skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For what it's worth, Perl 6 allows dashes in identifiers, and many of us working with the language have gleefully taken to using them instead of underscores. I can't tell you why it makes a difference, but somehow underscores now feel clumsy/ugly to me, despite two decades of happily using them in my C++ code.
Please don't. As a current Flash/HTML5 developer - just let it die. I don't say that with hate towards the platform - so I'm not pandering to that crowd. Honestly, the pro-Adobe, anti-Adobe crowds are both nuts and introspective to a fault.

I just want one platform that we can all count on. Flash had its day. Let's not fight about who killed it, or how amazingly insightful Steve Jobs is for lighting the first match. Let's all just collectively get over it and utilize the platform that works everywhere (even TVs). Think about how much better developers we can all be if we can concentrate our efforts into a technology that is widely supported & scales well.
I'm generally a fan of RedHat, but not having details on the most important point of OpenShift that will decide whether it will fail or succeed in the market (i.e. the price) is a scummy play - that I only expected from enterprises. I hope these "enterprise marketing" tactics aren't a trend for RedHat.
I find the number of negative comments when startups sell (particularly to big companies like Facebook) interesting. It seems a lot of people start tech companies with the goal of 'changing the world'. When they see other startups sell they see them as sell-outs. A lot of people seem to forget - this is business. When you have investors the goal is to make money. If the best chance at doing that is to sell then that is what you should do.

I don't think the rumours that Google tried to buy Digg years ago were ever confirmed. But if Digg did sell they probably would have seen this sort of backlash. They didn't sell and now are gradually fading away - and I've seen them mocked for not selling when they had the chance.

I think it reflects badly on the tech community when they can't celebrate an innovative company being bought by another innovative company.
Suskunlar 11. Bölüm Özeti ve Fragmanı
Interesting that Pingdom would choose to complain about a lack of DNS servers in these regions when they themselves do not offer Pingdom probes in any of these regions less represented by DNS roots

If I knew of a similar offering with more global reach I would switch in an instant.
I agree with the thrill of being able to impact millions of people in some substantial way. For some people, that's through code; for others, the medium is paint, magazine articles, blog posts, books, posters, music, ...
Well, computers can already create accurate and convincing Daily Mail headlines: http://www.qwghlm.co.uk/toys/dailymail/
5 Steps for Creating a Pre-Launch Ambassador Program
Shouldn't MS's numbers be base lined against Apple's?

Clearly the industry has had that kind of growth in it, Apple did it. While MS is printing money like no one's business, the growth seems to have stopped where as they are a very rich company, a very talented company, with tons of resources, why haven't they grown?

It's hard to say Ballmer is bad, the numbers to speak for themselves. At the same time, if you maybe spun Xbox out and let it run as a small nimble company, maybe it'd be dominating, not carving off a third. Same with windows mobile and maybe even bing. There does seem to be some level of market share they can win with incredible expense (what they spend to win that market share has to be way more than the competition) and then the machinery of MS sort of bogs it down and it's a far smaller number than "Windows Everywhere" would have you believe they are capable of, it's not a leader in the market. You have to wonder about the future, I don't think they're in trouble but the tides can turn rapidly. What's the end game for Windows 8 tablet? 15% market share? 10%? What's acceptable? Moreover, it just seems like bad news is coming out about it and it's going up against iPad. Short of the DoJ leveling some sort of charges on Apple, I don't see windows8 tablets getting out of the blocks, let alone "Windows Everywhere." And then the flip side, what would they have Apple do? Allow IE on iPad? Is that going to change any thing?
Could they use NaCl as the native platform for developing Android apps?
I'm a Ruby developer who never uses Rails, and I think this is a major problem. It makes it hard for me to embrace "Ruby developer" as a career path because that means I'll be typecast as a Rails dev, and I don't want to use Rails.
Thanks for making this as accessible as you are! I would love to see more practical pieces on TDD, especially for the web.

How will you be sharing the source code? I would love to see TDD happen with a test committed followed by a commit to pass the test, etc. to get a sense of the full process or write my own passing code for each test and compare against another implementation.
I really, really doubt the folks at Square are sitting around aspiring to being bought and shut down by Facebook.
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I'm surprised the CEO of Groupon wasn't on the list.
Startups with money to burn could buy one of those remote robots for telepresence :) like the Anybots QB

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robot...

or the texai

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-softwar...

Maybe one day this will become commonplace (when they become an order of magnitude cheaper, I suspect). Meanwhile, Skype is a good idea.
This author makes the point that general problem solving and programming are, in fact, the same thing, and you can't have one without the other.[1] I call foul on this: I bet programmers think in terms of loops, but because that's how they think. There are other ways to solve problems as well.

And many of the problems the author outlines really aren't problems. My Android app crashes, or my form doesn't submit. Yes, there's code underlying those problems, but SO WHAT. Why should a layman care about memory management?

