skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You mean people shouldn't be surprised when their livelihood disappears after building a business out of shady marketing techniques?
The same applies to almost any large country. Outsiders tend to think that every country has a single culture, single language, etc. (I am from Sweden so for us that assumption is basically true.)

Examples where it is not true: Russia, India, China, Germany, Spain, Italy.
Seems only fair.
I thought Ruby and Python were in the Perl-class of programming languages.
I think you submitted the wrong link, Kavu.
They are just a bunch of misinformed people who think goggle destroyed their legitimate business when it actually is neither business nor legitimate.

I am an Indian and i know a few people who claim to be "SEO Expert" and moved to Delhi for "a high paying job". This makes no sense. They are outright scammers and are mad that Google degraded poor SEO work? They call themselves "programmers" but all they really do is exactly what article states, poor SEO. I feel ashamed, we are better than this. There is someone in article who says he taught his 6yo to "link build", that is ridiculous.

SEO is not art, if anything it is easy to over-do SEO which is exactly what is happening here. They take it way too seriously.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/girirajnet/3621281339/in/photos... ==> looks like this image is from 2009
Ruby has multiple implementations, but none of them can deviate too far because of Rails. It's like the old test of IBM PC compatible computers, can it run Flight Simulator / Lotus 1-2-3.
A good developer has a natural, almost visceral aversion to complexity
This really just seems like a matter of definition. Rather than viewing LISP dialects as fragmented forms of one original language, we can view Common Lisp, Racket, and Clojure---the three main forms of LISP seen in "the real world"---as three separate languages that, like Python and Ruby, haven't fragmented. We can view the fact that all three use the LISP model of computation simply as a design choice and not a sign of "offshootness", in the same way that we don't say that Python and Ruby are the results of ALGOL's fragmentation.
> That shows a very inefficient use of USA's wealth and a very poor healthcare policy.

The greatest factor in longevity is genetics, not wealth expenditure. Ever consider that the average genetic makeup of someone in Japan may be quite different from the average in the US?

Now, compare those of Japanese ancestry living in the US with those in Japan and I might be interested in your theories.
This article, with its black text on dark grey background, is incredibly hard for me to read. It's almost like the author didn't want it to be read.
...it seems to me all programming languages, including Lisp implementations like CL and Scheme, are mere instantiations of Lisp...

There's an element of truth in that, but only in the same sense that all Turing complete programming languages are equivalent or that many programming languages are ultimately instantiations of a register machine, a memory store, and a program counter. The interesting thing in most cases is what you build on top of that foundation.

With Lisps, the value is in the uniformity. That makes it very easy to extend the basic functionality you get out of the box in a way that fits in, using macros and so on.

With various other languages, the value is in the pre-built tools that rest on top of some underlying abstract syntax tree. That covers a vast range of functionality these days: more expressive type systems, a wider range of built-in data structures, actor-based concurrency, low-level memory and port access, and numerous other practically useful language features. Hopefully any given language offers a combination of features that work well together and have natural supporting syntax and semantics. That in turn gives each language its own flavour and means each language works better for some types of software than others, even if ultimately it's usually just syntactic sugar for a relatively simple execution model and an AST.
Yes, i didn't see that before. The picture is definitely fake. The older people in the picture are not they type that are computer savvy, let alone make a living off of it. The domain looks fishy too. Looks like they wrote it to make a fuss for their purpose.
Think You Deserve To Be Called a CEO?
So, it's of the same order of difficulty as Firefox? Is this surprising?
If they used a telephoto lens then the shaking would be much more noticeable. Also the motion hints at someone actually attempting to correct for the movements, but because it's zoomed so far in every movement to counteract the shaking is greatly magnified.
Galaxy S3 Being Compared To Almost Every Other Phone
I think we did get someone solving it that way once, and modulo Unicode, it's arguably a reasonable solution. But there are other one-line solutions that are more transparent.

