skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"For a scientific study it's really lacking facts which makes this is little more than fluff journalism/science."

Did you actually read the study, or just the piece on ars? There's a link at the bottom of the article to the actual study, but I don't have a PNAS login so I can't confirm/deny your assertion. If you're basing your criticism entirely off of the ars piece, though, I would tell you to pump your brakes a bit. They summarized the study, which is typical for this sort of journalism, and in my opinion worthwhile -- as long as the summary matches the actual findings of the study.

"For example I have an Infiniti(G35), a Lexus(IS250) and a Nissan Economy Box (Versa)"
I'd probably be able to take your response a little more seriously if you didn't immediately establish that you likely have a higher SES (owning three cars, two of which are "luxury" brands), and then fired off what seems to be a series of kind of defensive attacks on the study.
Google drops Pwn2Own sponsorship, posts $1MM Chrome bounty
Fund Scholars Live Video Feed Competition
If you ever need new pictures, offer my photos of the most adorable border collie on the planet :-)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/trothwell/tags/samantha/
It's the same in US English. The issue is just that there are 1-10% of people who are sensitive to the issue, and computing has grown from a small club of close friends/enemies/frenemies to a more mainstream activity, there is a growing call for being more welcoming and "politicallyy correct" tone in conversation.

For example, on the official Mozilla Bugzilla, diverting from technical debate to non-technical vitriolic commentary is a bannable offense, regardless of the value of the user's technical contribution.

It's just a toxic way of communicating, and if someone can't package their thoughts for public consumption, it may be better to keep their thoughts (semi-)private and leave it to someone more tactful to spread the word more widely and effect positive change.
The problem is the huge activation energy required to get people to move to a new language.

Microsoft TRIED to get people to move to a "better" language (C#, which IS arguably better than Java) but the .NET runtime is massive and doesn't ship with existing tablets/phones, meaning it (or rather, Mono) would add 10Mb+ to a download size that needs to stay under 20Mb to download over-the-air (2G/3G/4G).

A lot of people did jump on that bandwagon, but C# isn't really great for games, and so the adoption has been lukewarm outside of the Xbox/Windows Phone development community.

Point is, until someone has created something that really is BETTER than C++ in the ways that it needs to be (which probably requires heavy investment in tools as well as libraries), it's going to be an uphill battle to get people to change.

Even if you had the Perfect Ultimate Language designed an implemented today, you'd need support in everyone's editors, debuggers (including source-level remote debugging support and any necessary server modification on all target platforms), cross-platform build support to all the relevant architectures, C/C++ linkage (unless you plan to rewrite all current libraries), JNI linkage (so you could interoperate with Java, which is required on Android), and support for multiple paradigms (NO single-paradigm language will ever be adopted across the board, nor should it be -- different programming problems are solved best with different paradigms).

Honestly "D" is the language that best fits the bill that I'm aware of, though it has a long way to go as far as support on other platforms and mindshare. I haven't yet USED D, though, so I can't really critique it intelligently.
Note that anywhere you see array() in that list for PHP 5.4 you can replace it with [ ]'s. So the example that has:

$a = array(1,2,array(3,4));

becomes:

$a = [1,2,[3,4]];

Also

0b101010

works in 5.4.
Facebook, HN, Gmail, The Verge, Quora, Lifehacker, Google Reader, and Reddit
Have you ever had to deal with someone suffering from clinical depression? It is not a condition likely to have the ethics of an effective therapy doubted by anyone, including the patient.
Another life not really improved despite their insistence that it is
Looks like Vivify clobbers (or just doesn't output) terminal colors. Here's a tool to fix that: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1809

There might be better approaches, of course.
Legal companies bill by the hour, lower-on-the-totempole lawyers (that don't have a company of their own or that have made partner) are typically salaried employees.
Not sure! =)

I have a handful of side projects in both programming and "soft" skills such as running a newsletter. I got some leads through various HN posts about my side projects, and a few from the "Freelancer?" monthly thread. You can see the projects that I listed if you search last month's thread.

