skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Not only should we write off the luddites, we should consider every step towards lower complexity good and steps towards complexity and slower understanding to be bad and actively harmful.

Fine. Here is a program written in my new JS proposal:

everything;

That's it. Just one line. It does everything. Of course, "everything" means exactly this one kind of app that I have decided is good enough for everyone. We're all writing Facebook apps, after all. If someone is going to complain that "everything" isn't flexible enough to do what they want, well we can just write-off those luddites because they want to be able to write "everything( more detail)", which is obviously more complex.

Reduced complexity must be balanced against reduced expressivity. "Well, way to take it to the extreme, Jamie. Classes are hardly so radical, and you don't have to use them".

Ok, well we'll just delete all C compilers from our systems, and use C++ compilers, right?

>But then why any language feature at all? Why isn’t assembler good enough for everyone? Or C? Or C++?

Why isnt C++ good enough for C programmers? Or assembler programmers?

If I don't like C++ I can program in C. While in theory I can write run plain old C through a C++ compiler, the reality is that some things are different. Most importantly, the thought being put in by the compiler developers to solve language problems were being spent solving C++ problems, not C problems.

Why does this matter? Question: are browsers going to support two different languages? JS and JS++? No?

So now imagine that we were proposing deleting every C compiler and only allowing C++. Would there be a shitstorm? Quite.

Here are two much more relevant questions:

1. why are people writing Scala, or Clojure?

2. How does the JVM's class-only system make certain Scala constructs non-optimal.
It's one pool of money under the control of the university. What prevents UF from funneling some of the athletic dept's revenue to subsidize the rest of the university?

I realize that the university might be motivated to implement budget cuts in ways that harm voters (in order to make voters angry about it), but it's hardly clear that UF doesn't have $1.7M worth of waste. Nor is it clear that the $2M increase in the athletic budget will result in a > $2M increase in revenue.
Auto Transport Port St Lucie, Florida
Erm, is this real support, or just more cribbing from Mesa?
Physics is still exciting. It's just different areas of physics than earlier.
PIPs have a purpose. Just as there has to be an orderly and codified system for promotion in larger companies (to avoid favoritism, etc.) there generally has to be a codified system for termination due to under-performance. A manager shouldn't just be able to fire one of his team arbitrarily when they haven't broken any rules/policy.

PIPs provide a codified, constructive way to deal with these situations; they make explicit to the employee that they're on the edge of being let go, and they force the manager through a process to demonstrate that the employee is not appropriately qualified or motivated for their job. No manager _wants_ to do a PIP. Frankly, it's usually easier to just pawn an underperformer off on on another team. But the reality is there are appropriate situations to do one where just passing the buck is unacceptable.

I have seen folks get PIP'ed and let go, and I've seen some come back and have a good career with the company. (Obviously the latter is less common.) In some cases where you have a young guy who just isn't stepping up, the PIP process serves as a wake-up call that the manager isn't kidding around.
As another Mac user since "the beginning", I could smell that rotten smell; slightly at first with SL, then thick and rancid with Lion. So my Macs are now back on 10.5 Leopard, and I'm not missing a thing, the lousy performance in particular. Unless ML turns out to be hugely superior, I might be stuck on 10.5 until I get a machine that simply can't run it anymore.

In the meantime, I'm also hedging my bets, and I've gotten very comfortable with Windows 7 for productivity (ok, it's really for gaming) and Ubuntu Linux for web/LAN serving.
Ah yes. The dreaded Chrome renderer never enderer.

I too have experienced the Chrome issue enough that I don't even try to close it normally anymore. Force quit is the only way I exit Chrome. Thankfully, the restore tabs functionality works well.
Tuk.io team moving on to something else. Tuk.io domain name for sale.
Tuk.io was a super simple calender/event app. We will not proceed with the development to this project. We are offering up the domain name for sale.
contact hello@tuk.io

Thanks
Exactly. I never want to work on someone else's terms. I want to be able to travel on a whim. I want to be able to stay up all night and sleep all day. I want to enjoy things that require sunlight more than just two days a week.

