skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> All human languages have very similar every day vocabularies

I spent a lot of time working in Sweden and had many conversations with the locals (all of whom know English very well). Many of them remarked that English has more alternative words for something than Swedish and that each one has a subtly different meaning. For example, how you can use "grand" in place of "big" or "large", they all mean roughly the same thing but "grand" brings with it additional meaning. So, my personal experience appears to contradict this statement.

My point is really that languages and alphabets are tools and some tools make certain jobs easier. You could write a website in assembly, but its easier in Rails. However, I suspect our ancestors will look back at Rails and have similar feelings to us when we look back at ancient writing systems now.
Using duplicity is almost as simple as using rsync, and it gives you incremental backups as well. And encryption if you need it. And can back up over SSH like Rsync, or to a local path, or even to Amazon S3.

[edit] I wrote up how I do this, with examples and cron entries a few months ago: https://grepular.com/Secure_Free_Incremental_and_Instant_Bac...
Flash is click-to-play by default in Firefox for Android, using the same code that is now an option in Firefox Nightly on desktop [1]. Flash actually performs quite well on Android 4.0, but it can definitely cause problems on all earlier versions.

[1] https://msujaws.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/opting-in-to-plugin...
That is indeed a little scary. Thanks!
Really, you would type in chat with someone who was next to you? A real conversation is such a great thing, that I would not give that up. Much better is what the other guy in the thread is doing, skyping into a big screen in the room as interim-big-brother. Of course, he can't walk in close to join a converstaion, but unless there is a whiteboard or something out of reach, at least the conversation can still move over to him :)
I think other Facebook acquisitions I've seen recently have had similar comments in their blog posts. It's exceedingly clear that Facebook is doing talent acquisitions and nothing more.
I might point out that upvoting this post is not what I would consider helping.
Adobe Air dropped support for Linux around January of this year I believe. So not quite a full cross platform solution.

In fact, Adobe has been getting worse with Linux support altogether lately (including the Flash runtime).
The First Time I Used Programming At Work
Do you have pylint integrated with your IDE? It greatly, greatly speeds up the cycle around fixing basic problems like undefined variables or wrong method arguments. I don't know how I ever coded in python without it.
Note that Firefox for Android has the same level of HTML5 support as the desktop version, so there's no excuse to use Flash indeed.

...but for "legacy" sites with Flash, this new version will help you out.
"And then, some months later, Pixar rewrote the film from almost the ground up, and we made ToyStory2 again. That rewritten film was the one you saw in theatres and that you can watch now on BluRay."

http://www.quora.com/Pixar-Animation-Studios/Did-Pixar-accid...
Google can certainly put its "chrome" around webkit on iOS, the way Chrome (and Safari) started, and the way iCab or Atomic do on iOS today.

Desktop browser sync, bookmarks and tabs management, integration with Google services, all make good sense to put under a Chrome logo.
As they say, simply sending résumés is a chumps game. So, working on things that only look good in that context is probably wrong.

Instead, if you have a few cool apps under your belt, email the founders of startups you might want to work for and say you are looking for a full time position as freelancing is not fun for you anymore. Offer your apps as evidence that you "get shit done". Startups are much more approachable and all they care about is getting shit done.

Big co's are much more formulaic, they have HR departments. They get a list that guides their hires and they try to find the best fit for each through a process of elimination (read: sifting through hundreds of résumés). You need to stand out somehow, and offering a résumé alone won't cut it. Call the HR department and talk to someone, try to find out who your bossman would be and try to talk to them. Show interest and be conversational. Basically, beat the résumé filter.

It may feel a little sleezy as you cold contact people, but like anything, you can approach it gracefully, just don't be a dick about it. Keep it short and professional.
Why Tesla was the greatest genius who ever lived
At least they are open sourcing their stuff. So it is not a total wash.

I hope they open it enough for someone else to pick it up.
I want someone to throw money at until things work

In that case, although you can certainly pay for support (as others have pointed out)—but you're probably not the intended audience for this service.
That's an interesting point but I think it works more in favor of small providers trying to gain market share rather than incumbents.

Amazon's strategy with AWS seems to be to hype it so much that anybody who isn't using it feels like they are some sort of neanderthal since everyone talks about how everything is moving "to the cloud".

Interesting that he uses Excel as an example since I imagine (I haven't used Excel for a while) that saving data in a modern version of Excel makes it incompatible with anything else (at least it would do if OpenOffice didn't reverse engineer the format).
Thank you very much. That makes me wonder if I qualify as a dual citizen. My mother is German and did not make her American citizenship until I was 18. My father is American and I was born in the U.S., so I definitely have American citizenship.

Also, I will note that the son in question is in his early twenties. So it sounds like he is not a dual citizen and does not need to worry about the draft..etc.

