skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
2010 builds them OK. You can also look at mingw with g++ if you want to try some of the C++11 features on Windows XP. I was surprised to hear that MS did this. XP is still widely used in industry and is a good baseline platform to target.
There's a point, because if your sysadmin is competent, having access to the database of a webapp (webapp break-in) is much easier than being able to dump the server memory (OS break-in).

You can go hardware with a cryptographic accelerator PCI card (good luck integrating that in your webapp)
There's a lot of inaccuracies in the article and that's one of them. There's also this:

> Basically, B2G is just a cut-down version of Linux that automatically loads Firefox; basically, it’s like Chrome OS, but lower tech.

How is it "lower tech"?
> or a similar service provided by other companies

Why other? Microsoft has "web office" as well.
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Thanks...On the legal front, what all should I consider before crawling a website, apart from honoring robots.txt?
While VS itself doesn't consume large amount of memory, Resharper is a voracious memory eater. I used to regularly encountered OOM exceptions - not due to insufficient memory, rather because of excessive .net memory fragmentation brought about the holy marriage of VS2010 & R#. IIRC, this type of memory problem did not occur in VS2008 too frequently. Recent versions of R# have ameliorated the problem to a large extent however.
I know you mean to point out how old and crufty XP is (and that is true), but if you stop and think about it... it's really a testament to C++ and Microsoft engineering that it has done so well for so long.
"collaborative and real-time update features are the most important criteria"

What if MS Office or LibreOffice eventually bake these in to their applications? There's no need for cloud storage for real time collaboration.
We are developers and we can learn and use any language if we just know the concepts of what we are doing. Same thing, different language... who cares. Hope it's the last "why I switched" blogpost because I never found them useful.
You just conned a comment into HN. How do you feel about that? And what is your view on loaded questions?
Back in that day they offered private offices, now you can barely have a place to call your own.
The problem is that there's no third option- something to manage dependencies that's not bundler. We all want and need dependency management, but bundler should not be the One True Solution.
He didn't say "reasonable", he said "useful".
"Browser-based" does not have to be synonymous with "web apps".

You could also see it as giving up control over your local cache of (photos, mails, apps, etc) in exchange for ease of use. This could replace "I want to play Angry Birds, so I download it and then run it" by "I want to play Angry Birds, so I click this button". Then, your device could download the app, if it was not already cached on your device, and run it.
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Heya; I wrote the story.

I agonized about leaving in that 'lower tech' bit. Basically, B2G is built on the Android kernel. Chrome OS has a ton of security features that aren't present in Android. By 'lower tech', I mean that B2G won't have Chrome OS's verified boot, double sandbox, and other tweaks like that.

(Though I suppose B2G could have those eventually!)
I totally do two 4 hour segments of sleep like they talk about, except that it is over a 48 hour period.
I can't believe this actually exists. But then again, rule 34 I guess.
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I dunno. Am I paying you for your advice or are am I getting it for free?

What right or expectation do I have to assume that you're giving me good homework advice?

Are you a friend of mine? Am I relying upon my past experience?

If I'm not paying you, you're not a friend of mine, you're just some marketer paying sites to show your ads... I expect no real value from them.

I almost never click on Google Ads embedded in web pages, so I don't understand the blame game going on. Some suckers do click on them. They pay for free web content. Who am I do bite the hand that feeds us for free?
http://hg-git.github.com/
Yep, possibly -- though, obviously, users aren't likely to go for a phone that's _worse_ than iOS or Android, so I don't think carriers would screw things up too badly.

The main thing is B2G is COMPETITION!

Much in the same way that Firefox rocked the IE boat, B2G should hopefully offer a sound alternative to iOS/Android.
Love the new update
...for what?

If I'm a systems programmer for 100% of the time, chances are if I've chosen C or Go, then it probably actually is good enough (compared to the alternatives).
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I'm also really annoyed by the more locked-down future that the new OS environments are facilitating, but I've been continually amazed at the boundaries "web" apps are pushing (e.g. WebGL, WebAudio )
It's odd that you would equate different design goals with being "lower tech". By the same criteria Android is a lower tech than Chrome OS.

