skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a .NET developer that's currently working on a 100,000+ line application that uses all parts of Windows, .NET Framework, and the C# language, I suspect this person is pointing his finger in the wrong direction when he's blaming Microsoft, VS.NET, and C# for "getting in his way".

Best case scenario, is he has been using the wrong tools to solve the problems he works on. But can't admin his own fault.

If anything, what I'm working on now would be downright impossibly complex and infuriating if written in Python (his example of a language and ecosystem).

To me VS.NET is incredible. The .NET framework is incredible. And documentation and information is readily available. But more importantly, the problems I'm solving can't be more easily solved using another stack.

And every time I blame one of the above, a few days later I realize that the real issue was just a stupid mistake I was making myself...

As an example, just the other day I was using a BackgroundWorker (new thread) to do some work outside the UI thread. I needed to do 3 or 4 tasks and decided to re-use the BackgroundWorker for each task (instead of using a new one each time).

Of course problems started showing up. For a while, I was convinced that VS.NET was debugging on the wrong thread, and that there was an issue with re-using BackgroundWorkers in NET. I mean I'm a good programmer, it can't be possibly my fault!

Basically, I forgot to unsubscribe to the BackgroundWorker events. Which caused the previous DoWork attached anonymous functions to run multiple times.

.NET is the way Windows applications are built. VS.NET has no rival on this platform. And this stack is not any weaker because people such as the author leave us. Referencing a few negative blog posts does not prove .NET is dying and that "developers are leaving for greener pastures", which by ALL METRICS is completely not true. If the author wants to think that Python and whatever other choice of IDE will now solve his pain... Then let him eat his cake.
> Perhaps simpler: If you make something and I take it
without permission, I'm a dick.

Yes, I agree. But this has nothing whatsoever to do with copyright law.
MasterCard forces Paxum to drop Bitcoin illegally
PHP Unix Programming
The problem is that criminality is decided by a jury if a case like this goes to trial. In New York or San Francisco or even D.C., getting an obscenity or child porn conviction based on images of minors that are not nude, whether they're fully clothed or wearing swimsuits or bras, would be difficult. Getting an obscenity conviction for fictional depictions would be nearly impossible in those locations.

Then there are cases like the Christopher Handley manga case in Iowa, where he plead guilty to avoid the risk of a longer sentence for possession of purely fictional manga that a jury of his peers may well have deemed "obscene".
Well, if Apple's users aren't the sort to dive into a command line, then most developers aren't Apple users.

Also, have you seen any modern, user friendly Linux distros (e.g. Ubunutu)? You never have to dive into the command line there and yet it has nice package management that just works.
If Google implemented !wiki → wikipedia.org they'd be facing a possible antitrust lawsuit (even though they can't be a monopoly as you don't have to use Google, US officials seem to think they are). Wikipedia isn't the only wiki.
Deadlocks and Lock Ordering: a Vignette
No, I'm treating OSX as a UNIX. It is advertised as such. I know that you can use the app bundles. But they are only useful for GUI applications. I usually run applications like octave or gnuplot from the terminal or other applications (e.g., Emacs).
I love c# to bits.
Leadership is not necessary exclusive of administration and facilitation. Contrary to the intuitive belief, it is not synonymous with 'command and control' and therein lies the issue Joel was trying to expose. Also, being an administrator does not mean you are a secretary.

You can be a leader, a facilitator and an administrator at the same time.
Excellent, if lengthy, article. The lecture model of education offers little interaction and isn't much better than a video, just much more expensive. People learn much better by being active participants in learning, as the article discusses.
Nivo Slider is one I've found to be very nice - surprised it wasn't on your list. It has versions for wordpress (paid) and jQuery (free):

http://nivo.dev7studios.com/
A Macbookpro alternative with similar build quality
Hi,
I need to get a new laptop and I wont like to get a new laptop with a build quality thats very similar to a macbookpro. Any suggestions?
Comparing MongoDB write-performance on CentOS, FreeBSD and Ubuntu
If you look at the comments on his post announcing the book, the majority are asking for a kindle/ebook version. He implies that it was easier to get going with a printed version, but I just don't understand how that's possible.
I would love to hear why.
Malaysia Deports Saudi to Face Capital Charge for "Blasphemous" Tweet
May be too late for the Inactive page discussion, Windows has this concept of Standby page. It is in an intermediate stage between working set and the Free page list. It's not in a process' working set but still has the data for the process. If it's accessed, it's brought back into the work set. If the system runs out of Free pages, the Standby pages are "freed" into the Free list, becoming available to other processes.

It is like a weak reference memory page that can be brought back to life immediately but also be readied to be freed for other purposes.