The Stanford CS Ph.D. candidate whose solution included a Perl function for converting decimal numbers of up to three digits to binary was rejected.
The return of heritage fruits and vegetables
I think you meant to link to http://whitequark.org/blog/2012/05/06/reaching-the-limits-of...
Let's look at the PHP version:

Hello World!

One line. I didn't have to worry about Linux/Windows, knowing HTTP headers or the fact that I need two CRLFs after the last header[1]. I just wanted a page that says "Hello World!" and that's what I got.

Don't get me wrong, I would never choose to write a web app in PHP over python. But it is brain dead simple to go from nothing to something in a few keystrokes. Which is precisely what people just learning to write web apps want (right or wrong).

[1] I can't remember how long it took me to figure out that I needed the second CRLF after the "Content-Type: text/html" when I was learning perl (or even the fact that I needed to specify the Content-Type in the first place).
It means I don't have Facebook cookies set when I visit other web sites with Like buttons, so although Facebook can see that the same browser configuration at the same IP address is visiting those sites, they have less certainty that it's really me.
Working with encoding is not that bad in for example Ruby 1.9. What makes them horrible to work with are the bad design decisions in Python, especially Python 2.
New jQuery and CSS3 Tutorials
Frankly, except for the people developing the readers, the RSS/Atom distinction is completely irrelevant. RSS is used as a simplification for RSS/Atom.

I am actually developing a reader, so I know the differences. They're mostly minor, and I have to support both formats anyway, so I abstract most of them away.
Realtime "Likes" displayed on retailer's clothing hangers
Re: Benevolent Dictators

In the case of Python, there are such dictators. With Ruby, it was less the dictator and more the dictates of a poorly defined language specification. "The spec is this running C code" is thought by many to be a smell. (Also said for VP8.) In the case of Ruby, multiple groups of several people each worked for long stretches of time (half a year or more) to come up with parsers and non MRI specifications for Ruby syntax.

Conversely, one can implement Lisp or Smalltalk syntax quite quickly, which means the barrier to fragmentation is pretty small. Python is still fairly small. I think that there would be more fragmentation without its benevolent dictator.
Might it more be that "the answer [the author believes] is no" which is only unfortunate if you believe the author in this case to be smarter or know something secret about Jeff Bezos. Since Jeff was ahead of the curve with the online book company and then again ahead of the curve with the internet architecture (AWS,EC2 etc) thing I'd say he's pretty bright and just because some semi technical author can't figure it out doesn't mean that the authors conclusion is correct.
It is a bit similar in concept to Gentoo but adds in a configuration management (CM) part. The current iteration doesn't take full advantage of the CM capabilities but we're working on it.

As far as building packages as compared to installed the distribution binaries... I've run into issues where the binary package wasn't compatible with libraries and apps that I had to install outside of apt-get or yum. For instance setting up reasonably modern Rails configuration with all the gems I needed on a Ubuntu 10.04 server.

I've also done builds and software configuration management for a living so the whole process is more like second nature at this point.

What you do want to avoid is a constant cycle of having to upgrade and build existing and working environments just to have the latest versions. At that point you do need to step back and evaluate if it's really necessary (security, fix, etc.).
It's like the eccentric love child of Smalltalk and Perl. (I mean that in a good way, having been paid for work in both.)
I'm the founder of Pathwrangler and we just launched our web app which solves this exact problem. You can build, collaborate and memorialize your trips in a central place. No more spreadsheets, docs, pdfs, or non travel specific project management software.

We have people using it for everything from Everest expeditions to weekend camping trips, backpacking around Europe and diving in the red sea. Check us out at pathwrangler.com or email at info@pathwrangler.com for more info.
I'm upvoting this because I believe in the credibility and intelligence of the HN folks. Getting trapped by fake posts like this is the best way to detect fake posts in the future.

Eye openers like chokma do a good job on this, but without people like him, how would your healthy mind tell you that this is fake? Exactly.

