skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hear you, and can relate to the romance and frustration! I was in grade school when JS was released... but've been writing it for over 10 years now. I tried "everything" else, and it's made be a better JS hacker, but I feel like I'm doing it wrong when I use anything else.

I didn't mean to suggest riding the wave of new, distinct, non-progressive technologies. Their is a progression; it seems clear to me that PG was right, that we (as an industry) are slowly moving toward Lisp. He also said that he felt Lisp and C represent the two "clean, consistent" programming models, and I agree. And that's the reason that JS isn't just another passing wave (although my previous comment did seem to make that suggestion).

JS is something different; it's (1) a good-enough balance of C and Lisp and (2) available on every platform. To me, the situation is clearly that JS will form a solid, durable layer over C. Then the language designers and industry hype machine will shift to langs that compile to JS. This is already happening, naturally, it's just not evenly distributed.

> Like what?

We're still in the early days of compiling to JS, and being able to use it as a modern server-side environment. I don't know what the results will be, but I think the difference will stem mostly from development time. Even though it could be done, in practice you don't end up with the same app if using Fortran, Java, and CoffeeScript, because doing so would take a month versus a week versus a day. To paraphrase Linus from his Tech Talk on Git, speed doesn't mean you do the same thing faster, it changes behavior.

Apps will get written that wouldn't've. I'd argue that Facebook succeeded mostly because of PHP, and in turn, that they'll eventually fail because of it, too. They beat MySpace because MySpace used the MSFT stack; it's like England's victory over Spain due to more nimble war ships. Same thing'll happen to FB unless they evolve when necessary.

This is what Yegge was getting at back in '06 [Dreaming in a Browser Swamp]. He mentioned "Scheme on Skis" and "JavaScript on Jets", which might turn out to be ClojureScript and Express or Railway. Well on our way, and he was entirely right in retrospect (even though a shocking number of smart hackers don't want to accept it and keep on with archaic tech that's becoming rapidly endangered, but that's life).

Light Table is an early example of an app that's happening because of ClojureScript. And many exiting CoffeeScript apps are quite impressive: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/In-The-Wild

I think it comes down to being able to focus on design and make fast changes, without needing to worrying as much about the lower layers of abstraction.
The code I referenced measures the difference between strings

Exactly, and the algorithm used is, as I said, attributed to Levenshtein. Expressing it as a ratio is hardly novel.

As for the implementation, Alex Martelli credit's Stavros Korokithakis[1], although Lev implementations are 2-a-penny, and this isn't a particularly good one (sorry Stavros).

[1]http://www.korokithakis.net/posts/finding-the-levenshtein-di...
I'm not going to attack the logic of an article that is illogical

It seems to me that is the exactly the type of article you'd want to attack in that way.

If you won't attack arguments with faulty logic on logical grounds, and you can't (correctly) attack arguments with correct logic on logical grounds, that implies you can never refute anyone logically, and that all your arguments will be ad hominems and suchlike.
>Every time an engineer joins Facebook, a startup dies

eh, I'm not convinced. Sure some will, others go on to have jobs with decent family-supporting salaries, great benefits, and predictable hours. I know a couple of engineers like this who make > $100K in the midwest and they're home for dinner at night by 5:30 every night. It just isn't a dichotomy of startup or poverty and shittiness without contribution to society.
Basic Literacy (yet another response to Atwood)
Nope.

The data is the center. Databases, frameworks, _and_ use cases change.

Data (information, knowledge) is what persists.
Certainly not, but I assume it's not quite the payout they were hoping for.
We still use snippets, though most people manually update it in the web interface rather than by replying to an email.
You really think that about OSX?

iTunes? The app store? Redesigning touchpad interactions for OSX?
Having lived in Texas for 12 years I totally agree that this case isn't unique, in that Texas regularly appoints public defenders who are unqualified for the job or so overworked they can't possibly provide an adequate defense (1). And courts are happy to convict people whose lawyer sleeps during the trial (2). I express no opinion on whether this is suitable for HN.