Most disk cache memory pages, terminated process pages, and others are in the Standby list. They are read-only pages that can be reused or repurposed either way.
Let the games begin: NASA political budget pong opens at $17.7 billion
An inheritance puzzle
No, not if you want to bump into hackers or throw yourself into the startup scene. To do that, you should choose Palo Alto / Mountain View. If you have cash to spare, work at Hacker Dojo, but live in an inexpensive area (see above). You can commute using light rail to Mountain View downtown, and take a short walk to Hacker Dojo from there. Castro St. (downtown Mountain View) has great food options.

Palo Alto is more expensive --- forget about living there! Also, fewer spots where you can camp out. There is a Starbucks and a great cafe called Coupa Cafe, but both places are now too noisy and not ideal to get any work done.
Great work, and a nice writeup. Do you have the cite OSM as the data source for your maps? I read their licensing terms over the weekend and I was under the impression that attribution was similar to Google Maps (ie text in the bottom right corner).
That's indeed the promise of BrowserID. Learn more at https://browserid.org/

It's already being used for sign-in at https://developer.mozilla.org/, and it will only get better once browsers and identity providers ship native support.
Both Arch and, to a lesser extent, Fedora are aimed at more advanced users who want faster updates and newer technology over stability.

I think this is a great compromise, but it does mean you may have some issues with updates. That said, I have not had any issues on Fedora that weren't my doing.

I've been using Fedora for about a year. Earlier, I used OS X for about the same amount of time and I did have problems that weren't entirely my fault, largely with Java and Eclipse. Since all I was doing during that time was simple Java development for school, there just wasn't anything else that could have gone wrong.
As a third-party observer, I initially had the same reaction as sophacles, in that your comment appeared, at first, to be a strongly-worded straw-man argument.

However, now that I re-read it I can see your point, but your use of profanity and the general lack of civility in your comment obscured your argument. The tone of your comment was more like an accusation than a reasoned response, even if the content (minus the profanity) was not intended to be.
Get a macbook pro! (sorry, couldn't resist)
Reddit and r/politics are not the same thing. Subreddits are user-created forums moderated as those creators see fit. Each subreddit chooses what it wants to see, how it wants to be moderated, and who will moderate. A particular sub community not welcoming you or your ideas is completely different from site-wide moderation.
Nice job! Actually have a side project ill get to use this in. Thank you!
Steve himself links to the bookdepository in his blog comments.
Honest question: are you serious? What point are you trying to make?

Please don't troll here. Take the time to make an argument.
Okay, fine. It's some form of self expressions; but it's petty self expression. Writing in all lowercase is unlikely to establish you among the classics, even if your readers can still understand all of your sentences. That sort of "creative syntax" would be expected in graffiti, not Hemingway.
Take a look at Dell XPS 15Z
Enterprise Hadoop: Big data processing made easier
First commandment of semi-colon-free: any line that starts with [,(,+,- should be prefixed with a semi-colon.

var x = function() {
// something
}

// avoid polluting global scope:
;(function() {
// Some initialization.
})()

;[1,2,3].forEach(...)

In practice those are the only places you'll see (and need) them. It has the extra benefit of disencouraging starting a line with a pre-increment, hacks or weird constructs (not talking of IIFEs of course), and making sure you're never calling a function or accessing properties by accident.
Battlestar Galactica, I assume. The story is about self-deception among other topics.
Essentially a duplicate from just two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3577624
Here's his blog post about the book http://steveblank.com/2012/02/09/two-giant-steps-forward-for...
Facebook is also great for organizing events. I don't know anyone who uses e.g. Evite anymore. Social chatter.

I'm not generally a fan of how ubiquitous FB seems to have become recently, but when everyone is on the same network and that network has some simple tools for doing socially useful things (making plans with people lots of people and carrying on idle chatter), that's handy.
This strikes me as similar to the common explanation of why Whole Foods "appears" so expensive when apples-apples comparisons can show prices there to be similar to those of Safeway; yes, the apples cost the same, but Whole Foods gives way more prominence to the super-expensive rare varietal organic local apples that cost 3x as much.

Net result: whatever the absolute price comparisons say, it takes more mental effort to shop cost effectively at Whole Foods.
I'd love it if MITx courses could give a chance for real credit, rather than a certificate. That said, what incentive does MIT have to give real credit? It seems like it would only devalue taking these courses in person.
Why we don't have jetpacks and flying cars:

A: We do. A helicopter is a flying car, built safe enough for commercial use by a trained pilot. Anything that incorporates enough safeguards to be reasonably useful will be a lot like a helicopter.

B: Humans are bad enough at driving on the ground, in 2 dimensions of space. Add a velocity assist from gravity, and the danger factor goes way up.