I think you see the irony in progga's post..
I doubt watches will ever disappear. First of all, they're effectively the only piece of "jewellery" that men can legitimately wear in many situations. And, secondly, they tend to be a lot more efficient for knowing the time than a mobile, as you don't have to pull it out of your pocket and then (often) push a button to turn the screen on (not to mention problems with sunlight).
They have billboards up and down 101 advertising some -Ville game all the time. I think the average person around here will know.
I can't comment on switching roles within Google, but since you mentioned you're interviewing with Amazon, make sure you're aware of what they expect of you before you join -- like working unpaid overtime (they don't pay their devs for going oncall.) Also be aware of some other things that Steve Yegge posted in his rant.
I think it's a matter of ontology. The category "ML" is pretty fragmented, but the categories "Haskell," "F#," and "OCaml" are all pretty non-fragmented. Ditto for "Lisp" vs Clojure, Scheme, Common Lisp[1].

I don't think Ruby should be compared to ML. I think Ruby should be comared to OCaml. ML, if it gets compared against anything, should be compared against the category that includes Python, Ruby, Perl, and JavaScript. This category is about as fragmented as Lisp.

The problem with this new category is it doesn't have a simple, clear definition. Lisp is pretty much defined by S-expressions, and MLs by their type systems. This new family might be defined by their common approach to object systems (i.e. objects as dicts), although that's really more representative than fundamental.

[1] I'm under the vague impression that Common Lisp and SML are somewhat more fragmented than other members. I wonder if this correlates to their being the "Common"/"Standard" dialects.
Replying to Jiggy, but can't directly reply since it's dead:

No, a simple Rails app is not very coupled to Heroku.

The deployment process is simpler and pretty unique to Heroku, but it's usually pretty easy to move away from Heroku or deploy in parallel to another location. I actually deploy one app to Heroku and I have an offsite backup process that deploys the same codebase to a NGINX/Passenger setup and clones the production Heroku data to that instance.

Your mileage will vary, of course. If you start using a bunch of Heroku plugins, you'll find it's harder to maintain an easy dual-deploy setup.
This, and the number of games I had going on at one time were the main reasons for me uninstalling it. The game was fun, up until I had 30 games going on at once.
Completely agreed, standard doc is goto reference, they miss variety of examples and use cases.
I've been using RSS for ~10 years and I still don't know why I would choose Atom over RSS or RSS 2.0 or whatever.
So what if you post not one "LOL" but thousands or millions of "LOL"s? Furthermore, what if the whole purpose of you posting millions of "LOL"s was to defeat spam filters. Would it be spam then?
Upvoted for content but please read this: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/621/01/
This reminded me of my high school physics professor who always answered with a "maybe" whenever he felt the student had more insight into something than he did. It looks simplistic, but it was very encouraging as a response, even when we students reached a halt most of the time.
Thanks for the insight re: PhoneGap and native interfaces. Does the same apply to Appcelerator (or similar)? It compiles to native, but does the interface feel native or HTMLy? At some point I want to play around some, but that requires buying a mac and an iThing, neither of which I have yet.

Re: system requirements - that sucks that I really need to have (moderately) up to date hardware to do iOS development. On a PC I'd probably be fine with a 2004 Dell laptop with a fresh install of Windows. I guess this is my first "welcome" to the walled garden.
Sacrebleu!!!
Yes. That should be. I've removed that. Thank you.
Eli Manning Shows How Text Messaging Makes You Look Stupid [video]
Indeed, transactions should be as short as possible but no shorter. If your code crashing within a set of queries would leave the code in an inconsistent state you should probably wrap them in a transaction, but if not you should not put them in the same transaction.
I am indeed a teacher, as I said, and I'll add that the particular aspect of my post that is not explicitly addressed in Russell's commandments is the notion of students being smarter than the teacher. It's a useful lens through which you can look at the problem.
Firstly, reading the 10 Commandments, I didnt feel an instant connection to Teachers, rather a loose set of values for all. So I came back to Hackernews to read the comments, thanks to Michiel throwing the titbit of information about his rejection from New York, I went on to discover a fascinating individual, via wikipedia lead me down the rabbit hole of self-learning of a few other interesting folks who were closely or loosely linked to Bertrand. All this whilst sat on a boat, via 3G. (The world we live in is amazing!)