But yeah, I find it a little surprising myself. Probably some combination of the following:

-public projects

-right skill set (PHP instead of more trendy Ruby, etc)

-cheaper price

-good environment for developers right now

-luck

If you think about it, there are a lot of brilliant people on HN...but many of them already have jobs. Of those freelancing, a lot probably already have a solid client load. Of those that still need clients, not all are going to be working in a specific skill set, and I'd wager many don't want to work with PHP.
No worries. :) I did interpret it as 1280x720, but even 1366x768 in a 13" is really disappointing.

PPI is king as far as I'm concerned - I love the 1680x1050 panels in the 15" MBPs.
PHP repl is actually php -a
this is some seriously recursive abstraction
Here's a tip: Don't use PayPal unless you absolutely have to. PayPal has taken to treating its customers as badly as many large banks.

Many credit card companies are very proactive about fraudulent purchases online, and I even had Discover call me when they noticed a series of small purchases on iTunes. It turned out it wasn't exactly fraud (my 5yo on a home computer I hadn't signed out), but I was able to cut it off and I'm sure they saved me a bundle of money.
It's February, 2012 is a leap year ;-)

Could you prevent the tap delay with onTouch-events?
I quickly build a mobile web app using jQuery Mobile and re-used a lot of code and functionality from our desktop web app. I had to disable some jQuery Mobile functionality but I had something working in less than a week. This wouldn't have been possible if jQuery mobile isn't just a wrapper over HTML and JavaScript.
Silicon Valley: a hot market for lawyers
In answer to your first question. Prototypes are a much much simpler concept than classes and instances. In prototypes, you create an object X which is "just like object Y but with the following differences". No class declarations, no instantiation, no constructors -- just factory functions. Prototypes are also easily understood by people who have grasped the concept of dictionaries. No need to explain why you have dictionaries and also have classes.

Prototypes also have some niceties. They are very memory compact, unlike classes and instances. They are elegantly dynamic -- you can add and delete methods and variables, and even change who your prototype is at runtime. Methods in prototypes are very similar to functions, so you don't have to explain the distinctions there.

I think the main problem is that Javascript is such a screwed up language that it has soured people forever on prototype OO and no amount of semantic elegance will fix that.

In answer to your second question, here's the list of languages I know of. Only two are "mainstream", but in a field (CS) where quality is all too often inversely related to popularity, I'm not sure if that's a helpful metric.

1. Self

2. NewtonScript

3. Lua (via metamethods)

4. io

5. IIRC Python implements OO with something approximating prototypes internally but covers them with a class-based sheen when presented to the developer.
Try setting the "Website Storage Settings" to 0 on that Flash settings page. I did that ages ago and haven't noticed anything break because of it.
Ask HN: HackerNews in RSS should have domain listed next to the title
I use an RSS reader to keep up with HackerNews, but there are sites that I don't want to go to. I can't see what site it's linked to in the RSS feed view. What do you think?
Big Brother, Survivor, and other similar crap (e.g. The Jersey Shore) seem to contradict your idea, I think. I have not had a TV for some years now, and every time I actually get to watch some, I notice that it keeps getting dumber. Of course, you can still find interesting, thoughtful stuff, but it is becoming rarer and rarer.

I think that part of the problem is that being stupid is no longer seen (by society at large) as a bad thing. We're headed for the Idiocracy future...
Cannot upvote this enough. I just saw the trash in ~/.macromedia and was stunned. Immediately rm -rf everything and made the symlink. Will be doing it on my girlfriend's macbook as well.
Mombasa Submarine Cable disrupted by anchor. (sort of unrelated but related).