In other words, humans can't generally be trusted with these technologies. We need robopilots.
Lived in a similar sturcture for about a year as a kid growing up. House didn't have enough room for myself and my brother, so we built one in our back yard. They're warmer than you'd think, quick to set up, and they last a while. Great for guest rooms, but make sure you have an outhouse available, or at least running water.
I have. Polish is polish, the utility it provides feels pretty minor.
The only unfortunate thing is the sole focus on the native Android UI now, due to limited resources. Conventional mobile Linux which has to use XUL based mobile UI is treated as barely supported because of that.
It was supposed to be an accusation. Some things deserve accusations. And profanities.

Sigh. I’m quite disillusioned about HN, actually. Not that it should surprise me, but damn. People here say the exact same things as on Reddit. If you squint a bit the reactions are the same. That doesn’t make me happy.

I do recognize that I can’t do many constructive things here (short of screaming at people) so I’m going to excuse myself from this thread. I won’t convince anyone anyway.
Reddit had the biggest hissy fit of all about how child porn laws like SOPA were going to go too far and ruin the internet. And here they go banning anything involving a bathing suit.

The hypocricy is strong in this one.
Apple forcing contractor to choose between Zenbook or iOS devices
Priceless. Thank you :)
It doesn't seem to be illegal, unless someone is alleging coercion or conspiracy -- which is not in the article.
Did Chrome ever use anything like pdf.js?
I can't wait to get my hands on this. Steve's previous book The Four Steps to the Epiphany was amazing. I would put it squarely in the top 2-3 most influential books I've ever read.

I don't know that you can ever reduce "starting a startup" to a "paint by numbers" recipe, but Steve has done an amazing job of creating a rigorous methodology for going from idea -> business.
dude,
I am considering cost and also the fact that I am more of a Ubuntu user.
true, and hopefully microsoft comes through for him. But if it doesn't, he should go the indie program and steam route. Put up a post on reddit, and make his millions (thousands?).

That'll get their attention.
TileMill has an export feature: You can design your map in TileMill, then export the style as Mapnik XML.
Got me in soooo much trouble. "But Erin, he was the inventor of bacon!"
They aren't. And neither is hiring only people with red hair.
I'm getting a 509 "bandwidth exceeded". Can anyone copy/paste the content?
That's a pretty poor response to a valid question. While the tone of the question was harsher than I think was warranted, the question of "why is this something I should care about?" is something that should be at the forefront of every product developer and investor's mind.
If you're interested in serious completely mind-bending hacking, don't forget to check eyepopslikeamosquito [1] posts on perlmonks.org. The golfing adventures (in Perl, Python and Ruby) really read like fantasy tales from another planet of superior brains :)

[1]: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=176576
I personally thought the photos were hilarious and "got" that they were humor, clearly intending to show a progression of suitable partners as you descended deeper into the code cave and away from respectable corporate employment working for the man, eventually resulting in being with a monkey. At no point did I assume these were necessarily real partners.
CSS3 buttons based on Adobe Kuler's top 100 color schemes
I'm not a .NET person. Heck, I'm not even a Windows person. I found this sentence interesting:

Things like the Microsoft "professional engineer" who advises you at your invitation, and then sends e-mails behind your back to executives to inform them of his concern about the "business risks" of non-Microsoft technology choices.

That's really weird. Who finances these commissars? I mean, I've seen this sort of thing take place, but only when a two-letter consultancy was gunning to take over some director's entire department. What's in it for the commissar?
Uhh, I've seen this too. Part of the reason we are migrating some code from Erlang to C.
Privacy still matters - conversion rates with Facebook authentication
From 2004-2010 I lived in both shipping containers (refitted) and trailers (basically 12' wide knock-down structures) and wooden shacks (and houses).

There are things I'd do with shipping containers to turn them into livable housing, but they go beyond a basic conversion -- it's cutting them apart and basically using them as a source of sheet steel and study frames. Normal steel structures or tilt-ups accomplish basically all of this already.

Prefab modules for things like kitchens/bathrooms, combined with inexpensive ways of enclosing space, is the way to go.
Startup Gamification Lessons From a Kindergartner
If this is of interest, you might also check out Bookmarkly, a visual bookmark organizer I open sourced last week. It's node.js on the server and Backbone.js on the client, with a little Twitter Bootstrap in the UI as well.

http://bookmarkly.com

https://github.com/dangrossman/Bookmarkly
Thanks for the kind words. I've been writing javascript like this for more than a year without any trouble. It's not confusing at all, you just need to sit for 5 minutes and understand ASI.

I'd bet with confidence that 90% of programmers out there don't know if a semicolon is needed after a function declaration. They just put it in there blindly, then some day they find a bug because they "forgot" a semi-colon somewhere.
ADDENDUM: For (2), also consider the widespread use of young girls in...