Chrome OS was about building (a desktop computer) around the web as it exists today whereas B2G is about building (a mobile phone) around the web as it will (hopefully) exist in the future.
I wouldn't say that programmers are too lazy to learn new languages. It's just difficult to keep so much in your head and to reliably use all the different languages without having to recall the particularities of that language, its build and run time oddities, IDE, etc. My advice is to pick a few languages and learn them well. It's a waste of your brain-power to only know 10% of ten different programming languages and to have to learn how the other nine do that (whatever that may be). You're far better off knowing 60% of three languages. That's my experience anyway.

Edit: The three I suggest are:

1. C or C++

2. Java or C#

3. Python or Ruby

4. (optional) Linux Bash scripting or Windows PowerShell
The part that scares me most is the thought that Mozilla is willing to give any power back to the carriers. I do not want this, not in a million years. I'll take Apple's walled garden over AT&T's heap of shit, any day of the week.
"Now, people much more junior expect all of that, plus crazy workplaces, free meals, free babysitting, free carwash, free haircuts, etc."

Junior or not, only a tiny percentage of people can get these perks. For example google recieves 1 million CVs a year approximately 5000 of which get a job offer (0.5%). (approximately 35% of those who are allowed to have a phone interview are allowed to the onsite interviews and approximately 25% of the 'onsite-interviewed' people get a job offer.)
In my experience with Ruby development (2 years), I have never, ever experienced a single issue caused by duck typing. Static typing is great for performance, but it has nothing to do with being able to maintain a project.
It's just one of those ideas that make total sense.
I wonder if it's this person: http://www.classmates.com/directory/public/memberprofile/lis...
Side note: I hope "Boot to Gecko" won't be the official name of the OS. First, most users don't know what booting is or what Gecko is. Second, it will be awkward to use an imperative phrase as a noun. "This phone has Boot to Gecko." "Did you see that game for Boot to Gecko?" Very awkward. GeckoOS might be OK; something inspired by the word "gecko" would be better still. A quick look at the Wikipedia article suggests "Gekkota", "Adhesion", etc.
Write your own? I'm sorry but if Bundler doesn't solve your problem (or introduces other problems) either try and fix those issues OR write your own dependency management lib.
Why? Exploration and evolution are in many ways the opposite of education, but that doesn't mean they are bad things.
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Generate a key for each user. Encrypt the users key with their password, but then create a second backup encrypted copy using public key crypto. If the user loses their password, then you can have systems in place to retrieve the key from the backup encrypted container.

The process of retrieving the key could involve somebody manually approving the decryption of it on a secondary system where the private key lives, and then copying it over to the original server to be re-encrypted with the users new password.

EDIT: If data needs to be shared between users, then a new sharing key can be created, and encrypted with both users passwords and the backup public key. That data can then be re-encrypted with the shared key.
The UI layer is already called Gaia, I would assume that's what they'll refer to the product when speaking to end-users.
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Hehe, well, I'm fairly sure that B2G and Chrome OS share more similarities than you grant them. They are both an attempt to build a cloud-based, web app-based thin client. The Chromebooks have 3G connectivity, don't forget -- and I'm sure there will be a B2G tablet, too (a Chrome OS tablet has been rumoured for a long time, as well).

I don't think you can compare Android to B2G. But yeah, perhaps I should say 'simplified' rather than 'low tech' :)
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On the flipside, the nice thing about older founders, presumably building products for older users, is that monetization is usually part of the product from the get-go. Older users have money and need solutions, and a solution can usually be reduced to "save me time" or "save me money." If you can save them time, they'll gladly pay you for it. If you can save them money, you can steal a ton of share from existing providers in the marketplace.

I'm not saying that younger founders can't do this, and there are plenty of exceptions on either side. But there does seem to be an age-related tendency toward either product-as-gadget or product-as-solution.
The UI layer is explicitly replaceable, though.
Giving power back to the carriers is unavoidable with an open system.

Conversely, taking power away from someone is usually why you keep the system closed.
This kind of project seldom grabs the headlines and is unlikely to raise more than a stifled yawn in most circles - so they just reformatted some data, right?

But imagine all the different bank accounts governed by different legal contracts with different rules (interest rate calculations, overdraft rules, penalties, etc). Imagine the complexities of accurately identifying duplicate customers in different systems. Imagine the logistics of switching over without downtime. Imagine the staff training and customer communication. Imagine the consequences of getting it wrong.

Now try to do all that in the midst of all the politics that comes with a merger and then end up with a system that not only consolidates all 30m accounts but is also flexible enough to serve as a platform for growth.