(1) "Appointed as his advocates were a general practice lawyer who never had handled a major felony case and a veteran who had a heavy case load."
(2) "The presiding judge said that the Constitution guarantees a defendant a lawyer, but it does not guarantee that the lawyer must be awake." http://www.secondclassjustice.com/?p=196
He isn't insulting Jeff as a person, nor is he even accusing him of deliberately being a hypocrite. He's just accusing him of a single instance of hypocritical behavior.

Also people who won't listen to Jeff anymore because of this post, or are really angry at him, are likely being hypocritical. He's making the same sort of a mistake as a blogger that many will make as a programmer, especially if we don't discriminate who gets to try their hand at programming. He didn't ship this out to some scary production place where the blogging equivalent of exposing private data for thousands of user accounts might happen. He just blogged it. Likewise, for the most part, new programmers will be limited in the amount of damage they can do.

Edit: I thought the blog post was civil. The talk on twitter isn't civil, though (in fact it seems Zed is the only one of the two who crossed that line). https://twitter.com/#!/zedshaw/status/202473102674894848
It's doing better as Bing than it was under either of its old names.
So as a Google employee and by using private posts, you prove that people use Google+

I am no Google employee and with the same logic, I can prove that people don't use Google+.

Private Google+ posts are what people call Emails. I have not yet received a single Google+ private post, nor have I sent any.
SocialCam's shady secret
Profile of the Data Journalist: The Data News Editor
The guy below said it before me. I have seen things that could be handled with a good programmer, and I am not one just yet.
I agree, there's too much invested in Dalvik as a Java environment for Google to throw that out, however the Oracle lawsuit works out. I wonder how feasible it would be to make Dalvik run Go the way it runs Java. If it runs reasonably well, that would be a great option.
Is thepiratebay down?
Like everything in life, only 1 out of 100 will excel at what they do, 90 will drop out before they even start and 20 will become average coders (yeah I suck at math).

But we all have to try even if we fail, the world needs that unique specimen to move us all forward.
It's kind of annoying to read so much good about PostgreSQL when you have hundreds of gigabytes of data in MySQL and no real reason to migrate to another database because of the expenses. I loved postgres in my previous project when I needed spatial indexing and I started to like its interface a lot.

It seems to be that Postgres is solving the problem of having different databases for your app. I would love to see the Redis datatypes built into it and Postgres might then become the strongest choice when selecting tools for my next app.
Banking on Trust
This guy is a clown. Google has no right to host his stuff - he's free to do that elsewhere if he likes. You may call it censorship, but Google has no obligation to support him.

That google doesn't believe in "customer support" should warn off anyone who really needs that - caveat emptor.
Actually, that's one of the guiding design principles for the WHATWG: ease of implementation for a developer is supposed to trump ease of implementation for a vendor every single time. How hard a specific piece of the spec is to implement in a browser is supposed to matter less than how hard it is for a developer to implement that part of the spec in code and on down the line.

Unfortunately, the WHATWG seems to do whatever the heck it wants to most of the time and having an idea collaborated on by the development community (the <picture> element) or working code (the <time> element from that whole fiasco a few months back) doesn't seem to amount to much.
Is the American tech worker obsolete?
And this is why the death penalty should be outlawed. If there is even a 0.001% chance we could execute an innocent person than its not worth it. Unfortunately I think the probability of executing an innocent person is much higher. Humans are imperfect and should not play god.
The only thing all these counterpoint blog posts are proving is that while programming may or may not be important for everyone to learn in the future, being able to hold and understand cogent arguments most certainly is. I've read at least two blog posts today making counter arguments to points the op wasn't even making (op being Jeff).