I just hope I can buy my freedom while I'm still young.
This has been possible using the Dropbox API for quite a while now. Is the announcement that they added it to the context menu?
Disappearing Net Names Hint at Amazon Data Center Expansion
I like this. I also like the current design. I don't particularly think one is significantly more effective than the other on the surface. I think the redesign is somewhat distracting because there is text all over the place, some big, some small, and there is no logical path for your eye to follow.

My main criticism with the current design is that it should never be that complicated to find pricing information. "What is it going to cost me?" is the first question any prospective customer is going to ask about any product once they realize that it is something they may want. So why require the user to click through to a pricing page and then click a drop-down to see a price list? You may as well put it front-and-center, because hiding the cost from customers is not going to make them forget that there is one.
Kay's assertion seems incredible -- he really has to prove it.

What assertion, exactly? That the personal computing stack can be implemented in 20K LOC? They've already achieved the bulk of it, so that claim no longer qualifies as incredible.

Pooh-poohing this staggering achievement because they didn't reinvent personal computing while they were at it really takes the cake for moving the bar. If someone had gotten all the world's recorded music on a thumb drive in 1970, would you have complained that they didn't write the music themselves?
Must be the graphics card then.
After switching to Rails it's things like this I find quite amazing that people still have issues with.

Rails does so much good stuff "for free", such as when deploying to production it combines all static files (css/js) into one file automatically and also minifies it. That means your 15 external http requests get reduced down to 1 or 2 tiny ones.

I'm not saying Rails and Wordpress perform the same job - they don't, but I do find it amazing that other frameworks / engines don't adopt such obvious best practices like the one example I've given.
Usability and Human–computer interaction example
whoops, my bad! that's pretty major. I'll fix it this afternoon..
DOSBox: Play your old DOS games on Windows 7.
Prices are still twice as high as the items I spot checked from McMaster
Of course it's OK to want to make money. Your desires don't require the approval of other people.
If you are talking about mobile app, Parse has an excellent example for that to integrate in applications.
Both Google and Apple are equally interested in keeping their devices up to date as long as reasonable. Both release one new device each year. I don't see how ios has an advantage here.

update support does not depend on the operating system, but on the service provider that provides the software on your phone. And it looks more like 2:1 right now, as ASUS has been very dedicated so far to update its tablets as soon as possible.
This argument rings hollow at every university where I've encountered it. Universities are educational institutions and athletics are great but if they produce surplus it has an obligation to fund academic activities first and foremost. Phrased for people who react emotionally to this argument: educational institutions ought to increase their brand licensing fees to their for-profit football team subsidiaries.
Been there, done that ...

I was laid off by an AI research company in 2006 at age 55, where I was a programmer - I have been a programmer or project manager since 1976.

My wife and I have been frugal our entire lives and are very aggressive savers. When I was laid off, I persuaded my wife that if I accepted one of several job offers it would just put more money in our retirement accounts and investment real estate. Furthermore, our financial advisor said that we already had enough saved.

I have been researching and developing my own AI software since 2006 at home and without pay - I have published a few workshop/conference papers. I work 8-5, happily self-directed, on stuff that I really enjoy and which - maybe - might eventually make a big difference in our world. I use the latest technology. At age 60 I became an Android programmer and soon I will be setting up cloud infrastructure using Amazon Web Services - and so forth.

Programmers and software developers make good salaries. Here is my advice to follow in my footsteps ...

1. Aggressively save from your family income.

2. Get the advice of a financial advisor. I am too much of a risk taker for my own good and would have wasted my savings gambling in the options and futures market. Better to simply buy and hold index ETF or mutual funds. I average an 11% annual return on investment residential real estate that I manage and about 8% annual return over several decades on a mixed stock / bond diversified mutual fund portfolio.

