, written about, etc...

For instance, Cobol is still fairly widely deployed in some environments, but growth is probably negative, as it's being replaced by Java. Java is very widely used, and is still probably growing, although probably not as much as things like Ruby, which have grown a lot; which is easy when you start from a small base.
Chrome actually updates itself automatically in the background.
I think the key here is "build stuff." Do all the excercises in SICP, and see about doing the projects that are listed in the Open CourseWare for the course. (I think one of them is a web-spider.)
I think that hackers often work through the "normal" holiday time. I know that I use time to get some stuff done for sure. Some people might have a bit more time and therefore spend some more time reviewing your app.
If you set the time line filter correctly you'll see it is getting deader by the year.

http://www.google.com/views?q=java+dead+view%3Atimeline&...
IntenseDebate? What about Disqus??
This article lacks any substance whatsoever. This post is the equivalent of a long, drawn out reddit rant without any factual or statistical backing. To make matters worse, his claim to fame is that he served 22 months in prison after a "pump and dump" scheme on wall street and then wrote a book about it titled "The Wolf on Wall Street". While there might be some insight withing his post, is this really the direction we want to take HN? Common now I expect a little better of this community than this drivel.
You should always just launch whenever you're ready.
It's a mistake to try to launch at specific times when
you think people are paying attention, because everyone
else does too.
"The companies are complaining because they are hurting. They can’t produce quality products as cheaply, as reliably, and as quickly as they would like. They correctly see a shortage of good developers as a part of the problem. What they generally don’t see is that inserting a good developer into a culture designed to constrain semi-skilled programmers from doing harm is pointless because the rules/culture will constrain the new developer from doing anything significantly new and better."

Wow. I was a little anti-Bjarne because I'm no big fan of C++, but this is gold.
Ask HN: Is a survey a good way to get user feedback?
I run a startup web app and I am looking for more feedback on what current users like, dislike, if they share it with friends, what they'd like to see implemented etc. Is a survey a good way to accomplish this or should I take another approach? I already have a feedback button on the site but I think the feedback it captures is only a small segment of my user's thoughts. If I do a survey, which users (heavy, light, new, old, all) should I send it out to and what other questions should I ask? Does anyone have a survey already prepared they'd be willing to share? - Thanks
Technologizer is blogspam. This is just a summary of an article that was submitted 3 hours earlier.[1] His other submissions are the same.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392861
How does it need to evolve? Unlike a lot of languages, they got some things right from the start - Unicode for example.
and "What should high schools do to prepare students for university-level software development? When I entered a Math course as a 1st year student, the department head said something like this in his welcoming lecture: "I don’t care if you know math - we’ll teach you that from scratch - but I hope you know how to work hard and to read & write English, because you’ll need that to keep up." I think he had an important point: current freshmen appear to have been spoon fed and many find it hard to adjust to independent work and to shake the impression that you work only to improve your grades.
Notion to Motion: Starting a Business Based on Passion | global citizen experiment