I have a feeling a big part of it is the blogger proclivity to make link bait headlines that are somewhat related at best, deceptive at worst, giving rise to knee jerk reactions.
This was a good post, but the entire thing may not be worth as much as the first sentence. So much of learning is about how you approach the state of ignorance in yourself and others.
Mailing list web interface magic
Jeff's irritation here comes as as ignorance. The PR value alone of the Mayor of NYC learning to program could potentially inspire thousands of new casual coders and hundreds of new programmers. There is nothing wrong with wanting to learn how to create something. Ultimately, many thousands of Americans learn a little bit of plumbing for home improvement projects and they're generally happy with it.

It's no different to learn a little bit of coding for building a dynamic website for your community group, even if it's as simple as using HTML, CSS, and Javascript to customize a Drupal or Wordpress site, for example. In fact, you couldn't pick a more appropriate language than Javascript and markup languages for beginners looking to make something useful. We're not asking them to write linked lists or handle correct use of object inheritance.
My vote goes to browser vendor prefixes (eg: -webkit-make-awesome-coffee)
Your thesis is that without the death penalty there would be more Ajmal Kasabs. That there are would-be-terrorists who don't act because of the death penalty.

To me, that's absurd on its face. Such persons are beyond reason. Don't forget, amongst this group are suicide bombers.

In the U.S. at least, its widely accepted that the death penalty is not a deterrent for murder, much less terrorism.[1]

[1]http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/files/DeterrenceStudy2009.pd...)
Google Green - The Story of Send
Pro Bono or No No?
it's reasonable to publish a scientific article in a major publication without independent thought and fact checking

The person you are replying to did not say or imply that.
Don't forget about Maker Faire this weekend
Mruby (embedded Ruby) in Go
Quick and dirty rest security (or hashes for all)
Every company is not going to be doing software acquisitions. Regardless of if software eats the world. The premise of the article is wrong.

It will never happen for the same reason that every company doesn't employ an army of electricians and plumbers. The same applies for duct work, air conditioning, construction, architecture, food services, and on and on. Your average company also has no interest in running their own cloud setup, or data center; they'd much rather outsource that for all the obvious reasons.

Some extremely high percentage of companies will continue to outsource their software needs, exactly as is done today. There will be no broad based software acquisition binge. It's a very difficult world to specialize in, innovate in, and manage unless software and tech is what you already do.
Why Your Company Needs A Chief Collaboration Officer
OpanGraph has numerous problems which hinder it appearing by default in HTML:

- It is verbose and bloats the page. You have a dozen of tags in the best case, but if you have an album of something you might need to provide a set of og tags for every object, which is a lot.

- You often need a different set of og tags on the same page in order to make facebook treat that page differently (you can be doing different things on the same page). So you end up serving a special version of page with og tags to facebook by user-agent.

For simplier cases, you don't even need og, and for more complicated ones, they are facebook-specific and you'll have trouble using those for anything else.

The overall experience from og and facebook: Bad. Don't like.
Context:
WHATWG: Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group
WTFWG: Wiskey Tango Foxtrot

Regarding the issue: rough consensus, working code.

And beware of monopolists bearing Web standards.
CERN, OpenStack Keep Resonance Cascades at Bay
This makes me so sad. Why does Atwood mistake learning to program with becoming a programmer? I expect this kind of thing from naysayers and ignoramus, but Atwood is a hero in our community. I feel like he's forgetting a /s tag at the bottom or that he's trolling us all.

Next he should tell us to leave math to the mathematicians.
Radical notion: Some people should learn to code. Some shouldn't. Not everyone should be a programmer. Some people need to program even though they are bad programmers (e.g.: a business guy stringing together off the shelf services with a little bit of glue code to make an MVP to attract an engineer cofounder.)

If you have the internal drive to be a programmer- great, be one. If the idea repulses you, then do something else.

I don't really think there is all that much peer pressure for everyone to be a programmer.

In the past, however, there was. Back In The Day, "computer literacy" meant programming because computers often came with little more than a basic interpreter out of the box. This is no longer the case.