Again, thanks!
Could you make an impact (even if a very small one) on a large number of people over the course of a weekend with a pencil and paper?

Gandhi made a huge impact on a vast number of people and all he had was a white cloth and a pair of glasses! (albeit it took longer than a weekend)

Joking aside, if everyone learnt to programme then there would be no need for specific programmers. Yes, it's frustrating when people don't know the basics, but I have no idea what to do when it comes to plumbing. These are very distinct jobs. I take my car to a mechanic for the same reason. I do not need to know how the plumbing in my house works to take a shower, or how an engine works in order to drive my car. Facebook or Amazon do not require their users to understand how programming works.

If your code requires someone to understand the basics of programming then you have failed as programmer to understand your target audience. Granted you have apps that save you work/time/money, but your basic user should not need to understand what is going on under the hood.
OS X Safari 5.2: 173ms (2.0 GHz i7)
Bloomberg = a hypothetical non-techy boss
relevant: http://xkcd.com/1050/
"The only things you HAVE to know are how to make enough of a living to stay alive and how to get your taxes done. All the fun parts of life are optional."

If we measured everything by how much we used it professionally, we wouldn't learn music, play sports, or any number of things we focus on in schools.
I agree with davidu that you crossed the line. I certainly had a bad opinion about davidu and his company before your comment, but I didn't know who davidu was, or what his company was. So now I have a bad opinion about real life stuff, based off one comment with little context (perhaps it was hastily written, etc).

Taking one comment and trying to tie it to google juice about real life is a dickish move, IMO.
I understand that people are disappointed that a service and community they like will no longer be around. But the sense of entitlement I see in the comments on their blog is frustrating - saying "I am disappointed in you" (emphasis mine) is what you say to your children, not a peer who is providing you a service. I translate their reactions to "I am disappointed that you are no longer willing to take the kind of financial and professional risk that I am not willing or able to make."
Typical of the undermathed professions* : they provide high and low salary numbers, but no median! This makes this salary guide vastly less useful than it could be.

* This phrasing is an attempt at humor
Put Pluto, Vesta, Mercury and Mars side by side. They look pretty similar; a lot more similar than Mars and Mercury do to Jupiter and Saturn.
You hit on an important point: curiosity. Most of the best programmers are deeply curious, and I don't think that can be taught, though I do believe it can be cultivated from an early age.

On the other hand, showing people how to safely experiment in ways they can be sure won't screw things up may be very empowering and allow them to express their creative drive.
In the last hour 14 comments were posted on the article. None of them welcomed the change. Same here. It says something about Facebook.

It is so sad to see so bright engineers producing great software[0] for such a dubious machinery.

[0]
https://github.com/facebook/phabricator
http://wiki.github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/
For the record, I was mostly serious. I was half-joking about the Lisp part. This is not really related to your comment, but just to clarify: I'm serious that coding using just 's' doesn't sound that unreasonable. If you're a professional programmer, sure, you know you need more characters than that to be productive. But I wouldn't fault a lay-person, even one who has some knowledge of coding, for believing someone who said they programmed using only 's'. Plenty of weird programming languages are possible. Take a look at http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Reverse_a_string#Brainf.2A.2A.2A.
Perhaps in some contexts: http://momjian.us/main/blogs/pgblog/2012.html#January_27_201...
Nobody is going to invest in startups like that. The startups that get bought and the product shelved, those are the successes for the VCs, incubators and other investors. The startups that steadily build up a product with a decent user-base, eventually making a small profit after several years, these are the failures, and are subsidised by the 'successes'. The big players aren't that interested in buying products: an existing product is just baggage, and one that they are forced to maintain even more so.
It was humor. I laughed. I guess you could argue "stupid", but I don't see anything petty here. It was cute.
No. Everybody should learn about computers, how to turn them on, how to browse the internet, etc. Not knowing the fundamentals of programming does not prevent a person from achieving any of the above.
Does anybody else see similarity between this

authenticate = SApp::AuthenticateUser.authenticate(...
action = authenticate.action
if action != :login_error
redirect_to "/#{action}"
...
def find_account
@account = SApp::FindAccount.find(@account_subdomain)
end

and this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Soft_Coding.aspx
Redis for time series data (?)
Yep - There is nothing more eager to spend money on backups than senior management the day AFTER a disaster!
How Yahoo killed Flickr and lost the Internet
Ask HN: How to create a buzz for an iphone app
I will be releasing my iphone app as soon as it is approved by Apple. How and when do you guys think I should release it to the world. From the statistics point of view, most of the apps are downloaded on the weekends, so I am gonna target one of the weekends for the release, but do I need to create any buzz around it before the release or should I just put it live and then do the marketing.
How did you guys handle the release of your apps?