Anyway, I find this a supremely short-sighted argument. But I think the crux of this whole series of discussions is around one question: Where on the spectrum of "things everyone should know" does "programming" fall?

We all agree that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of things about programming on that list. Reading, arithmetic, critical thinking, civil rights, personal finance, health, history, etc. And in a world where many people are illiterate, in debt, oppressed, and so forth, shouldn't we focus on those problems first?

[1] "If you don't know how to program, you filter out all parts of the world that involve programming. You miss the loops and divide-and-conquers of everyday life."
> If you don't know how to program, you filter out all parts of the world that involve programming. You miss the loops and divide-and-conquers of everyday life.

decomposing large problems into smaller ones is math. we all took 10 years of math in high school and college.

a broad education is good. coding, in particular, may or may not be relevant, but certainly more and more schools include a year or two of programming in high school or college. that's probably plenty. no need to get all worked up about this.
Sorry, but back at the university, I gave several semesters of tutorials in programming for beginners.

It's not that people are 'dumb' or 'smart'. It's just that some people have an easier time with some topics than others. I have seen people who really struggeled with the basic concepts after three courses (not my courses ;)). Others understood it far quicker and with much less work.

I'm not saying that these people were dumb. They usually excelled in other areas, just like I am seriously unable to keep a plant alive for more than a few months (believe me, I tried!).

As I said, to some people some topics are an exercise in frustration. It's not that hey can't learn it. It would just be really painful and boring to them.
Embracing Your Desire Path
Ask HN:  What is the difference between TNW plagiarism, and the other blogs
They all do the same thing - someone writes an interesting article and one of the popular blogs comes along, compresses all the important parts into a summary, tucks the attribution out of the way where it won't leak much traffic, and then hits the social news sites.

AOL famously pioneered this model and today most major tech blogs we see on HN have adopted it at least partially.

Yesterday TNW got called out for doing it, their CEO mentioned that it was 'normal' and he's pretty much right ... plagiarism is normal for modern blogging, unless somehow it's different when Engadget, TheVerge, Gizmodo, CNet, TorrentFreak, everyone related to Apple rumors etc do it.

What is the difference between The Verge rewriting FastCompany's article [1] and the TNW [2] event?

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/15/3021574/google-plus-study-weak-public-activity-engagement

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972651
I think programming is like an art where you have to do it to actually understand the creativity and effort that goes into creating something. In that sense, learning to program is really valuable because you start appreciating your computer, the Internet, software, and Web apps you use a whole lot more because you have a deeper understanding of how things work.
This is really bad PR for Microsoft, they should offer a free upgrade for everyone buys a new PC with Windows 7 with 2-3 months in advance of launching Windows 8.
Thanks for posting the entire clause. Let me just comment as a Red Hat/OpenShift employee with some insight into the business intent behind the legal language.

As you can see from the complete clause that includes "...for the purpose of providing the Preview Services", the license to your content that you grant to Red Hat is really to allow Red Hat to provide the Service. Also the last sentence i.e. "Except as set forth in this Section, Red Hat obtains no rights in Content under this Agreement." should make it clear that there is no other interest in the users content.
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I actually like Atwood's example program:

10 PRINT "I AM THE MAYOR"

20 GOTO 10

If everybody on the planet could write and understand that program, the average level understanding of computer science on the planet would have increased exponentially.
Jingle (the protocol behind Google Talk) works great for 1:1 calls. I'm experimenting with Mumble for group voip, though I often fall back to Skype just because everyone already has it.

But for actual coding I've found http://pair.io (using tmux) to work fantastically; I can't wait for them to come out of private alpha.
What's the big deal with selling your business? If they don't see a lot of growth in their future then the best way to make a profit and pay back the investors is to sell. If you start a company with the goal of never selling to a larger company it would be much harder to get investment and you have a much greater chance of failing.
They were programs in every sense of the word. Back then it was often QuickBasic or x86 assembly language, nowadays they tend to be either Lua or some Lisp (usually Scheme). I actually find the process helpful, because when it's not as convenient to just run the program to see if it works, I find that I reason about the programs more deeply. YMMV, of course.
One aspect of gabe's otherwise excellent post that went unmentioned is the cultural issue associated with an acquisition of this sort.

For the acquired company to make a difference, it is going to need to be put in control of a large number of business processes. And for it to produce productivity gains, it will likely automate away many of the existing jobs at the acquiring company. Finally, if the acquired company is in fact a failing startup (as gabe postulates), it won't have a large team, or much revenue, or have proven itself against the acquirer in the marketplace.

These things will combine to produce intense and arguably justified political resistance at the acquiring company. The old guard there will see a bunch of young whippersnappers, who just became millionaires, without any revenue, who are coming in and expecting to tell them what to do when they are the ones who've been producing profit for this company for 20 odd years.