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/weird-...
Maybe! Greasemonkey scripts are pretty easy to whip up, why don't you try it? If you check my profile it links to a few scripts on Github that could get you started parsing the layout.
Mutual Recursion
Bookmarked and forever using this to explain the differences between these. Thanks for the awesome resource!
Tyler Cowen has an interesting comment on this [0]. Generally, it's good policy to interpret these studies cautiously.

[0] http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/02/how...
I heard an interview with the guys from Groupon and they mentioned paying $14,000 for a paper weight and paying $5K to a guy to stand in a clown-suit all day in their office just because they could.

It's this sort of wasteful spending that kind of makes me want them to fail.
Put your github, stackoverflow, blog, research papers, web apps etc in your profile, and possibly work the confidence index up, and let folks know your'e avail for remote work now

I know C++ and Python ok

(never took math classes at U of C, but spent lots of time in Eckhart library)
Kenn Harper: Dragon Go is the beginning of a
How to Use Text Message For Marketing | Entrepreneur Stories
> If you give me the option to pay $0, and give me a reasonable suggested price(this book), I'll pay the suggested price.

I actually didn't download it at all because of that. A free book to throw on my Kindle and maybe look through on a slower day is great but setting the price to zero felt like ripping off someone who contributes to HN and spoiling his metrics. I bookmarked it though so there's some gain from this tactic.
Aegisthus - A Bulk Data Pipeline out of Cassandra
Wow, you sound really optimistic (and who shouldn't be? You'll slay SF!)

Good luck man :-)
Yahoo seeking patent windfall from Facebook
Plato's work has had a lot of support/maintenance over the years, as it has been ported from the spoken word to parchment to book to e-book, and finally translated to English, which is how I assume Dan read it.

Programming languages and environments just evolve quicker than human ones. As with books, the best ideas get ported over: you can read Plato, but other than (Socrates/Plato/Aristotle), how many Greek philosophers were around whose ideas failed to survive? VisiCalc was first implemented in seventies for the Apple II, but its ideas have survived and been ported to Excel (and now Google Spreadsheets).
Interesting, my M1330 got motherboard replaced within a day after the nVidia died. Still works perfectly, I've never been happier with a laptop.
> I guarantee that no software we write today will still be in use after 2,400 years.

I don't know about that.. pretty sure COBOL software used by big banks written in 1960's and 70's will still be used.
I think you're both coming from different directions, here. For Computer Science, it's a bad choice. For Computer Doing, it's a good choice.

Not passing judgement either way, but I doubt you're ever going to agree with each other on this basis...
Current (and past) experience in this field, if you're looking for someone to do some contracting I'd be interested in hearing more about what you guys do. I'm local. yoblin -at- gmail dot com
I've been using PayPal for nearly ten years now and never had any issues with the service. Now currently my bank account is overdrawn, and if I don't get it out of the red soon I won't be able to use PayPal with my eBay account, etc. That's not PayPay's fault -- it's my own for not managing my money better.

Apple Inc. prides itself on its customer service. When I went in for a group interview to work at the local Apple Store that was the most important concept they drilled into our heads. That said, it's one thing for a company to talk the talk; it's quite another to walk the walk.
mod_pagespeed for Apache (by Google) also does this. Amongst many other automatic optimisations.
Como Invertir en Forex-5Consejos
NASA raids other budgets to fund Mars effort
Which bit was not factual? There isn't a single factual statement in there except in the most absurdly pedantic sense, it's all mocking hyperbole.
Don't blame jQuery Mobile for that. It's a result of a bunch of time-based heuristics that sometimes don't work the way you expect. You can always override them (at your peril) by going for the immediate events like touchstart.
An overlooked market: graphics printing for blind people
I've had experiences dealing with fraud from both PayPal and Bank of America recently. BoA were easy to get on the phone and refunded my money instantly. PayPal won't let you speak to a human, and after a week or so of going back and forth determined that it was acceptable for me to be overcharged for an item as long as I got the correct item in the mail.