I think all these tools that let "non-programmers" learn to code are great-- because there's a lot of "non-programmers" who could benefit from it. For instance, ops people aren't necessarily "programmers" but they can use scripts to automate tasks that would be mundane and repetitive otherwise.

If an assistant wants to learn a macro language so that they can better operate spreadsheets-- wonderful.

I worked thru one of the online programming classes with a non-programming co-founder and I think she found it pretty valuable. She's not writing code now, but her understanding of what's going on with the product is much better.

I think its silly to pretend like everyone has the same level of programming skill (which was a hard lesson for me to learn, because it always seemed so easy for me, and I figured t would be for other people.) But its also silly to poo-poo on "non-programmers" wanting to learn some programming.

These tools are great. And this drama seems, well, also silly.

I'm a programmer. I would think any article saying "Everyone should learn marketing!" is silly, but I'd also think that "nobody should learn marketing except marketers" is also silly. I spend a lot of time thinking about marketing and learning everything I can-- because its something we need.
Would people be so torqued up if this were a wrongful imprisonment in Massachusetts instead of a wrongful execution in Texas? I doubt it, which suggests that this story may be pushing buttons in your brain other than injustice == bad.

Wrongful conviction is bad in any case; the death penalty aspect is simply inflammatory. Executions are irreversible, but so is imprisonment. They might let you out if they discover you're innocent, but there's no way to refund you your lost time.
This whole article was problematic to me because it starts out with:

Two processors, running in parallel, execute the following machine code

Processors don't "run in parallel." Among other things, the OS could be scheduling the threads on each CPU in any way it wants. I just can't think about the false hypothetical that the processors "run in parallel."

I'm in the process of going through the article more carefully to see if this erroneous way of thinking propogated. It seems like the author knows his stuff, though, so I'm guessing not.
The making of Sveglia using Meteor
Well written piece. Completely true and misunderstood. Of course there was some hyperbole, but as a non-programmer learning to code for the reasons Mr. Atwood gave (problem solving, etc.) I think that while it is an important skill, that it's starting to be annoying how the thing is being sold, in my opinion, because coding is very, very hard for people who don't know how to do it, but it's being made out as life or death, and not that hard, which is not right!
> I would say that condition is 100% impossible to meet, and would present that as an argument against the death penalty.

Without getting into the pro/con discussion, that doesn't sound right to me. I was under the impression that the vast majority of criminal cases were complete walk-overs: You have weapon, forensics, motive, opportunity, confession and what not all aligning perfectly.

By a stroke of tautology, we never hear about them because they are boring.

Or at the other end of the spectrum: Where is the wiggle-room for less than 100% certain guilt in the Anders Behring Breivik case in Norway?
Certainly, one's early experience skews one's perceptions - I was 10 or 11 when I was 'non-technical', my friend is 35 (and, knowing her pretty well, her skills are definitely not in the coding area).

Thanks for the tip, I'll pass it on to her.
I've had a lot of difficulty locating a laptop with a keyboard I like. Even the "full size" ones with a numpad built in tend to have what I find to be awkwardly placed Home, End, Page Up, or Page Down buttons, or make them inaccessible except by using a Fn key combo.

Seems like the only real solution anymore is to buy a good external keyboard and carry it around with me.
"Never listen to people who try to make beginners feel like losers"

Zing. A great litmus test that's simple and has results too.

Too many programming communities, including the most popular web frameworks that are the be all and end all to everything have elements of this.

It's not something to be proud of to feel better about yourself by putting others down, telling others what they do, or how they do it, or who they ultimately are isn't as capable.
Here is a reason to learn to code that has nothing to do with programming.
Or you're using a Chrome extension that serves ads. I flipped out the other day because I thought someone had hacked our application and decided all they'd do is serve ads. Bad behavior on the part of Chrome extensions.
Yes, we're exploring the idea of allowing free themes and plugins in the store. It would allow easy upgrades to PRO versions. I also like the idea of making donations easier for free theme/plugin developers. So instead of "Buy & Install", it could be "Donate & Install" where the user would have to explicitly skip donation before installing the theme or plugin. All of these are just ideas at this stage though, no plans yet.
I tried K&R but could not get into it after reading the first 2 chapters a few times over.