Take a moment to read his wiki entry and then ponder quietly to yourself, what sort of activities, Bertrand Russell would have championed today.
Colleges experimenting with student ID cards that double as prepaid debit cards
I am dubious of this assertion. The original 1960 paper "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine" introduces S-expressions and M-expressions as explicit entities (not as some abstract syntax, but as a literal syntax that people were able to write down). Now, M-expressions never really got used because everyone just used S-expressions, since they were simpler.

Do you have some citation about how he left implementation of syntax as an exercise? I'd be interested to see that.
Ed.ted.com - Lessons Worth Sharing
A bit early to declare something a failure no? If I had declared some of the App Store stuff I've done to have failed the same day they went up for sale purely based on watching analytics data, I would have totally missed the media coverage, chart rankings and word of mouth exposure (not to mention the loads of "thank you" emails from users) that occurred 1,2,3+ weeks later.

In any case from what I can tell this is exclusive to Amazon right? I'm guessing they have an API for this sort of thing or a way for you to scrape specific products.

Can Amazon notify users when prices drop? What makes this system you've setup unique? Pitch me, because it's not over yet :)
Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life
Jeff Bezos is a brilliant mind and I'm thankful for all of his innovations within the tech community, but what interests me most is his 10,000 year clock project currently under development in a Nevada/Texas mountaintop.

http://longnow.org/clock/

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/06/10000-year-clock/all/...
A half-working cached copy http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&safe=...
San Franciscans hope startup approach can ease neighborhood’s problems
A great client is Shaun Inman's Fever[1]. It scales really well; the more feeds you add to it, the more tailored it becomes to your interests. It's not free but it's easily the best aggregator I've seen.

[1] http://feedafever.com/
I'm sorry :/
Will keep this open while writing...
Just a note, it's NaCl, spelled NACL, as in the molecule "sodium chloride" (and the abbreviation of the name "Native Client").
> I've no complaint with this, but it leads to the mistaken impression that great applications are written in dynamic languages

Right, except for Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Wikipedia (yes, Facebook has a different PHP runtime which uses gcc to get a performance boost, this is an irrelevant implementation detail).
The author misses one big implication of Amazon Prime: it's an invitation to start routing thousands of dollars in annual spending through Amazon.

I'm in Canada. If prime were available here, I would rarely go into a store except for groceries. Most other things I need I would just get shipped to me, much easier that way.

Not everyone in the US has figured out that free delivery of supplies is usually easier than driving to the store. But once amazon gets someone inside their ecosystem, it will be much easier to convince them to route more
and more purchases through amazon.

Given the broad range of amazon's offerings, it's a huge mistake to treat them as a book company, or an e-reader company.
So are there literally security researchers that go and poke around of every release of everything major in the software industry to find things like this?
Note: only applies to people using the old "FileVault" on Lion, not the new "FileVault2" (the one with full-disk encryption).
I'd rather run tested software that someone else has compiled then build it myself just to get a slightly newer version. Older versions are generally safer to run as well since by virtue of their age they've been more tested with more bugs removed and security holes plugged.
I don't like the wired approach. It reminds me of our first VCR as a kid that had a wired remote. lol

I'm sure others are doing it too but I think that Asus has it right with the Transformer line. You have a tablet that is self contained. But you can easily attach the keyboard which then turns it into a laptop. The keyboard has some additional I/O and another battery. I wonder if it would be possible to take that one step further and have additional cpu/gpu power in the keyboard so that as a laptop it is even more powerful.
Go on, let's hear about how devoted Apple is to security again.
> if (!chrome) redirect_to_the_pentium_ii_in_the_basement();