Thanks
How likely is this hypothetical cleanup of JavaScript to happen, though? It seems about as likely to me as the likelihood of Haskell replacing C++ or Java; i.e. not very likely at all (even though I share your opinion that it would be a wonderful thing if Haskell were more popular).

The main advantage that JavaScript seems to have over Python is multi-statement lambdas. In other respects it seems no more Haskell-esque than Python is. Python at least lets you do a very limited form of pattern matching on tuples. And JavaScript brings along so much hastily-designed ugliness that it seems like it would take ages to break free of its historical warts.

I'd personally be happy if some flavor of Scheme became the dynamic language du jour, though I realize I'm living in a fantasy world there.
I agree, and I'd argue that you can program something in 5 minutes, but you can't program something well if you haven't put in years of practice and dedication.

It's just like anything else in the world. Any jerk can grab some paints and make some lines on a canvas, but the ones who take the time to understand art and practice for years are always going to be better. Always.

So should you learn to code? If you're interested in it and you really like doing it, then yes. Otherwise you're going to waste your time and everyone else's time. Coding is just another art form. It's a means of expressing systems that run on computers. If this doesn't excite you, don't do it!

Learn something you're passionate about....because you'll never get really good at something unless you're fired up about it, and what's the point of doing something if you aren't going to completely commit? There's so much in this world to learn and be passionate about, why spend your time learning something you don't care about?
Well, it is your camp that is equating "learning programming" with "becoming a programmer."

I don't know why you should feel threatened or defensive about the fact that a lot of people want to understand your basic skill set. I don't know many mechanical engineers who discourage people from learning to fix their own cars.
I'd agree ebooks are lame. They're great for easy transport, and quite useful for college, but a lot of the fun of owning a book is lost.

I can't have a signed copy of my favorite book with an ebook. When I have a party or gathering at home people browse my shelves and spark conversation about certain books they've read, or thumb through others they haven't, this doesn't happen with my kindle sitting on my desk in the office. Buying a book and caring for it can mean you'll have it a lifetime, I don't know that this is the case with ebooks yet. They still feel like rentals. I have a few old books handed down from my parents, they have a charm and character all their own, something lost with ebooks. Some books I own are sentimental, my first copies of The Lord of the Rings, and a Wizard of Earthsea, I've had since I was very young. I can touch and smell and experience those books today.

Now, many teens might not care about the above, but the coolness factor may be tied to similar thought. For instance the vanity of walking around with the hottest teen novel or having it in your bedroom at home. Or, I remember in high school kids carrying copies of Fight Club and Clockwork Orange not just because they were reading them but also as part of whatever counter culture image they were going for. The author sort of touches on this, "But does size really matter that much? My copy of The Perks Of Being A Wallflower was so small I could fit it in my second-hand jacket when I was an angsty high schooler." For teens what they're passionate about and what they're into is part of their identity and trying to set themselves apart, and they like to show it off. Just look at the kids doodling their favorite band names on a binder, or listing every book, TV show, and movie they like on Facebook.

When I worked at Barnes & Noble a lot of teens enjoyed hardcovers that had some sort of unique flair. Embossing, elaborate art, books that opened in non-traditional ways. There's something to be said for the tangible aspects of the book. Appreciating its make.
I'm curious though, what was the uptake on Ruby before Rails?

I wasn't aware of Python/Ruby back in those times, but my impression now is Python was widely used prior to Rails existence... in academia, science, mathematics, etc, but Ruby was not much on the map until Rails came along.

I'm not saying this is how is was - I honestly don't know, just my impression as someone fairly new to this stuff. I would appreciate if someone who was familiar with the Ruby community prior to Rails could shed some light on this. Doing some google searches turns up minimal clues. The wikipedia on Ruby says "Around 2005, interest in the Ruby language surged in tandem with Ruby on Rails, a popular web application framework written in Ruby. Rails is frequently credited with making Ruby "famous""
Just for the record: I used Python at work because I had to; I'd rather have been writing Java.

The titanic investment bank that I used to work for started a major rewrite of its entire set of booking and risk systems in which everything was to be written in Python. It immediately assigned hundreds of programmers to the task, shepherded by a "core team" eager to use every feature of the language. The result was a perfect example of the problems with Python in the large. Enormous type hierarchies mingled with copious use of eval; there was no structure at all to much of the code.

It's possible to write terrible code in any language, of course, but using Java would have been one way to curb some of the worst impulses of the low-quality programmers.
I wonder whether these guys will end up working on increased integration with other acquisitions (e.g., Instagram, assuming that all goes well with the antitrust investigation with the FTC), or potentially even on other other services themselves? I'm looking forward to seeing Facebook's plans with photo sharing -- especially after Facebook's post earlier[1] highlighting the increased prominence of photos in their mobile app.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150978179604009....
I'm put in mind that this is more in line with the important personal communication I've experience on networks (including the Internet). Control of scope is essential.

