skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also, take the Java platform for example: it's good old (okay, not old) Java EE 6. Just take your app and deploy it wherever you want (JBoss, Glassfish, Websphere, etc). On AppEngine, you have a blacklisted Java API, proprietary API for common tasks like threads, etc.
>> I understand that some things could be more efficient, but "hitting shift" hardly qualifies in my opinion...

I does qualify as something that probably contributes to Repeated Strain Injury which most programmers should worry about.
A lot of people are confusing "learning how technology works" with "learning to code". I think society would benefit if more people understood how things worked. But not necessarily if everyone could code.

Perhaps learning to code is a gateway to understanding technology. But that's a pretty steep learning curve just to explain to someone how a web page is generated and served.

To keep the plumber analogy, I'd be a better homeowner if I understood what all the pipes in my house do, and the importance of proper care and maintenance. Or when something breaks, how to turn off the water main without calling 911.
.Pirate Domains Now Available Through OpenNic
This is true, but the same can be said of being a great writer. George Orwell set out to have an impact on the world and he is still doing so long after his death because of the strength of his writing.

The same can be said of being a great orator. Cicero is still known today largely for his oratory skills, and similar skills have served president Obama.

So does being a great biologist and research doctor. Edward Jenner saved countless lives through is work.

Code can multiply your effort, and that is why I code, but it is not the only thing that can, and in fact many technologies exist to multiply the effort in some form or fashion.
I'm curious what the difference is between TheNextWeb and The Verge rewriting articles - TNW spent yesterday on the front page for plagiarism, and here we have The Verge who have just taken all of the substance and value from FastCompany's article and made the original source redundant.
New Firefox Beta for Android with Flash support
I, for one, applaud Jeff's attempt at deflating the hype bubble around programming. There are plenty of useful skills in the world to learn. Programming is one.
"the stretch"?

Properly typing an underscore should utilize two hands and shouldn't require a stretch at all.
Think about it: something I did reached 10,000 actual living people and had an impact (however small) on their life. That would never have been possible if I didn’t know how to code. != Imply that (ability to code) = (eyeballs reached)

I don't think the implication was supposed to be that you can't reach people without knowing how to code, but that in this instance, him knowing how to code gave him the ability to have an impact.

It seems an important enough distinction to point out.

Edit: <i></i> didn't make italics
Edit 2: Thanks wallawe
Yes, you can have an impact - a very large impact on a very large number of people with just a pencil and paper. Martin Luther did it.

Of course, that's taking things to an extreme, but you get my point. And sure, it took him longer than a weekend, but I doubt most 'disruptive' works of programming were born in a single weekend.

(EDIT: I'm not sure why Luther's 95 Theses popped into my head above any other body of work. But it's pretty indisputable that it was awfully impactful, and were, largely, just pen and paper (or quill and parchment... whatever :)))
My whole family have always been avid readers. Even the younger kids (13-18 years) still read and exchange books on a regular basis at our family gatherings. A while back I asked why none of them had started reading on their i-pads or gotten an e-reader. Their answers were pretty interesting.

They all mentioned not being able to fully utilize their imagination. On a paperback novel, you have the cover artwork, you have the author's bio, and the back cover art. They said most e-readers don't have these and it takes away from the experience. They also said the feel of a book in their hands is an experience they know and love. Even the simplicity of turning pages is lost. Holding a little tablet, they never knew if they getting close to the end of the story or not. With a paperback, it was easy to visually see and know how close you were to the end of the book - and it felt like more of an accomplishment.

I found it pretty enlightening. A lot of simple things people take for granted which can't easily be replaced by a better technology.
I know you're joking and this isn't really too relevant to your comment at all, but the 1s and 0s thing that non-techies fixate on is just stupid.

Programming (and computers in general) have nothing to do with 1s and 0s and saying stuff like "at the end of the day, its all 1s and 0s" is like saying that at the end of the day banking just comes down to scrap pieces of pressed tree pulp or a bakers job is just about a bunch of grain or a teachers job reduces to sitting in a room for a few hours or whatever silly analogy you want to dream up.