3. Avoid non-investment debt. I.e. mortgage on investment property is OK, credit card debt is not OK.

4. Marry well! E.g. Be sure your mate is an aggressive saver.

5. Live substantially below your means. The greatest benefit of being comparatively wealthy is simply not having to worry about money. E.g. avoid university debt, do not buy too big a house, do not take expensive vacations, do not have an expensive wedding or throw an expensive bar/bat mitzvah, buy used cars, etc.
What really needs to happen is that Spotlight and Time Machine need to use direct i/o (F_NOCACHE) when they read data from the filesystem, this way they won't pollute the disk cache with their reads and OSX won't swap out a bunch of pages in response.

I think you could probably hack something together that does this with DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES (OSX's LD_PRELOAD) that would would hook the open system call and fcntl F_NOCACHE on the file descriptor before it hands it back to the application.
Yep I'm right there with you, and a lot of those points are exactly why I left to do freelancing and enjoy it for the most part. I've definitely done "working trips", and I do work each day when it's best for me. That being said, the part I'm struggling with right now is how to take a real vacation. I mean like 2-3 weeks off, full disconnected. I have 3 clients I'm working with right now on an ongoing basis, and trying to find 3 weeks where I can break from all 3 (and have anything to work on when I get back) is next to impossible so far. But that's part of the challenge, and I've learned to allot time to figuring out strategies for running the business, both in drumming up work and making it a better experience for myself (hence I only end up billing 20-30 hours a week generally).
This link seems to be inaccessible.
Is it possible to develop an iPhone app without owning one? I have a copy of Mac OSX running virtualized but I never had the courage to learn all this stuff while jumping trough so many hoops and creating something I can't even test myself.
Most "computer-science" graduate jobs are jQuery hacks.

The self driving car would do perfectly well built by a group of physics + maths PhDs who were self-taught programmers. We managed to build self-driving flights to the moon that way.
This stack has no soul.
NimbleTV - watch TV anywhere, on any device
Stop Staring Clothing’s Alicia Estrada Acts as Role Model for Young Latina women
Probably something like that. One problem with the Public folder is that people can easily guess URLs to files you might not want to share with them. I recall http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1/test.png used to show a wireframe for the Dropbox Desktop client.
I think Matz should focus on the language and the (very outer) ecosystem. Ruby is powerful enough for many innovative new libraries, but not necessarily professional enough. I wish a huge company would enforce some convergence here.

* Ruby Core is a black box that produces tarballs. Point releases and even patchlevel releases will happily break code without warning. The only way to test if your code still runs is to run it, all of it. This is complicated by the fact that mod_rails cannot run each project on its own version of Rails.

* The professional Ruby world (=Rails scene) is a different beast. Most projects are open source, but linked to a single name (person or company). There is little incentive to maintain projects cooperatively, because if the project isn't yours, then how do you present it on your github-based resume?

* And then there are the hobbyists (with some overlap of course), many of which honestly cannot understand why some companies are still running 1.8.7 or Rails 2 and don't have their employees live on the edge all the time.

Add all these individually amazing but uncoordinated programmers together..and suddenly every line has to be prefixed by "bundle exec"; .rvmrc will specify your Ruby version, except if you use rbenv; your gemspec contains your dependencies, and so does your Gemfile (with subtle differences); your project info is spread across github, ruby-doc, ruby toolbox, rubygems and your own domain (to advertise yourself)...and often enough, the only documentation to guide you are blog entries, which sometimes omit the timestamp for stylistic reasons.

Ironically, the Rails Core - which gets the most flak by far - provides documented and tested fixes for each recent major and minor version of Rails.
i found node.js is a phenomenal scraping tool. There's also a pretty simple / easy framework for these tasks called node.io (http://node.io/).