I was close to giving up on C till I picked up "C Programming a Modern Approach" and Zed's "Learn C The Hard Way". They were phenomenal.

After finishing them I tried K&R again but was still not digging the style so I did a few of the exercises but not much else. I get that it's a classic but it was written before I was born so I didn't find it all that well written. That's just my opinion though.
The V-Pole: Vancouver's artistic approach to wireless utility poles
I agree it's a good skill to have in many careers, software engineer included, but it is definitely not the definition of programmer. If you wanted to map this skill to a profession, I'd probably go with Business Analyst being the closest.

Breaking a problem down into solvable parts is something I was taught in math and it was invaluable. I'd written programs before and after that, so I wouldn't say that this technique makes you a programmer. Rather it's an approach you'll need to be a good programmer.

Asking someone non-technical to describe the problem they want to solve in detail is completely within the realm of reason. Non-technical != moron. Knowing how to do this, does not make you a programmer. Likewise, being a programmer doesn't make you good at this.
Ron Conway's thoughts on Open Graph, investing and marketing
CloudCache Giveaway
Google, Privacy, & DuckDuckGo
can't just remove body language, a huge component in how we communicate, and expect that the loss can be recovered with a better project management app

Since when is body language involved with getting stuff done? Or do you mean office politics and those greatly productive meeting hours?

bandwidth of communication

The lower bandwidth is more than compensated by the better signal/noise ratio.

I've found communication in remote teams to be radically more efficient than the usual office chitchat. You just don't waste time in poorly focussed meetings, adhoc exchanges that all participants have forgotten a minute later, or the infamous daily standups that give everyone the blurry feeling of being on the same page - without knowing which page that would be.

Chat is the primary communication channel in the teams that I'm participating in and the sole act of typing something out instead of saying it makes technical discussions tremendously more focussed.

It also enables a culture of meta-discussion that simply doesn't happen in old fashioned meeting-driven companies. I have many dozens of Chat-threads going on in parallel, some of which reach back months, often with long pauses. These threads contain pretty much the entire thinking that went into any given subject. Nothing is buried on funny colored post-it notes or blurry memories of long forgotten meetings.

Feel free to compare that to your "knowledge-base", "Wiki", or what have you?

certainly not viable now.

Says who?

I've been "the remote guy" exclusively for the past 5 years. For different companies, some fully distributed, some with a central office. If you want to maximize productivity of a mature team then that is your modus operandi.
"What caused the obesity epidemic?"

"And it’s something very simple, very obvious,
something that few want to hear: The epidemic was
caused by the overproduction of food in the United
States. ...This, of course, is a tremendously
controversial idea. However, the model shows that
increase in food more than explains the increase
in weight."

This is analogous to saying:
"What caused the increase in car accidents?"

"And it’s something very simple, very obvious,
something that few want to hear: The car accident
epidemic was caused by the overproduction of cars
in the United States. ...This, of course, is a
tremendously controversial idea. However, the model
shows that increase in cars more than explains the
increase in car accidents."

By using the phrase "overproduction of food" he is using too broad of a statement that doesn't describe the problem in an addressable way.

It makes it sound like we could just cut food production across the board and prevent obesity.

.

I would argue the problem isn't the quantity, rather the quality. Quality in regards to:

- Nutrients vs Fat and sugars

- Number of meals a day and the time we eat those meals

- Sugary drinks vs Water

- Appropriate meal size

- Fast food vs home made meals

The solution for the 21st century is going to take more than cutting food production. Just as curbing injuries from car accidents will take a different approach than limiting US car production.