All of these things are implementation details that, really, are irrelevant to pretty much everyone everywhere. If you are dealing with low level digital systems you will encounter 1s and 0s (and analog voltage and resistance and capacitance and a whole lot more besides), but usually (especially when building something complex like a computer) this gets abstracted away pretty quickly.
I don't think this has anything to do with infix versus prefix. It works in Lisp because the reader knows (roughly speaking) that symbols are terminated by whitespace or parentheses.

If you wrote a version of Ruby that was still infix but where you needed to put spaces around all symbols, then "foo-bar" would work fine there, too.
Part of me dies when I see a small, innovative application get bought up and shut down by a much larger, more founded business. I want to see good ideas succeed on the internet. I don't want to see great ideas get phased out time after time by larger companies.
If those are the top 2 reasons, I suggest these as 3 and 4:

3) You lose the 'cover' of the book to signal to people what you're reading. Hanging out at Starbucks all day reading whatever it is you're reading is a good way to encourage conversations with other people who like the book/genre/author/style. This might not sound like too big a deal until you realize that teens use this to find sexual partners. (No, I'm not guessing here.)

4) They haven't yet had to lug their $365, hard cover, 800 page, 20 pound edition of "Calculus" from the dorm side of the campus to the science quad a mile and a half away.
Agreed, but I confess that I'm also a bit unclear as to Matz's active involvement with the language. Every "Ruby expert" post on HN seems to originate from either Yehuda Katz or DHH... is it just that Matz prefers to communicate in Japanese, on Japanese mailing lists?
This is true, there always is an opportunity cost. But people have a lot more time in their day than they believe, and there definitely is time to go out of your way to learn something new.

I may not be trying to learn polish right now, but I am attempting to learn Italian. (Due to the fact that learning a language is no small undertaking, I'm attempting to learn using the "pimsleur approach")
We're reinventing the wheel, yet again.

Wasn't this what CORBA, XML-RPC, or SOAP was meant to solve? And then we all happily ditched them for loosely defined RESTy JSON because it was so goddamn easier.

I think TFA is describing a legitimate complaint; but I don't think the RESTy CRUD twitter exposes is all that difficult to abstract.

Amazon on the other hand…
Specially if we take into consideration that this is country specific.

Many country specific keyboards also need modifier keys to access the hyphen.
While i truly love Go as a language i think it might still not be mature enough to be used as a full fledged language for Android. The garbage collector is still not mature and could use some optimizations.

You also call Java a systems language. I'm not sure i agree in that view since you don't have direct access to the hardware it runs on. You're still running on JVM which does jit compilation of your code. Java is a high level language falling into the came category as the .NET languages and Python.

I would still very much see Go on android as a fully supported language. Go is beautiful.
>> "Underscores require me to hit the Shift key. When writing prose, I only hit the shift once or twice per sentence. In Ruby, I have to hit the shift key every few letters. Awkward. Inefficient."

That passage sticks out to me as well. Especially the "Awkward. Inefficient" part.

Maybe the guy needs to learn how to type, because hitting shift for me is muscle memory that requires no thinking. That Grade 9 typing class in 1984 just continues to pay dividends for me.
Cool as a geek demo, but I prefer my native tools.
I think I'd actually prefer a pure domain expert who can express their business and ideas well than a half-assed programmer.

No offence, but what often ends up happening is you turn into a know-it-all client. "This should only take an hour. You just have to loop over these results and format them...".

Finding a technical co-founder is a sales process where you need to prove that it's a good idea and that you've made a significant investment yourself (I would prefer if it wasn't code) like thinking through the interface, and as many use cases / stories as you can think of, and describing in detail the problem(s) being solved.

The pitches we hate are the guys who know you through a friend who want you to make a Groupon-like application for their specific market, without having invested more than the 5 minutes it took to write it down while baked. I'm still not going to be sold on this idea even if they manage to throw together some terrible PHP site that sort of acts like a real application.

