skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't find it all that surprising. A few large insurance companies still have a lot of their (core) software written in COBOL and outsource its upkeep to IT companies. It's a big expense, nobody likes it; but replacing it would cost more.
Java isn't 'cool' anymore. No one wants to write Java. They want to use the newest flavour of the month.

While it might be possible that everyone gets tired of these and returns to Java, I don't think it's very probable.

If I had to bet, it would be on JavaScript. It's everywhere. It has begun catching the interest of more than just 'browser scripting' and with a little help from some core enhancements in the coming generations, it could really become the 'platform of the future'.
Maybe I just haven't learned the proper bluster when talking to investors... I really believe my idea is awesome, that I and my co-founders have solid skills, and that our startup will succeed with or without investors (but will succeed faster with funding). I feel anything else is BS that investors especially will see through, or am I missing something?

Alas, I am in the Triangle area of NC, but I'd be happy to chat via skype!
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I disagree.

The sugar question is settled in nutrition science. Sugar that doesn't occur naturally in food is pretty bad for you. But underqualified people have different opinions and get a disproportionate amount of face time on media.

In fact, I'd say the question is almost identical to the climate change 'debate'. The science is settled, but the average American doesn't know who to believe.
While they certainly have incentive to downplay revenue for the purposes of paying Oracle, let's not forget that all of the contributing revenue factors would be legally discoverable. I think that we can assume that the numbers contributed in court reflect the revenue fairly accurately - Fortune 500 companies tend to have lawyers whose degrees don't come in specially-marked boxes of cereal. Also, Google has a lot of very good incentives to state their revenue exactly as is legally relevant (albeit, not a penny more, in this case).
While I graduated with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering (and rarely attended), I started to code my freshman year in college (2003) after my dormitory neighbor got me interested in computers; he wore a robe most of the time, had a hefty beard, and kept a bucket of computer parts in his closet. He talked a lot about IP tables :) It's only been down the rabbit hole ever since!
That's a lot easier now than it was back then. Maybe he used carbon paper but there was no photocopying and obviously no word processing, at least nothing that an individual outside of a specialist organisation would have access to.

It's obviously the most likely explanation but still, it perhaps stretches what might be considered usual for the period.
It can't. That was sarcasm. My point was that Web API does a lot of things MVC can't.
Most want to be rich? Russians. Least? Swedes.
There are two different questions being asked here.

Is the number of polls getting out of hand?
... to me that's a no, they give a glimpse of the HN community which I find interesting

Are the polls a cheap way to get some karma?
... to me this is "quite possible" and I often wonder if the poll would be created in the first place if there was no promise of karma gain
Talking Big Data Trends
Why do you think that a non-profit model is outside of the market? People donate money to sustain something they get utility from, and all of the donations are freely given. It would only be outside a "market model" if Wikipedia were funded solely by the government. As it were, it is a free enterprise with a goal other than profit.

Charities and non-profit foundations can hardly be considered outside of the market model. Wikipedia is, in fact, an anecdote you'd point to if your goal was to debate that market forces result in collective good.
As far as first world problems go, this one is really annoying. Especially if you send an article to the Kindle and don't notice that you only got a part of it. After a few times, I learnt to view and check first but it really kills the flow.
Business versus Basement: the Half-Assing Mediocrity Parade
Well, they do have an IT department with staff competent enough to make a linux migration. I guess they do have an appropriate rollout management to compile and deploy KDE without much hassle. I wouldn't worry about that.
April Fools Prank in WordPress Dashboard becoz of a Theme?
ROME - An interactive Film in WebGL
Exclusively Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, managed with Landscape and Puppet. Normalizing the environment is crucial when managing a non-trivial amount of servers. LTS is very nice when it comes to production servers, stable updates, stuff rarely breaks, it's universal and almost guaranteed to be supported by more exotic closed-source software.

Upgrading to next LTS is usually painless, this hopefully goes for the upcoming version too.
the first thing I ever wrote that has to do with programming was in applescript lol, that was around 12 years ago I remember the main reason was trying to automatize an chat-client showing a message of what I'm listening in itunes, well, now I'm 24, professionally have 3.5 - 4 years living of it, I develope in .net platform, and trying to learn some old school programming (dont like the fact of "programming" click oriented with wizards, even though I use wizards but I'd like to learn some low level programming languages as you guys who have 10 or more years in the bussiness)
That's really awesome that you've started. Would you want to do mobile applications next or are you sticking to web applications for now?

This might be an outdated guide, but it gives you an idea of how to build a "native" looking application using CSS, HTML and JavaScript - http://matt.might.net/articles/how-to-native-iphone-ipad-app....