I believe that code might go something more like

> if (!SPDY-capable) redirect_to_regular_somewhat_overloaded_http_load_balancers_without_resetting_client_ttl_value();
No doubt, but doing nothing while mobs are already ruling the country is not much of an option either.
I'm also of the opinion that these questions in general offer far more value (and are far more interesting to read) than the hundreds of "how do I iterate MySQL results/display them on my page/use a PHP function in javascript" that get posted every day.

I'm really struggling to see what benefit there is to deleting these things.
Yes, I know. But the viewer won't know that, because they don't know where the motion was before it was stabilised.
Look - your startup hasn't failed. First of all, it's not a startup, it's just a project you've been working on. You haven't spent savings or taken debt or investment to do this. It sounds like you are maybe still in school.

Second, you put it on HN and on person signed up. This doesn't mean you failed. It is merely the first in a very long line of setbacks that every startup, both great ones and not so great ones face along the way. Figure out why no one was interested in this - talk to potential customers, tweak the product/landing page/distribution channel and tr again.

I hope this doesn't come across as harsh because projects become our babies and it hurts when no one else cares, but hopefully you can take a step back and realize there's a lot you can do to remedy the situation.
For those who who are curious, he's also a famous logician, mathematician and pacifist in addition to being a philosopher [1].

My first introduction to mathematical logic, set theory and axiomatics [2] was thru his work because he made everything so accessible as a writer and a thinker. What a remarkable mind.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell
[2] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russell-paradox/
You should give it more than a day before calling it a failure.
This is a horrifically dumb article. If you care about the first day, you didn't launch a startup, you launched a project. Submitting an article to Hacker News isn't a launch strategy, it's showing off a cute project you did.

A startup is something you fully commit to until you're convinced you tried every reasonable permutation in a scalable market opportunity.

The average startup takes 7 years to get to liquidity. That's 2,520 days. You got one day in before throwing in the towel.
The odds are that Mr. Bezos knows exactly what he's doing. People asked questions like this when Amazon was transitioning from selling books to selling everything. Lots of people at the time thought it was crazy. Now it's recognized as a brilliant move.

Ask yourself, how many other things has Amazon done that seemed a bit out there, but turned out to be brilliant moves? How about competing with Apple with a tablet computer? Also ask yourself, how do these crazy or out-there seeming things fit with an overall vision in retrospect? I think the answer is: amazingly well.

My best guess is that Jeff Bezos has a roadmap for the next 5 years and vaguer plans for the next 10 or 15. (I happen to know that Intel had a roadmap out to 15 years in the late 90's, so it's not unheard of in tech to plan on this timescale. Probably a good thing to note for serious investors in the stock market.)

EDIT: I've said it before on HN -- Bezos is a player of the game at Steve Job's level. He's just not getting up on the really big stage and so avoids becoming a target of celebrity attention.
While I agree that this is a security hole and it should be fixed, a headline like that is completely misleading and a scare tactic to drive eyeballs to the article. This flaw only would affect a very small subset of users, but the headline makes it sound like everyone just had their passwords compromised
Yes, they are called "hackers" .. Especially the black hat kind.
Yes ban accounts that are clearly abusing comments with thousands or millions of "LOL".

No need to detect on individual comments if something is deemed "appropriate" or not.
So you say Google is using a battery of hidden markov chains with classical or slightly novel algorithms?

I could believe that, given the quality of the Google Predict results. Plus Google buying http://recordedfuture.com undermines that their Prediction algo's aren't top notch (mildly expressed).
Twitter was Ruby but moved to Java.
Amazing, I'd never thought of a hanger as a display device - much less a haptic one. Other data sources can be added for the consumer, but the data gathered by the retail store could provide some amazing insights.