Using a real credit card (not debit) gets you a great deal of protection and is a better option than ever using PayPal.
Would it be fair to say that if both sides of the transaction are trusted then Paypal is OK? I would say that most of the time I use Paypal this is the case.
Hahaha I think universities will still be teaching Java too :)
> you only execute flash if you want to

NoSciprt allows you to do that, so does Flashblock. I'm sure there are similar plugins and extensions for browsers other than Firefox (well, maybe not NoScript, it seems pretty unique).
awesome. looking forward to this, which is coming from someone without any formal education on programming. it will be good to see the difference between understanding the principles via video, vs reading it in a book.
Better here where like-minded folks hang out (at least, they will have HN News in common), than some random recruiter who have no inkling what either party is looking for
Nice. Useful and handy.
> There really is no setup

Except for creating an HTML-file and understanding how all that works.

> and the OS becomes (to a degree) irrelevant.

This is pretty much true for any language as long as you don't use platform-specific features (fork).

> Further, javascript is an easy language to prototype in, and, at the basic level, easy enough to teach and write.

"Easy language to prototype in"? Both Python and Ruby are equally "easy", but comes with even more batteries included. They also have a consistent object model, as opposed to JavaScript's prototype-inheritance-is-cool-but-let's-mix-in-constructors-from-classical-OOP. There's pretty much nothing like JavaScript's prototypes in any other languages (Self/Io works quite differently), and I don't really see any gain in teaching that to students early on.
Still didn't make it a good idea though.
Project estimation is like measuring the length of a beach
I hope you get the girl.
The problem with PHP is that 99.99% of the code in circulation today isn't the shinier cleaned-up versions. It's PHP4 and PHP 5.0 and it's still chock-a-block with the storied mind-bending nastiness of yore.
It's an interesting idea. I'm curious about the point (²) about cache hits where there are currently misses. What scenario would this happen in? If you're pointing to the same cachable resource on different pages, it should be cached anyway.
> PayPal won't let you speak to a human

Really? I've spoken to humans at PayPal many times. When I call, I don't even have to navigate a phone tree or wait on hold, someone just answers. The people I talked to were helpful and knowledgeable about their service and handling problems (which is what I called about, some weird customer that sent a bunch of <10-cent payments to my account then disputed them, and more recently with a question about the new IRS 1099-K form).

It wasn't hard to find the number to call either. You log in, click on Contact Us, then Call Us. Two clicks and you have a phone number.
Any chance this would be webcast live or recorded for later viewing?
Is AwareLabs A Good Marketing Tool For Agencies?
Possibly this one?

http://techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-news-is...
As an employer, and that's your attitude, first of all I wouldn't hire you, because I couldn't rely upon you to get the job done- particularly when things go wrong. And if I did employ you, you certainly wouldn't be part of any stock option or participation scheme for the upside.
Silicon Valley's goal setting tool: "OKRs"
Good point, I agree.

Anti-psychiatry (wiki explains their position in good detail) says that basically the very moment we stopped believing in magic, witches and wizards, psychology/psychatry surfaced as 'sciences' with exactly the same role - to root out people who are too non-compliant with the system from the society.

USSR and communistic states (I used to live in one of them) are great example. All dissidents were automatically labeled 'insane' because anybody doubting communism had to be crazy in communist view of the world.
In 1997, when Steve Jobs had just taken over the company from Gil Amelio, betting against Apple seemed like a sure thing.
The moment that Apple releases a decent Siri API is the moment I hack something to work with my existing X10 system.
The reality is that political dissenters are often diagnosed with schizophrenia if they, for example, accuse their government of crimes. Of course governments do commit crimes, but one can only acknowledge the crimes of someone else's government, or crimes that occurred long ago.

Even in the United States, the automatic reply to any significant claim of criminal behavior against the US government is "bat-shit crazy conspiracy theorist".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_i...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry

http://thejcl.com/pdfs/munro.pdf The Ankang: China's Special Psychiatric Hospitals

Governments, including the United States, project through their propaganda and education, a false reality in which the most important state actions are always moral and justified.