Startups don't have a monopoly on challenging engineering projects!
I've used Isolate[1] pretty happily on a few things (command-line tools and/or Sinatra apps). I haven't tried it with Rails, so I can't speak to how well it works in that context. But the readme's first example is Rails, so it's worth a look if you really want an alternative.

[1] https://github.com/jbarnette/isolate
It sounds like you live in a world where people only take responsibility for the consequences of their actions if they are paid to do so.
So, illegal Mexicans shouldn't be on the right-wing agenda this electoral cycle, or am I missing something?
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There are two reasons for this (in my opinion).
Use

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As with almost all headlines with a question mark the answer is "No."
I've tried to get used to Open/LibreOffice but it was unbearable every time. I no longer try. Luckily I don't need to deal with office documents much, so iWorks/Google docs is enough for me.
I just looked and it turns out this link has already been submitted to Reddit, where it gathered fewer votes -- and generated fewer comments -- than on HN:

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/pvctl/journals_warn...

The general public just can't -- or doesn't want to -- invest the time & effort required to learn about and pass judgment on these kinds of situations.

Arguably, this is what allows businesses, lobbyists, and others to get away with unethical behavior.
Windows Phone beating Android in the app price game already?
Trivial, they're in the same category with add and multiply.

Check out http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/587 for some non trivial examples.
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I would add a functional language to this list. Even if you're not going to use it for real world programming it's likely that it will change the way you code. This is something that is often said and I think you need to experience it for yourself to understand what it means. For example learning a bit of Erlang and Scheme has changed the way I program in Python.
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Hadn't seen Isolate before- looks awesome. I'll try it out. Autorequire is one of my biggest complaints against bundler.
You never code any automation, scripts, testing, etc around your main codebase? Or do you program those in C? (gargle).
I believe that was the GP's point, he just omitted the sarcasm tags ;)
It's like any evolutionary process. You need a dynamic period when ideas are smashed together. But you need a lot more time when ideas are given the opportunity to independently arise. The diversity in the ideas going into the fusion/collaborative stage will determine the fitness of the output.
No, they aren't exactly the same:

x = 0
def foo():
x = x + 1
print x

UnboundLocalError: local variable 'x' referenced before assignment

The javascript version works fine.

var x = 0;
var foo = function() { x = x + 1; console.log(x); }

I realize there are ways around this, but they are considered unpythonic. For example:

x = [0]
def foo():
x[0] = x[0] + 1
print x[0]

This works as you'd expect.
The author makes a big rhetorical/logical fallacy: (s)he describes the "problem" that the internet has without ever explaining what exactly the problem is (its existence is just implied).

The issue is exactly the oposite. There is no problem with the internet, but the industries, that see internet as a potential new source of (parasitic) revenue, are creating a problem so that the politicians ca solve it.

> but then how do we make money without intellectual property rights

I really don't know. But maybe you should ask Paulo Coelho, the developers behind The Indie Bundle, or Monty Python (http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/monty-py...).

> We talk of freedom, artistic expression, and creativity, but at the end of the day, someone has to get paid.

Well, who said that art must be paid for, and that it must be paid for by the customer? In my opinion, art made for profit is not art, true art comes from within, and is expression of the soul, which would need to be expressed even if there was no money coming from creating art. Even so, the politicians and lobbyists emphasise the "successful" artists, those earning big bucks, but really there are many artists that are only losing/spending money doing their art, but still do it. After all, we're all artists.

Furthermore, that artists have to "make a living" is a relatively new idea. In the past, artists had donnors, rich people who financed them so that they could create in peace, without worries.
I generally agree with what you say. I'm yet to be won over by the browser as an OS idea, whether from Google or Mozilla and also while Web App might be the future, they're far from the now. That said, Mozilla seems to be really be behind B2G so let's wait and see whether their OS can do everything that ChromeOS has failed to.
Sam Hughes wrote the same story 3 years earlier and I think I like his version better: http://qntm.org/difference
Your list is very short and consists of languages that are quite similar to each other. I recommend learning ten or so programming languages from several different paradigms. It will take about a decade but it will be worth it.

You should include one flavor of Lisp, a statically typed functional programming language (like Haskell or ML) and another declarative programming language (like Prolog).