In this view, the only way this works is if it's a Mint/Intuit-type deal, where Mint crushed Intuit's online offering to such an extent that it gained respect within Intuit.
Such rules ("all operators must be space-hugged") are special cases, and I think raganwald's point is that such special cases make at-a-glance mental parsing more difficult. Lexing and parsing in Lisp is much more straightforward than in, say, Python. Hence, mental lexing and parsing has fewer barriers. This is a direct result of using s-expressions, which implies no in-fix operators.
How could I forget Ada Lovelace? Facepalm moment. Thanks.
EDIT: Python is my favorite language. But I wish a LOT more very lazy people or people who can't apply algorithms to solve their own problems (and hopefully in all the same domains that I work in) used it, discussed and asked questions, etc.

It is in this vein that I write...

"Python is popular enough to have a critical mass of users" - on this point unfortunately I have to disagree.

Often the way I write a script is to put in a little extra effort up-front: I do three or four Google searches with the hard part of the task + Python, Perl, PHP, etc -- just to see if someone has already done this for me. I must say that if it's something hard and remotely web-related, the Python part is usually not even worth trying. Either I can do it off of the top of my head, or some fool is asking how to do this thing they can do in PHP in Python and, well, not really getting an answer. (It's not that it's wrong to code things up the long way, it's just that, like I said, it's not even worth doing the Google search).

In this sense there is not a 'critical mass' of users. Let me give you a simple example. Say you want to do fancy appointment-matching like people saying "next friday"...you want to try to pick up on that and offer to set an appointment. So, Google "appointment regular expression next friday php" "apppointment regular expression next friday python" "appointment regular expression next friday perl". You can go ahead and do it, I don't even have to check. If you don't find anything, play around for less than 15 seconds with alternate search terms (more general, more specific, or just different.)

I did the above search just now, and in my case I went off on this tangent and within a couple of minutes had an answer that was satisfactory for me.

I would say, well, there are simply lots of fast scripts that you KNOW can take you 2-3 days of head-scratching to get right OR that the community already has bumped their heads against. Which do you do? If you're NASA, of course you go through scratching your head and getting the RIGHT answer. If you're trying to get a demo out the door, then you go for the low-hanging fruit, with as much leaning on the community as possible. Of course, if its creation, trajectory calculations, whatever, involve a scripting language in any way, would I want a rocket to use Python over PHP. But if I need a script that creates a GIF file of a rocket blasting off off-screen, based on a static image of the rocket that I have? (Forget whether the gif is the correct solution, I just want to see what it looks like, maybe as part of investigating lots of possible ways to do this). Well, then I would do a couple of minutes of Googling first... (As above, though I didn't try this one). Usually, I'm sorry to say, Python doesn't win.

If this get smore downvotes I'll try the Python search on creating a gif file programmatically.
>> Surround yourself with SV snakes, and you'll rapidly find your principles eroding.

Everyone, including SV snakes, wants integrity and/or thinks they have it. The problem is that everyone has a different definition.
Some Japanese keyboards do this. Tiny spacebars and extra modifier keys. I've always wanted to buy one and put keys like backspace and delete on my thumbs.

Japanese ThinkPad USB keyboard (with TrackPoint!):
http://i.imgur.com/4dWVJ.jpg
Downloads are the new hits
I'm aware (my girlfriend owns a color one), but they still run their own proprietary software atop of the OS, in addition to providing DRM-infected eBooks (but you have the option to put your own eBooks on the device, which can be DRM-free). Their TOS also states that they can remotely access your device at any time (stating that the act of doing so to apply upgrades may possibly harm your device), among other details I do not want to begin ranting on here.
7 tips for getting started with developer marketing
That's C-SPC.
You have missed the point. Your girlfriend did not need to learn to program in order to discover what can be achieved with a basic program.

For the common woman or man the revelation of computing comes from seeing what can be achieved, not how it is achieved.
You also end up getting an intuitive understanding of basic physics by doing everyday things like throwing a ball or riding a bicycle.
The Value of Ballmer
Think Twice Before Starting a Company
C is full of implicit type conversions. I think the key is that C is based on value semantics and not references, and that makes pointers full-blown values with their own address, conversions, … - something closer to C's integer types than to other languages' references, and equally picky about operators.
API Strategy Lessons from Factual’s Upgrade of its Mobile/Local APIs
This is not a bait and switch. We are trying to make sure we get the pricing right. That said - we plan to make the current free tier free even when we announce pricing. We are also committed to being competitive in terms of pricing. We will be announcing pricing this summer.
Agree. And along the same lines an entire industry grew around the fact that computing products before Apple (particularly DOS, Windows etc.) were difficult enough that the average person (say someone who might be urged to code now) did not have the desire or aptitude to learn how to do it themselves. I'm sure everyone knows many of these people who giggle about how stupid they are with computers and have no interest in learning how to fix the simplest of problems.