Being able to pop up a jsdom, and extract data from the page using jquery is a lot of fun.
mtn- http://byalicelee.com/files/PG_1920x1080.jpg
plain- http://byalicelee.com/files/PG_1920x1080p.jpg
Sorry, fixed now.
Yeah I was just about to say this, I thought it would have been common knowledge (at least for HN folk).
I'd suggest resizing the window.
I'd take the graduate at 100k/yr if he had awesome side projects that show hustle/autodidactism rather than the experienced developer at any pricepoint.
I'm (fairly) uninformed on this, but from an initial read of the post it seems like memory management may have been optimized for SSD-equipped systems, at the expense of hard disk performance?

Whether this is unintentional, part of a calculated tradeoff, or a cynical business/tactical decision is another thing.
When time machine starts on my MBA ( to an external hd ) it almost freezes the Mac. Is this related?
Wasn't this what helped SMS take off originally in Europe, kids text other kids to ask them out?

Breaking up over SMS seems chicken to me; I am not especially good at conflict, but I always thought I owed it to the other party to explain myself face to face. Asking out, why not? Three hours of of somebody's evening is no huge commitment.
India leads world in junk emails
Wow man, you wrote a lot :)
I saw just the example looks nice.. but it seems I have to read the post after all..
I can't believe this is actually advice, either - that's what Windows users used to say in the 90s.

At least Windows, having gone through this particular growing pain, is nowadays fairly painless to reinstall. Did OSX ever improve that aspect of their product?
Hitchhiker’s Guide to Metaprogramming: Class/Module Hooks
My first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000, circa 1983.

It had the add-on memory module (16kB I think). It might have even had a tape drive later on, if memory serves. It plugged into my TV.

I had some book, looked like a comic book. Had some simple programs in them. I typed them out on the god-awful keyboard, but had fun playing them. It was in no way a good computer, but I'm glad my dad bought it for me, as I work in computers now.
Microsoft’s Top Lawyer: We Never Wanted All of AOL’s Patents
"I strongly feel that this depends on whether the 40 year old likes programming for its own sake, or they feel that it's just part of a 'clock in' and 'clock out' job. It's also very difficult for many programmers that I've known over the years to step outside of the language that they started with, and start learning and heavily using something new."

I'm not so sure.

At one of my previous jobs I worked with a lot of people in their 50s and 60s who were used to assembly language, Jovial (it was an Air Force contract), and Fortran. They couldn't wait to transition to newer stuff because the old languages were so difficult.

On the other hand they were all really smart, so maybe you're right.
Yet it still swaps to disk ALL THE TIME and a new Terminal.app window can take up to 5 seconds to open.

That's not swapping. That delay is /usr/bin/login searching the system logs so that it can display the date and time of your last login.

Create a .hushlogin file in your home directory to prevent that.
I feel a little uncomfortable seeing that quote with my name under it. The ideas are Bronnie Ware's; I just transformed them from mistakes to the corresponding commands.

Also, I didn't mean to imply those are the five most important things in life or anything like that. I just wanted to avoid the specific mistakes she described.
Heh, we weren't thinking about the saying "5 by 5" as much as wanting to capture that we were giving 5 startups 5 minutes (hence the 5 in 5).
I know it has nothing to do with YCombinator but I love seeing articles like this.
Enable Your To-Do List With Preemptive Multitasking
Mozilla Popcorn : Link social media, news feeds, visualizations to moving images
I was in a similar place two years ago.

Everyone around me totally out classed and outsmarted me. I made friends with a guy who was freelancing on the side for a local company. I offered to help him in exchange for some tips and help. He said yes. I learned a bunch of front end stuff, and took on some freelance work of my own. One of my projects impressed a local company I met at an event and that turned into a full time job doing Android Development. I got called by one of my 4.0 classmates just last week asking if I could help them find an internship. It's funny how these things works.