Of course, by being proficient in any of the languages you mentioned will probably guarantee you a safe job, but having broader horizons in programming and computer science will make your programming career more diverse and interesting.
They just need one going from the bottom floor to the top, now that would be cool
I'm frequently surprised by how much power the US carriers seem to have. Here in the UK they are mostly reduced to dumb pipes. There are (almost) no operator exclusive phones, except for the cheapo own-brand ones, which few people would choose a network for. On top of that any phone you buy can be legally unlocked and switched to any other network.

It seems like a much better position as a consumer to be able to pick an operator based mainly on the line-rental charges and included data, minutes, etc.

I don't know if this is a consequence of laws around unlocking phones or simply because the operators in the UK pretty much match each other in coverage. Most built up areas have even coverage from them all so there is little to lock a buyer into one network or another.
> I've always felt the U/I got better with each iteration since the original VS, but this is the first time I'm not excited to get my hands on the next version based solely on the look and feel.

I feel the same about Windows 8. These products are ugly. I am deeply concerned about the direction Microsoft has taken.
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I'm surprised they managed to find a whiteboard pen which didn't destroy their display. Most of them have solvents which I would expect to interact poorly with the surfaces of LCD monitors.
It should be noted that this is true only to some parts of the world, and more specifically, true only to some nationalities and cultures of immigrants. The situation with immigrants' and lacking work ethics is grave in most of Europe. Grave.
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Wow, that post was terribly offensive.

... as was the code that zed linked to - https://github.com/gilesbowkett/archaeopteryx/blob/0b08ebdb9...
Depending on your use-case, their TOS. (See IMDb for a relevant example: http://app.imdb.com/find?api=v1&appid=iphone1&locale... see the bottom comment of that link). That is, most websites which provide unique info will not let you re-distribute this (be it an IMDb score, a summary of a movie written by one of their users, etc.).

Edit: for personal use there is not much to take into account other than what you mention. It is not illegal to "see" a webpage, it's more of a question of what you do with the content. In fact, one could argue that scraping is better than refreshing in your browser (as you'll hit them with fewer GET requests if done properly - as you won't download js/css dependencies).
> For the project I'm working on now, I had to make my own
> asset pipeline. It uses less for css (and bootstrap),
> precompiles handlebar templates and concats all the js
> into a single file and uglifies it. Cost me 2-3 hours,
> about the same time it took me to learn Rails asset
> pipeline and was about 10x more fun.

Sounds familiar: http://documentcloud.github.com/jammit/
This was reported on Sep 06 2011... a suggested fix in the ticket was "should strip from history like .auth()".

Has it been fixed? What is the implications of having it in the console history?
I know and I appreciate his explanation, although much of it was not new to me. I was not trying to convince him of anything, just commenting on what I think the original story was about.
> which means they must have some idea of what they're looking for to begin with and the ability to show that it exists on the encrypted medium to begin with

this is not a pedantic side concern, but is in fact, the key component of the government's ability to compel evidence production. if they cannot show that they know what's on your hard drive, that you control it, and that what's on your hard drive is incriminating, they cannot compel you to decrypt it.

so yeah, if you gave them a bad key and your decryption algo returned garbage, they'd certainly lock you up for contempt (given the aforementioned conditions were true).
Obligatory PG essay on "If [Functional Programming] makes you a better programmer, [why wouldn't you use it all the time?]" for massive upvotes. (Please don't upvote this comment.)

http://paulgraham.com/avg.html
I also find it interesting that everything has been abstracted behind the mouse. The stylus was around for a while but is was replaced by the finger. But does reducing the physical tool set benefit the experience?

Is it practical to increase the physical toolset? Adding pseudo markers and exacto knives and erasers? This makes it less portable but what does that matter if its always in the same place?
Great story however I think the author is missing a link in the communication chain.

Computer systems are not always used as the developers suppose.

I would happily bet good money that the developers built what they believed to be a useful and efficient system that the thoroughly tested. A view that I will guarantee was shared by the restaurant owner who purchased the system and implemented it into his restaurant and spent valuable time teaching the staff how to use it.

A couple of busy nights later and the staff are struggling to remember the sequence they are meant to follow and instead of familiarising themselves and becoming more efficient with the system over time they implement a very basic system that takes less effort to remember.

This is less of a case of a poor system and more a case of poor management mainly because the staff obviously weren't trained and sold on the system properly and no follow-up checks have taken place to ensure the system is being used correctly.
Do you have any sources for those numbers? Thanks!