That being said, I'm in the boat that thinks at least some rudimentary programming skills would be useful for everyone.
Great example; the new Ars Technica gives me a headache. It's clean, but it is impossible to read and harder to navigate. I've been meaning to redesign it myself for fun.
CodeSchool.com Free Weekend
Extending this - will our kids reflexively hate Facebook because their parents are on it (and were there first)? I wouldn't be surprised.
That's a very...abrupt way to send off your users. If I were a Lightbox user or investor I'd be a bit irked.
Diamond Ring Los Angeles
Diamond Ring Los Angeles: Save on Three Stone Diamond Ladies Wedding Band with Black Hills Gold designed leaves.
I think the main keyword out of your rant is "My life...".

Many small businesses or mom & pop shops may have benefited from Windows+Office (specifically Excel, Word, and Access).

They can also purchase Office 365 and have tight integration with their one and only laptop to run their small business.

Sharepoint Online + Office 2010 are extremely powerful and beneficial for those that don't have their own IT department.

Sure, people can keep pointing out Salesforce, Basecamp, Highrise, some random CRM, some random Time & Expense stuff, shopify and so on but if you can get SP Online + Office 2010 for less than $25/month... that's hard to beat.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/office365/compare-plans.aspx
Sorry, I must have misunderstood. You wrote:

Can you build an always available multi-master cluster that is available, partition tolerant and eventually consistent?

These are exactly the properties of Dynamo. Could you elaborate more on what you were looking for?
Don't forget versioning.

So it's both FTP + SVN rolled into 1 feature set under SP umbrella.
I suspect that teens recognize that ebooks are inherently cheap compared to print books.

It's not just that they're poor socially from a digital perspective, they're poor socially form a physical perspective as well...sharing or giving an ebook lacks the intimacy of sharing and giving a physical object.

eBooks are passionless, and teens care deeply about passion.

BTW, "lame" is stale.
I know nothing about python web programming, but I'm hoping to get deep into it very soon. I wanted to point out the framework that I'm planning to use, because I hadn't seen it mentioned in this thread yet.

http://www.web2py.com/
Why Instagram Won’t Be the Last Billion Dollar App
RISUG: Birth Control for Men
A new weekly newsletter about Big Data
MySQL Cluster, Percona XtraDB Cluster, Clustrix, Continuent Tungsten Replicator, vitess, and a number of other products are available in the MySQL ecosystem designed around these types of problems.
I agree with you on static typing and functional style being strongly preferable, and that Python makes that style of programming irritatingly difficult, but it's not like JavaScript has static typing or pattern matching either, so it seems odd that it would be your preferred replacement. Why not wish for a replacement that actually has all of the features you want?
Not to mention that it’s a poor approximation of the → character.
This would drive me bonkers. For some reason I've never been able to hit the spacebar on the left side.

(I mean, it's not like I'm physically incapable. I just instinctively hit SPACE with my right thumb.)

Getting used to using my left thumb would just be awkward.

I also have a nasty habit of using the LSHIFT exclusively. Even when it's not technically appropriate to do so.
The Division of Earth
Don't hesitate to give us feedback - good, bad and ugly. Email openshift@redhat.com or post on the forums and we'll get right on it. Around docs, we're trying to tune the primary landing spot:

https://openshift.redhat.com/community/developers

We also love involvement - good, bad and ugly as well ;)

https://openshift.redhat.com/community/get-involved
Wrong man was executed in Texas, probe says
I wonder whether the increasing popularity of Ruby for web development has created pressure for Ruby to compromise its original philosophy.

I don't think it has. The original philosophies, as much as they exist, oriented around ease of use, programmer happiness, and pure OO - things Rubyists still enjoy. But Ruby has missed the boat on being a popular, general programming language in the way Python is big time. Most Ruby jobs are related to building Rails apps in some way or another and the majority of the Ruby ecosystem (in the West, at least) orients around Web development (and not gaming, scientific programming, education, or the many niches Python has found a home in).