Facebook is once again feeling more like it's trying to force those social connections into the public domain -- well, let's say the public realm, for it certainly remains their domain. And I'm mindful of getting out of it, at this point. (The IPO seems to be a good event in their... erm, "Timeline", upon which to do so. [1] )

I don't want to lose those connections, though, so perhaps it is time to agitate amongst friends for Google+.

However, I do not want to be forced into a single, worldwide identity. Either personally, or admixed with various professional responsibilities and relationships.

I also don't want to feel an excessive risk of being "unplugged" from Google's services.

If Google wants to "do social", they need to "look at what users want to do". I am surprised at how suddenly apropos my chance browsing of this HN thread -- with its perhaps for some somewhat discomfiting terms -- becomes:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3976791

And, they need to be social, themselves. Enough to provide some real -- if, given scale, not always direct -- support.

When enough people start saying that something is a problem, believe them.

For now, I think I'll use a secondary identity -- not a false one, but a second account -- to participate in Google+. I already have one for casual business contacts. In case the feedback is worth anything, I still fear committing my primary Google identity to the product.

I wonder to what extent Google can enable and protect social dialog where users set the scope and privacy [2], while successfully fostering the advertising revenue that pays for the service and for Google's efforts. The kind of networking for this level of connections still seems to need to supercede any particular, balkanized smaller-scale platform. All of us are continuing to look for the effective and ethical host.

--

[1] Concurrent, I've observed, with another bump in the aggressiveness of their advertising. Not that I begrudge them "paying the bills", but perceived as perhaps a signal of more behind the scenes or to come.

[2] As I think of this, more, I ask whether Google needs to advocate for more transparency, in certain areas some of which include its own participation. What is the relationship with the NSA? Perhaps not all can be revealed, but... well, even the NSA ostensibly works for "the people", for U.S. citizens. And some transparency might ultimately be in everyone's best interest.

You can either assume that "the people" are morons, or that they are competent. Too many leaders seem to speak to the former, these days. Inherently, the Internet -- of which Google is currently an integral part -- speaks to the latter: Empower people by giving them knowledge they need and seek.

What are the people trying to do? Perhaps it's time for Google to pause and really take a look at that. That's what got them to where they are.
To be fair, it is a FTP with permissions and a decent user interface, and plays nice with a Microsoft ecosystem.

Whether that is worth what Microsoft is selling Sharepoint for, well, that depends on the buyer. It also has the "nobody was fired for buying IBM" point (and Microsoft does have decent support).

I still haven't seen an Open Source Sharepoint "killer", though I might not know of it (I had good hopes for Alfresco).
WTFWG
My only problem with underscores is that when I read them aloud in my head, I hear a longer pause than for a hyphen, so code with lots of underscores takes longer to read, or at least feels like it does.
>People who write Python choose to write Python.

People who write X choose to write X.

There's virtually no language that can't fit the bill. It may surprise some, but there are people who choose to write Java, Perl, C, and even C++.

edit: Didn't realize that people who choose a language different than Python aren't actually people.
What about knowing enough coding to understand the amount of work that needs to be put in to transform an idea into reality? Also to be able to construct the interface is easier when you know some code. Those are some reasons why I'm investing time to learn programming.
Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is
So I agree that Ruby's reached an equilibrium at the moment, and is looking for what's next.

I don't discount the possibility that it will break into other niches. The language is a better known quality, but there are still plenty of worlds to conquer.
Nicola Tesla the geek
Thanks!

And yeah, didn't think of that. It would be neat to be able to tag files or directories and then execute a command to see all the directories with that tag and then enter that directory easily. Maybe i'll try adding that to the next version. Can you think of anything else that would be useful?
Report: Microsoft Offering $14.99 Upgrade to Windows 8
I know you're being sarcastic, but since you bring it up, I think the -> operator in C(++) is awkward as heck. If dereferencing were a suffix operation as in Pascal, you could simply write p.foo instead of (p).foo.

I guess it'd break because of (a* +b) but that's just all the more reason to disallow whitespace around infix operators.
Again?

This seems to happen (blocked OS components) every so often with Win AV packages.
The comments on the blog post are interesting.

I have never been in the position of having to decide between a $1 million a year job offer or continuing to provide a free service and struggling to figure out monetization of that living on $5000 a month. Tough choice, and the users are pissed, but its not our choice to make - its theirs. Congrats to them.
Really? Name high-performance systems programming languages besides C and C++ because I'd really love to switch.
This is how I think it should be done:

1. Make a really good app.
2. Write a blog about it.
3. Promote the app on Twitter, FaceBook etc ...
4. Answer to all user complaints and solve any bug they found for free (update the app).
5. Repeat.
If by "start-up" you mean "sell-out", then yes.