You might want to try embedding some videos from Khan Academy, Youtube or the online universities. That will make your website more interesting.

Great start!
You're only looking back maybe 20 years. Imagine this same information 100 years from now. 200 years. 1000 years.
Show HN: My sunday night project (@cmpyl)
@cmpyl

Tweet a line of python at it (right now it works best with math) and it'll tweet back at you the return value.

Ex: https://twitter.com/#!/cmpyl/status/186850674053615616

Pretty useless little bot but it will be cool to see what sort of wild one liners it finds.
That's not honesty. Fact is, a tiny click-happy minority can put anything on the front page, and the majority cannot down vote it.
understandability by common users is a big thing and linux lacks it. A common person who doesn't know anything about computer would be much comfortable with windows or Mac rather than linux. Linux is a programmers operating system. You learn a lot using linux than windows. Programmers have different opinions so are different distros(That is my view !!). I personally use UBUNTU for my programming and Windows for gaming/netflix/other_entertainment.
Google makes money when people are simply browsing the Internet. That is why Google invests in all things that will make people browse the Internet more.

It's the same reason they keep throwing money at Mozilla too.
The author left out the most important part, which is the controller. The HTTP methods match controller verbs without requiring any attribute markup. The Get method responds to /controller (all) or /controller/5 (ID of 5), the Post method responds to a POST on /controller, the Delete method responds to DELETE on /controller/5, etc.

It's very elegant at this level. Adding additional methods requires more work, as does managing routing and the other support infrastructure in a more complex application, but it provides a great starting point.

One of the things that isn't great is that they, of necessity, have a different base class. Instead of Controller, it's ApiController. That makes sense. However, the differences pervade the entire stack, down to things like the Request and Response objects, and even AuthorizeAttribute (same class name in a different namespace with different parameters).

All in all, though, it's great. It certainly beats using WCF for simple REST APIs and it beats trying to repurpose MVC to implement an API.
I assume the question is referring to programming professional (i.e., for pay). I've been programming since the Basic on the Commodore 64 but I've only really been doing it professionally for the last 5 years or so.
The rudimentary nature of poll system on this site cheapens the experience somewhat. I love the community here, but this site is fairly archaic in construction.
Agreed.. took me a few seconds to notice the skip button, a second or two longer and I'd have left the site.
Dr. Lustig's rebuttals:

http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-ab...

http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-ab...

http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-ab...
I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave
Sony Releases Statement on Xperia S Display Issue
There is a correlated phenomenon that might be at work: many help desk calls are a result of what happens after a user tries to "fix it" themselves. Users may be sufficiently ignorant under Linux that they've reduced the number of steps they take "outside the box".
How old were you in the age of 8" floppies then? :)
That's true. I suppose more specifically Wikipedia is an example of web content being produced without a profit motive on the part of the producing entity, but not wholly outside a market model.

How that relates to market models producing collective good depends on which one you subscribe to. Many proponents (dating back to Adam Smith) argue that it's the profit motive in particular that makes the market model produce good outcomes. There's also a lot of skepticism of even voluntary collective production in much of the libertarian literature; e.g. the Israeli kibbutzim or the 19th-century "utopian socialist" communes aren't viewed favorably. Wikipedia has a sort of voluntary-collectivism feeling to it as well, from that perspective, though it's more limited in that you don't have to actually move to Wikipedia and live there; you can just contribute some content now and then.
I primarily use OS X, but I do have a Windows machine that I use for some development. My reason is not in your list:

I need to create Windows executables and installers as part of our product and don't know of a way to do that on OS X.

If that was a larger part of my development, I would primarily use Windows.
YouPorn: Targeting 200 Million Views a Day and Beyond
Samsung Galaxy S III to Launch in 2-5 Weeks
Id say it would be a bigger boon for non-Windows pc gaming. Especially if the PS3 uses OpenGL or a variant that can be easily backported.
What is this doing on the frontpage?
You're taking a lot of correlation and trying to prove causation, much like the people you criticize.

"They invariably neglect to take into account the pitifully short lifespans our ancestors had."

Of course their lives were short. They had no healthcare, medicine, or sanitation. A band-aid and some antibiotic could have been the difference between life and death for some people. A daily, clean shower, clean water, and living quarters (mostly) free from predators. We take simple things like these for granted.

The major point from all of these books and articles is that humans do have superb shock-absorbers for legs and don't need air-cushioned soles. Modern shoes have taught people from a very young age to run a certain, un-natural way and this has been proven with more than just speculation.
Solar Plane Set for New Record-Breaking Flight
If anything, I think it just highlights the need to separate submission and comment karma or do away with submission karma entirely. (Good) comments add to the conversation. Submitting is just pasting a link.