Hang in there man, keep your head down and don't be afraid to ask for help. Its a hell of a lot more attainable than you think.
I've been using links with Dropbox from the beginning, and I use it regularly. I guess the functionality is enhanced now (and no, I won't read the TechCrunch article).
I'm asking this because I'd actually would like to know how, but how do you say things that are on your mind and still cultivate friendship.
It is wonderful to hear of Phil's new venture. A unified solution for privacy on all these platforms is the need of the hour. +1000
Is this meant to be the home page, or a landing page for geting sign-ups?
What were you trying to do, exactly? I won't jump up on the barricades to defend the honor of the Android SDK, but ListView is a tool in my belt that I use to get real work done. It's certainly not perfect, but sometimes I miss it when I'm working with UITableView over in iOS land. Cursor management is pretty gross, but ListView itself is usually fine.

I have worked with some genius older developers. If I could point to a flaw in myself as I've grown older, though, it is that I fail to integrate and use working code in the larger ecosystem as quickly as my younger colleagues. More often than not, that shows up as blaming the tool or library because I failed to understand how it works, then falling back on something I already know well. Even if that means rewriting something unnecessarily.

Finally, look - as imperfect as software continues to be, you can't tell me that there weren't awful libraries in common usage ten or fifteen years ago. That doesn't pass the laugh test. You may only remember the good ones, but that's the luxury of memory.
Instead of just working out a licensing deal on Yahoo's 10 claimed infringing patents, Facebook spends $550 million to buy 650 aol/m$ patents. I bet FB's board was involved with this decision.
I like the colors
OpenStack Swift eventual consistency analysis & bottlenecks
That is correct. I just saw it and thought it looked interesting.
I removed mine a few years ago and swapped in a extra SSD using http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/
a huge amount of developer effort tends to be expended in mapping data between different data structures as required by different algorithms or API's

This is indeed one of the biggest sources of complexity. A programmer I used to work with called it "meat grinding".
My suspicion is that the "young" developers they speak of (not all of them, obviously) are faster in the same way not writing tests is "faster". You're taking on a lot of debt that you'll have to pay off sooner or later. For most startups, the bad technical decisions younger developers will make won't bite them in the ass until much later - maybe never if they go out of business for not finding product/market fit - and so getting somewhere, anywhere as quickly as possible is perhaps better than having expertise at writing "great" software.

Also, Moore's law helps folks ignorant of Big-O, algorithm design, memory management, indexing, etc. push off needing to know that knowledge until much later - if ever. When you can spin up thousands of Amazon servers for pennies it really "doesn't matter" (to biz people) if you improve your search algorithm memory footprint (or performance) by 100%.

I think it's possible to have both - older developers that know when to take on debt and how to responsibly manage it can be just as fast as the cowboy younger kids, but that's even harder to find.
It's equivalent to "while" and wholly correct, only more popular in the United Kingdom.
Let's leave the Steve Jobs PR bullshit out of this. When it comes to Web Standards, Adobe was on the bandwagon before Apple even knew such a thing existed. For example, before any browser had support for SVG, Adobe Illustrator could export SVGs, and Adobe wrote and distributed for free a plugin that made SVG available in all the major browsers (IE, Mozilla, Opera and Safari). After it acquired Macromedia, Adobe finished and made open source the first VM with a JIT for ECMA script and donated it to Mozilla, it also licensed Opera's HTML/CSS rendering engine (by far the most standards compliant at the time, KHTML/WebKit was not around) and put it into Dreamweaver. Most of Adobe's products use JavaScript as the default scripting engine since a long long time ago (close to a decade by now), and it goes on, and on. Yet in the Steve Jobs distortion field, it's actually good ol' Apple who are twisting Adobe's hand to join the Web Standards movement. Hilarious, especially since it's the same Apple who had for years an obsolete, nonconforming, slow browser that was dead last in performance and implementation of Web Standards, so much so that Zeldman, in his "Designing with Web Standards" recommends IE 5 for Mac over Safari. Imagine that, for years (until Apple forked KHTML and KJS from KDE), the best browser running on Macs was made by Microsoft.
As a side note, my wife thanked me for not naming it "5by5", in reference to it's use as the supremely annoying catch-phrase of "Faith" on Buffy, played by Eliza Dushku.

"5 by 5 B."
Interview with Michael Graves About the Design of Wheelchairs