Some people just lack the appropriate base skills to fool with computers and certainly programming. They will always need a "tech guy" and have no desire to change that for a reason. It's not that simple to them. Not because they are stupid but because it's not their thing.
NODB --- Uncle Bob on planning without databases
While I wouldn't quite recommend the TIOBE index in general, it's still useful for attempts to identify significant events in the history of a language's popularity. Here's its historical graph for Ruby:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Ruby.html

According to this, Ruby really exploded in 2006 after holding steady for quite some time in relative obscurity. Now you just need to figure out when Rails became hugely popular to check for a correspondence.
I've written a post on our company blog about our heavy use of Ubuntu including Diskless fat-client workstations..

http://blog.iacquire.com/2012/05/15/how-iacquire-makes-use-o...
I use Python at work because I have to, but I'd rather be writing JavaScript.
While I agree with the sentiment, I have two points:

1) The goal of a programming language is to be as unambiguous as possible. This is why we have syntax, and do not program in english. As soon as you use the same token identifier for two purposes, you introduce ambiguity.

Take markdown, for example:

* Hello *world*

In this line of code, which asterisk should be considered a bullet, and which an indication of emphasis? It seems obvious to a human, but codifying it in a set of rules for a computer is another matter, which introduces complexity and future bugs. (Eg., what do you do in this situation: `* Hello* world`. As somebody who is writing a full formal lexer for markdown, I can tell you first hand that it's an extremely annoying part of the specification.)

Lisp does not have this problem, because it is governed by an extremely simple and effective set of rules:

- An identifier can contain most unambiguous special characters, including - ! ? / + < > = etc.

- There are no operators, only functions.

- A hyphen by itself is a perfectly valid identifier.

- The standard library includes a function named hyphen which performs a subtraction operation.

Taking that into consideration, it makes the entire situation completely ambiguous. `a-b` is one identifier. `a - b` and `- a b` are both a string of meaningless identifiers. `(a - b)` performs function `a` with arguments `-` and `b`, and `(- a b)` performs function `-` with `a` and `b`.

Ruby is actually interesting in that it is one of the few languages which, like lisp, does not have operators. You could remove ambiguity by doing `a.-(b)`. However, readability immediately goes out of the window. Much more so than in lisp's case. Consider this:

(4.*(5)).+((7.*(9))./(3)).+(1) #<= the meaning of life

It's semantically a perfectly valid expression, but how long did it take you to mentally evaluate it to 42? Compare with:

4*5 + 7*9/3 + 1

2) If you're going to be writing an article about it, please learn the right terminology. - is a hyphen. Dashes are – (en-dash) and — (em-dash). Hyphens separate contracted words. En-dashes indicate a range. Em-dashes indicate a aside, much like a parenthesis.
Photos are Facebook's achilles heel. A few of my friends have deleted their FB account, most of them returned a few months later, when I asked why, they said they missed the photos.

Facebooks core design, social networking, restricts them from making a great photo service. I think there is space for an app that provides people with a way to share hiqh quality photos. Not just mobile photos, but photos from SLRs. Like when 10 people go on a ski vacation and want to make a group photo album. Or 4 college students living in a party house want an album where people who attend their parties can upload their photos. An app like Divvyshot.

Divvyshot, Instagram, now Lightbox. Any app that has the slightest potential of disrupting the photo-space is a threat to Facebook. They are smart to buy them out.
You're welcome! I haven't decided how I'm going to share source code. For my current series, I'm committing after every episode and posting on GitHub [1], so I'll do at least that much. Your idea of committing after every step of the TDD cycle is a really interesting one, but I'm not sure if could do that without it detracting from the videos. I've added it to my list of neat ideas.

[1] https://github.com/jamesshore/lets_play_tdd/commits/master
I agree that there's something satisfying about watching a computer execute a program, but I find pleasure in the process of just writing programs, too. At that point, though, it's just coding for coding's sake.
It's a slippery road to re-implement Sharepoint capabilities using Rails.

It's a typical buy vs build scenario. From my understanding, it's not difficult to integrate other enterprise apps to Sharepoint and make a dashboard.

You can probably do that with a bunch of Rails people but if the platform provides a decent "Portal" capabilities out of the box with minimum modification, why build from scratch?

The alternative is to install MediaWiki, WordPress, some sort of CMS perhaps, some sort of Portal (LifeRay?), some sort of document management system that supports versioning and decent web UI, integrate a bunch of services using custom web-app. That's a lot of infrastructure to deal with.
Wow, that is indeed classic Apple. Does the firmware update really fix it, though? My father-in-law has had all sorts of trouble with standby and his 2011 Mac Mini + Thunderbolt Display. Supposedly "fixed" by various firmware updates, but not much has changed.