There is a type of mass pathology going on in which almost everyone ignores facts that contradict the official reality presented by authority.

I think this is unfortunately a normal aspect of group behavior because I have observed it even in a small technical group where the manager decided that Windows Communication Foundation worked differently than it actually did and everyone went along with it even though the documentation clearly stated otherwise.
From Consulting to Employee #1 at a YC Startup
The worst part is that this kind of thing actually makes security worse.

If you force people to bypass security to do ordinary tasks, and train them to constantly enter the root password for everything, you don't actually have any security. It's like the password policy that's so impractical that everyone sticky-notes passwords to their monitors, or the Vista UAC.
I really like this. It shifts the importance of the production from the physical e.g. the actual code, the actual book to the idea. Great comment.
My comparison on setup was mostly in comparison to the effort in setting up a toolchain or an interpreter, in a situation like this where you have to support users on different OSes/hardware without spending valuable teaching time on it.

I do have to agree with you about the ugly mix of inheritance models, but for the initial teaching phase, you could largely ignore that before moving on to a different language to teach either true OOP or functional programming.
Even though there is no native "switch" statement in Python, the same control flow structure can be done with a dict construct:

http://simonwillison.net/2004/may/7/switch/
Show HN: Model approval queues for new and updated records (Rails 2 & 3)
I think the study merely predicts that BMW drivers are more likely to be arsehats.

Make of car is not a good indicator of genuine wealth in America. If you're looking for a heuristic, then a two year old second hand domestically manufactured vehicle would be a better indicator. See Thomas Stanley and William Danko http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millionaire_Next_Door
Facebook offers offers to share mobile revenue and help to bypass app stores
Having multiple currencies is a good thing; it allows the various nations to offset internal dynamics through the stabilisation of currency movements.

Uniform currencies come at a high cost. Just ask Greece. Or the Australian manufacturing industry, believe it or not.
I was interested in the comment that they do "post-push" reviews. It seems to me that you have only two options with code reviews:

a) Pre-push: now all your commits are delayed by the review process. Even if it's just by a few minutes, it breaks your flow.

b) Post-push: now if the reviewer things you did it totally wrong, it's too late to fix it. You have to make an entirely new patch, and meanwhile people have been exposed to your already-pushed crap. On the other hand, this is no worse than not reviewing.

In a post-push setup, what do you do with the reviewer's comments?
Indeed, but none of them led to the arrests.

It's very likely that they were false IDs created for diversion.
Here's a simpler comparison with way more langauges: http://rigaux.org/language-study/syntax-across-languages/Str...
That's what the Valley has always been about. Each year as the industry matures the more Hollywood it gets. 'Tis what happens when many see each other simply as network nodes, to be connected and leveraged.
Spain vs Venezuela today+ all goals of the game 29/2/2012
What's a better place to look for a job than Hacker News?
Yes I agree. And it is like every other quote from Linus contains similar exaggregations. I think it is his biggest weakness.
Here I think you are getting at a distinguishable difference between those who are pushing against authorities and those who are hacking the system and flying under the radar. I think that anti-authoritarianism is more a directed attitude of questioning, while avoiding them/it is something different entirely; less trying to change the system, more accepting or ignoring it altogether. That is not to say that one cant do both things; in fact it might be a necessary way to live outside of the norm of blind obedience.
Pakistan's plan for the "coldblooded murder of the Internet"
>Except for creating an HTML-file and understanding how all that works.

Using chrome? Hit [ctrl+shift+j|cmd+option+j] and you can write JavaScript without any HTML necessary. Other browsers have similar consoles that need no HTML to write JavaScript.
Smokers and the obese cheaper to care for
> And user experience is "nothing a couple of expensive consultants can't fix"? Really?

If that were even remotely true then Apple wouldn't be as beloved or as profitable as it is today.