Ruby is an interesting language and one that's worth learning and using IMHO, but in the West, Ruby has become "typecast" as a life support system for Rails essentially. (Before people note the non-Rails things they're doing with Ruby, I said most Ruby jobs and the majority of the Ruby ecosystem. Reporting on Ruby developments has been much of my job for the last 6 years but I am more than happy to be swayed :-))
Your conclusion on time is exactly why learning basic programming stuff like Variables, If then and For loops are powerful.

That is because unlike plumbing, electrical, cars, landscaping and like reading, writing and numeracy, basic programming augments your cognitive toolkit. In the least, it enhances rigorous and corner case thinking. It also makes learning abstract concepts easier, it allows one to reach beyond analytic solutions of equations and to access large amounts of data and automate the handling of said data.

If a computer can enhance many aspects of people's lives then they get more utility in having more powerful basic mechanisms of interaction for automating a program's behaviour. Having basic computer literacy would have definite positive utility for society.

Learning to program is not like learning to fix a car, it is like learning to drive a car instead of hiring a driver.
I've personally sold rather large tech companies (in the $200-300MM enterprise value range) to (UK) publicly-traded companies where the multiple of EBITDA paid was far in excess of the acquirer's multiple, thus making the acquisition dilutive. As long as the acquirer believes in the target's growth story, initial dilution is not necessarily a deal-breaker.
Sharepoint is a big and growing product for Microsoft.

Dynamics is their attempt to join the ERP, CRM market and so far it's still a niche because they're targetting mid-size to large enterprise but the larger companies typically would either go with Oracle or SAP for ERP and something else for CRM.

In some respect, it is similar to LotusNotes in which you can write little apps backed by a data structure called SharePoint List (or SharePoint Document Library). So when I saw Trello, that's like Sharepoint List. Period. Sharepoint List is the core data structure, everything else seems to be derived from it.

The biggest difference is of course SP is web-based and tightly integrated with Microsoft other products: Office, InfoPath, .NET, Dynamics, Outlook, Exchange, AD, etc.

You can pretty much do/build almost everything (specifically Line of Business type of app) with SP (let's avoid technical discussion regarding whether an implementation of Time Tracking should be backed by RDBMS or not since these days people are using NoSQL anyway).

I have to say that it's not a bad product and there are use-cases where Sharepoint can fit.
Ken Burns on Why His Formula for a Great Story Is 1+1=3
Matz is deeply involved with the language's design and a couple of its implementations but as a community leader, in the West, at least, he doesn't do much or have much impact IMHO. This is part of the reason people, rightly or wrongly, have seen the well known Rails developers as figureheads for both Ruby and Rails and then poured scorn on Ruby for their actions.
If "learn to code" means "learn that coding is a laborious profession", then yes, by all means, learn to code.

I am definitely wary of people who tell me:
- "Why don't we..."
- "We just need..."
- "How hard could this be..."
- "Quickly change it so that..."
- "We can always change it later if it doesn't pan out..."

The disconnect between people who know how hard it can be and the people who assume it's as simple as talking about it is way too large as it is.
Yes, but that's a very specific and fairly small set of books. Reading the Harry Potter and Hunger Games books is not the same thing as generally identifying as a reader. Carrying a Hunger Games book identifies you as a Hunger Games fan — carrying a Kindle identifies you as somebody who likes books other than The Hunger Games.
Pretty old.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7910256/YouTube...
Seriously HN?
Goodbye Keyboards?
Is there another specific language that you would prefer to code in, or is it that python is simply your only, albeit inferior, option (i.e. the worst programming language except all the others that have been tried)?
Unless there's some outrage from all of us about Apple rejecting it, I doubt it.
I see them as the next best thing to having an actual non-breaking space, why all the hate?
I have to say, I think everybody will learn to code in the future. It teaches logical thinking, which we just don't have enough of in today's society. And with the explosion of computers, it's going to be a handy skill; just like there are tons of amateur mechanics who can do a few things on their car but they can't do a complete overhaul.
They don't want me switching away, but they should also recognize that programmers like me are lazy/smart enough that I'm much more likely to switch to their service if I know I can easily switch away.