It's come up on HN before that popular blogs have bots running against them that post new articles to HN as soon as they appear on the RSS feed. I don't really care about the karma side of this but it encourages behaviour in some that just adds noise to HN (IMHO).

As for the polls, there have been a lot these last few days. Not excessively so but we might want to lay off for a few days. Some of the comments have been interesting. The results of the polls themselves are completely meaningless.

EDIT: to clarify, voluntary polls are meaningless. Properly conducted polls with random sampling are of course an effective tool. Of course, none of the HN polls fall into this category (hence "meaningless" in terms of results).
Android so good it doesnt even have to make Google any money Ever
It's a vague term, my guess is they mean datasets like Google's.
Is it really necessary to have Raphael as a dependency for such a simple widget? Just seems like overkill to me.

I recently did a similar widget for a project of mine, using canvas (I understand SVG has better compatibility than canvas) but either way would be nice if I wanted this widget that I wouldn't have to include Raphael as well.
Pinterest Co-Founder Paul Sciarra Is Leaving The Company
Cyber-rapist reminds me of A Rape in Cyberspace[1], from 1993. Which, 20 years later, seems much tamer in comparison to mobile anonymous physical stalking apps. At least back then, your stalker had to sit in front of their computer. Now we recognize that as something closer to trolling.

[1] http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-rape-in-cyberspace/
These results are useless for me since they turned on compiler "optimizations" that may lead to incorrect results in floating point calculations.
New York startup Profitably loses all but one employee, CEO Adam
I feel like "interactive film" is a bit of a misnomer. It basically gives you some minor panning with the mouse. When I think of interactive I think of changing the environment, not just moving the movie a bit.

(Full disclosure: I did not make it all the way through the film. Maybe it becomes more interactive later on.)
I was pretty surprised to learn that the HN crowd prefer OS X, but yes internet polls (and really, all polls) can't be taken seriously. There has been a small influx lately.
Someone has to produce those interesting articles you consume for free, but he probably doesn't want to work for free. Would you?
What do you assert I'm doing right now, then?

I think you turned the point on its head -- I don't care about the operating system as much as I care about the tools.
You got downvoted because you included some traditional anti-Linux troll subjects with nothing to support those points.

> However, hassles really do begin to manifest themselves once users begin to really engage their PC in any number of ways. The vast majority of PC users fall into this category. In other words, they have non-minimal needs but are neither enthusiasts nor developers or otherwise employed in IT full time.

The vast majority of PC users do not fall into your category. They will be people who need to read email, do a little bit of simple web-browsing, create and open simple office documents (the vast majority of which would be fine with Libre-Office) and maybe run some awful accounts / stock / ordering software.

> WiFi, external displays, software limitations (e.g. video editing) are only a small number of issues that can and will manifest themselves. For the vast majority of PC users, this constitutes an unacceptable hassle.

WIFI is fixed in Linux and has been for a while, you don't want to run wifi in a business, and if you are using it anyway you'd have it set up by IT.

I'm not sure what you mean by external displays. If you mean dual monitors than very few people need two monitors, and those that do would have them set up by IT, and they'd work with whatever software being used. If you mean projectors then I have no idea what the Linux situation is. I accept it might be a problem, but that's a problem faced by a very small number of people.

A tiny number of people need to edit video. In the context of a local authority we can say that almost no one will be editing video.

OS X, in the context of local governments trying to save money, is - and I say this as politely as I can - a stupid suggestion. The hardware is much more expensive, is a lot more desirable to thieves, it has similar (or worse) dual monitor problems as you suggest above, it has similar (or worse) lack of software as you suggest above.
I've honestly found developing on Windows a much bigger pain in the arse until you spend a lot of time setting it up. It's not that you can't do things on Windows - anyone with skill can do anything on anything, however it just makes it significantly less easy, it just feels like an OS set up for consumption as opposed to creation.
It would be interesting to have a similar poll for iOS, maybe asking the downloads/man-hours ratio.
> Sign up to any of their ad programs, become an advertiser yourself. Anyone can do this. Then try to "buy" this so called data they're collecting and selling. You can't, because there's no such thing

Ahhh, now I'm starting suspect that you are the person that doesn't understand privacy concerns... Here's a description from Google's own page describing one of their services:
"With interest categories, you can reach people based on their interests and demographics. You can find interested customers, such as sports enthusiasts, and show them relevant ads as they browse sites across the Google Display Network."

Interesting. So, say I'm a fundamentalist Christian, and I don't want to rent my apartment to one of those icky atheists. Easy, I choose to only advertise to people that visit Christian themed websites. Awesome! Trouble is, atheists are now being discriminated against, without any chance of ever being able to prove it - gee thanks Google!