Don't forget child beauty pageants. That stuff is IMHO often borderline pedophilia.
NoSQL would be what I would go for since this is the type of thing that Redis and similar excel at. Any way you can prevent writes per page view the better off you'll be. Redis gets you speeds similar to memcached but with some stuff you'd expect from a RDBS (durability, replication, etc). It's great for logging/analytics.

"Each drive in the first DB server has seen around 570GB of writes in 9 days, or roughly 63GB/day. The drives in the second DB server have gone through 1.03TB of writes in the same period of time or 114GB/day."

They're writing an incredible amount of data for what amounts to a fairly standard article/comment/forum site (which are typically very read heavy).
The first statement of the actual Guidelines of HN is "Be civil." I find it strange that you're disillusioned with HN because your uncivil comment was not well received.
Yeah, I couldn't disagree with you more on this, but this comment doesn't deserve to be downvoted.

FWIW, I think The Four Steps to the Epiphany is absolutely in "must read" category. Sure, you can crib together most (if not all) of the same material from reading hundreds of different blog posts, spread over dozens of blogs.. but if you just read the book, you get all of the important content, in one place, with the methodology all laid out in order, with the diagrams, etc.

Honestly, I'd argue that reading TFSTTE should be a prerequisite to reading any of the various blogs and articles out there that touch on Customer Development and the Lean Startup approach. But that's just my take...
There's a lot of dissonance between:
> It's currently in a renewed and stronger Eternal September.
>The top voted comments on threads about censorship are mostly 1 to 3 months old users.

and

>Sure, a lot of questionable/creepy subreddits shouldn't be there. But where's the line? And who draws it?

The way to deal with a dilution of community quality is communicate and enforce stricter standards. Ban more stuff. Not because of a moral panic, but because the trolls, spammers, pornographers, etc.. can trash your site with force disproportionate to their numbers. You can't fight Eternal September unless you lay down some serious boundaries.
"The community we're currently discussing this in, on the other hand, has been a lot more conscientious in cultivating the type of garden it would like to see. And I think we can all say the result is a lot more pleasant than a less tended place such as Reddit or 4chan."

This site is akin to a Reddit subreddit.

The community here is great, clearly amongst the best of the Reddit subreddit communities.

Is this community better than the Reddit community? Honeslty -- no. This is a place for tech news, and that's it.

The Reddit community has done a lot of wonderful things, for each other, for others, and for society in general. This community can make almost none of those claims.

Many people who frequent both look at Hacker News as if it were the real /r/technology.

But I didn't think people compared communities in general -- this place is tiny compared to even many of the subreddits!
I'm on the same boat. I know a lot about the subject, but I'm always willing to learn. I think I'll take a look.

Thanks!
"Bandwidth Limit Exceeded"

Google doesn't have it cached. Does anyone have a mirror?
Is Santorum's "Google Problem" a Google Problem?
Personally, I liked the humor. It shows you're an actual human and not a program yourself.

I'm always amazed at the commentators on HN who advocate that you should never offend anyone in the slightest way, ever. <sarcasm>After all, it's clearly not a strategy that works for anybody. Just look at Zed Shaw or Giles Bowkett.</sarcasm>
One market I haven't seen people discuss regarding this is businesses doing a large amount of research. I actually believe Coursera/Udacity/etc are actually trying to disrupt the undergrad education market, however I think we might start to see more businesses take advantage of this. With MIT for example, anyone could take any course without being a student, but the cost was at least double what a normal student would pay. Who would do this? Cambridge companies that need their staff caught up to speed on nlp, ml or something else. I'm fairly sure that Stanford has a similar deal.

For companies doing research that want to send their staff to these programs the main benefit is they want their researchers to have a top notch education in the area, but the cons are that the courses are very expensive and you have to have your employee off campus for however many hours a week the class is. Now it's possible pay nothing, have your staff stay in the office, and still be taught by world class experts.

I'm sure Google has a reasonable number of employees that are great programmers but could probably benefit from some formal CS background. Now they can keep these people on campus, and give them access to great materials for free (and even if there is a cost for these eventually it will be much lower), and get them training by world-class experts.

In this scenario a certificate is all you really need since the employer can say "I at least know you put some actual effort into this". Many companies don't necessarily need more employees with CS masters, but would certainly like more people with a foundation in nlp or ml. The structure of these courses essentially allows research companies the option to create an 'in-house' degree, covering only the material they find competitively beneficial.
There is one thing that I cannot reconcile in my mind. First is the advice to 'make it a story' - I think it really improved my writings. The second is blog posts like this one - what has this whole life-story to do with the point about abrasive on-line pundits?

And actually it is not only blog posts - journalists often do the same thing, but maybe they don't so often write about their own lives.
Even when using semi-colons freely, most people don't put a guarding ; at the beggining or end of the file. That's unrelated to this coding style.

And honestly, that should be done by the minifier. It breaks perfectly valid javascript.