(But being lazy, I'm not going to switch away from them on a whim. Even if the interface is the same, there's still a cost to the testing and such that would be needed. I mostly want to know that there would be a reasonable migration path.)

Joel Spolsky made this point about Excel once ("Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back!"): its adoption really took off once people could write 123 files.
You are echoing Avdi’s point. I understand it, I just happen to disagree with it. If Lisp was an infix language, then yes foo-bar would mean something different to the parser than foo - bar because of the whitespace.

But what’s also at stake is whether that language would be readable to humans without mistakes. Part of what makes Lisp work, IMO, is that you never try to type foo - bar, so you never run into an accident by mistakenly typing foo-bar and having the parser think you meant a hitherto undefined symbol.

Whether that’s a worthy tradeoff is a matter of opinion, and I’ll take Avdi’s word for it that he believes the benefits of calling symbols foo-bar outweigh the odd time you might type the wrong thing. I’m just pointing out in addition to the “whitespace is the separator” argument you both make, there’s also the “foo - bar doesn’t mean foo subtract bar” argument.
Do you have an example of a stateful protocol you prefer over REST?
Keep in mind how Bloomberg made the majority of his wealth. He has an idea of how software and hardware are made, deployed, and updated.
My favorite part is the kid using what he learns:

For school, the kid goes on the streets of Toronto to raise money for cancer research. He notes that a homeless man has likely already found the most attractive location to raise money (near the subway). Then, he uses backwards induction to infer that the homeless man will leave if he begins collecting for a more worthy charitable cause in the same location.
UDuino
Tips for raising start-up capital (UK)
You don't necessarily need special support for that. There's no special XML indexing support, but you can use the XPath and XSLT functions to extract the data of interest and index that:

CREATE TABLE foo (a_doc xml);
CREATE INDEX doc_title ON foo ((xpath('/root@title', a_doc));

I don't see any JSON functions for extracting data in the devel documentation, but that's what you would be waiting on, and it could probably be added by an extension without having to wait for built-in support.
How to get a celebrity to endorse your product
ColdFusion Railo deployment in Jelastic, a user review
Nope, this is not about thought crime. I could have the filthiest, dirtiest thoughts - nobody will complain about that. Problem starts, when I give words to those thoughts.

For example, imagine a fat person (or a short person, or a ugly person, bald person etc) - is it okay to make fun of his/her fatness, shortness etc, all day long? how would that person feel?

This has nothing to do with "professionalism". It is about just being as much nice to fellow humans as possible.

And according to the article, this Christensen guy is supposed to be "motivational speaker" - what kind of motivation, I can't understand.

The worst thing out of this episode is this - there are lots of nice men in the IT industry, who genuinely want more women in the industry. They'd like to help, and do everything they can to make IT more appealing to women - then routinely, a couple of times a month, these incidents occur - and it gives the entire IT industry a bad name, undoing all the good work done by others.
Haskell is my preferred replacement, but I don't really expect Haskell to replace Python. It might replace C++ or Java, however, or form it's own new niche.

People seem to want a simple, dynamically typed scripting language. Javascript can fill that niche while being a big improvement on Python. (Particularly if we accept some breakage of backwards compatibility, add a module system, and clean up the warts.)
I'm guessing you have an old model of Kindle? My Nook takes less time on average to switch pages than I do to turn a physical page and scan to the beginning of the text.
It’s odd that the author does not mention the truly ridiculous thing about underscores: they are a holdover from typewriters, where they were used to provide underlining by overstriking. The fact that we now have beautiful proportional-width screen fonts that support underlining—and do not generally support overstriking—makes underscores unnecessary.

And yet we insist that a programmer be able to write every modern programming language on a 50-year-old typewriter. You know, just in case.