Yes, you are right, Google does not give out my personal info with my name attached to it. But the data does leak out and can have a nefarious real-world effect. I'd just as much rather that using a search engine doesn't open me up to that sort of thing.
attempting to run Linux on a device that was not designed specifically for it.

Couldn't have put it better. Those who complain about how linux doesn't "just work" often overlook this point.

Personally though, I don't think Canonical coming up with their own computer isn't really going to help; I wish that there were a hardware vendor that designed really beautiful computers so that I could run linux on it (Currently, the best design is by Apple)
A couple of years ago I proposed a decentralized dead-tree archival network using time capsules and a shared location map. I've made a few capsules already.

http://carlos.bueno.org/2010/09/paper-internet.html

http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/10/dead-media-be...
Usage for IE is up, down for every other browser
I don't care for the fonts myself, but it's really cool to see more industries try out the pay-what-you-want model. It's starting to become large in gaming especially, and I really hope it does well. Lately everything seems to be going towards "micropayments", and that really scares me.
Giveaway: Win “The Best 365 CSS Websites Around the World” Book
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You can look at this a few ways:

1) It is a commentary on the frivolous use of polls.

2) It is a experiment to gauge the reaction of the HN community.

3) It provides value (if only satirical), otherwise people wouldn't have upvoted it.
The way OS X is being locked down. In 10.8, signing is optional and even if you tell your system not to allow unsigned, you can bypass it on a case by case basis. In the next OS X, we'll probably move a bit farther in that direction, and at one per year, the OS X of 2016 will probably refuse to run unsigned applications at all, for excellent reasons involving security and malware, etc. I'm sure there will be a way to turn it off, but when it's basically impossible to get more than a few users unless you submit to signing, applications like Bittorrent will either submit or find themselves reduced to developers-only status. If they submit, Apple will be able to remove them at any time (for the vast majority of users, who won't know how or want to "root" their Macs). Even if Apple never chooses to use this maliciously -- and I don't think they would for a long time, if ever -- it's going to be only a matter of time before some group sues them to use it to stop infringement or something.

I don't want to run a system where, by design, the manufacturer can remove my ability to run applications I've installed after the fact. So, even though I'm happier in general with the polish and fit of OS X than current desktop linuxes, that's where I'm headed.
Personally I like this story because nothing will hasten the US government into action more than being "victimized" by foreign companies and organizations.

This particular patent is less egregious than many but even so I find the situation ridiculous. As long as US companies are benefitting from patents, the government will do nothing. We need more patent litigation from foreign entities.

Just as a side note, the CSIRO is a "real" organization. It conducts an awful lot of research with some notable inventions [1]. That money will fund a lot more research. This isn't some NPE troll who will simply line its pockets.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Scientific_and_Ind...
Ask HN: Why are a large proportion of legit posts being marked [dead]?
Up to 1.5 million Visa, MasterCard credit card numbers stolen
Independent work: Not a young person’s game?
I disagree with you on LOSS x2: Kinect v.next.

The future generations of kinect will bring astonishing changes to the world of gaming. You assume the new capabilities will be used for "malicious" means which is possible but that's a bad way to judge some technology. That's like saying the next Gen Intel CPUs will be 2x faster so people will use it to spam twice as much or hack passwords twice as fast.

The fact of the matter is Kinect will continue to shape the future of gaming. The hardware is just not good enough for hard core gamers currently. Once that barrier is gone I think it can create a much more immersive gaming experience that would benefit all gamers.
Neat looking font. I wonder how the price distribution will end up looking.
Automatic setup of Django, NGinx and GUnicorn on EC2 using Bellatrix
HN API Wrapper
Can you provide a specific example in the article (or the technology referenced) where the "REST API" discussed is not actually REST?

I didn't see any, but I'm no expert and I'm trying to learn.
I think this issue stems from the fact that while WSGI was a great concept, it hasn't been fully developed, and hasn't been maintained. We need a better set of abstraction layers for socket and HTTP-based interfaces in Python.

And by the way, I love Kenneth's work, especially Requests. We use it in production and it's a joy to build on top of it.
Windows is only a little higher-polling than "BSD". Why is that? If you look at Diomedis Spinellis' "Organizational Adoption of Open Source Software" (http://www.spinellis.gr/pubs/jrnl/2012-JSS-OSS-Industry-Use/...) you'd expect to see Windows in the lead. as Hacker News seems like one of those places where "highly-productive employees and in rapidly growing and volatile organizations" are active.
April fools day was yesterday you know?