skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Microsoft dev tools were important for PCs, but they weren't the only game in town. Lots of people were still using Turbo Pascal and later Delphi -- there weren't a lot of tools that could generate Windows binaries yet. Some people were using DBASE, Foxpro, etc. Watcom C targeted 32-bit DOS extenders which were important for games.

The most important thing was (and still is) that you could easily integrate your the OS and UI framework of choice. Smalltalk couldn't provide that because it tried to replace all that with its own code -- which the implementor would probably further tweak into unrecognizability.

UNIX of course was its own world at this point, but it also was driven by pragmatics. You aren't going to write your MUD in Lisp if its going to thrash your swapfile, or if your friend down the hall can't hack on it with you.

It's also questionable whether these tools were "better". The one time I tried to use VisualAge all I could think about was getting back into my comfy text editor. I am hopeful however that we can eventually improve on the age-old compile/edit/debug cycle.
If you actually want to understand the "math behind it all," do yourself a favor and read the first three chapters of _Probability Theory: The Logic of Science_ by E. T. Jaynes. Jaynes builds, from the ground up, probability theory as an extended logic that allows you to draw inferences from incomplete and uncertain information. In this logic, a probability represents a degree of belief, and Bayes' theorem becomes a rule for updating prior beliefs in light of new evidence. From this basis, Jaynes recreates the classical probability theorems (e.g., sum and product rules) , giving them clear interpretations.

If you want to understand this stuff for real, it's hard to beat Jaynes. (Plus, he uses a robot mind (!) as a recurring expository device. That alone is worth the price of admission.)

[1] http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/prob/book.pdf
It says "sold 57% of THEIR shares"; I don't understand how one could read it any other way.
Unless you're providing an API/external access for your users, you can just use authentication internal to your app. It's pretty easy to roll your own (here's a tutorial for doing it in RoR: http://www.aidanf.net/rails_user_authentication_tutorial), but I would recommend using a popular plugin/middleware if you can find it for your language/framework so you don't have to worry as much about security.

For node/Express, passport.js is a good option (but doesn't help you out with the database at all) -- http://passportjs.org/guide/username-password.html

Django has basic user authentication built-in, Ruby on Rails has Devise - https://github.com/plataformatec/devise and AuthLogic - https://github.com/binarylogic/authlogic.

I'd recommend reading the Ruby on Rails security guide about user management to get an idea of some of the challenges in building an authentication system: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/security.html#user-management

If you want to write an OAuth provider here's a great PHP tutorial: http://djpate.com/2011/01/13/how-to-write-a-complete-oauth-p...
I never did cross platform desktop applications but from reading Python in a Nutshell, I was under the impression that it was pretty stable and should have long term support. Or maybe you are specifically talking about iPhones and Androids?
The fact that it's mentioned in HTML5 API bothers me.
I love all these designs and follow many of the designers who created them on Dribbble. These are impressive aesthetic achievements, but I'm always surprised that none of these icons are for an app with decent sales. I don't think many, if any, of these are in the top 200 of their respective categories, but there are a number of horribly designed icons in most of the top 20's. I'm a designer and predisposed to nice designs, but always find it a shame that these great works don't get a larger audience.
"Ignorance priors" are not the common use case for Bayesian in general, at least in my experience.

Furthermore, who said adding more data is not allowed? Of course it is, and I agree fully, but do struggle to see how that contradicts what was said.

Think about a Bayesian spam filter, you keep training it with more "priors", over time and it gets better.
It seems Windows is moving in that direction as well.
I wonder how many times this story can be posted in one day.
I wondered about this too. The icons that use a pseudo-isomeric perspective may look strange next to a bunch of top down icons.
1. you dont buy your military stuff from a potential enemy
2. US (and everybody) was (and probably still is) doing exactly the same. I do remember a scandal in the 80' concerning telephone systems sold behind the Iron Curtain by the US that could be kill remotely by an inner kill switch.
Walled gardens, which are just another annoyance in a long line of progressive manipulation of the computer user for profit, together with an increasing lack of responsiveness (despite ridiculously powerful hardware), drove me back to UNIX, assembly, FORTH and C. In some strange way I'm thankful for the annoyances of "modern computing" because I realised there is still so much more to learn about the "old stuff". I don't consider this move back to the old school to be "tinfoil hat", although it certainly can be used for that purpose. I just like being able to understand and control the machine, and having it be consistently responsive.

I can definitely sympathise with the OP. But I have little motivation to learn Javascript. It is a workaround to get a little control through the browser, but it is still browser-centric and has so little power relative to lower level languages. It is not a long-term solution to the problem the OP describes.
A Deeper Look Into Coca-Cola (Company)
I'd also be keen for a way to collapse the comment tree as I lose interest in responses to a particular reply.
I wrote about it on my blog a couple years ago too. I'm just glad some voice of reason finally surfaced on here.

Besides the cargo-cult idiocy of it, the other thing I don't like is the idea that Twitter's goal is maximizing follower count in the first place. I often block followers from communicating with me because what they have to say is inane or negative. If you're going to count any number, I think it should be the number of worthwhile conversations.

Product people should keep in mind that any time you show your users a number, you're turning your site into a video game. There's a lot of accidental gamification out there.
How I interview software developers
The way I read that is that they make the designs and look for circuitry that does not match the designs, which is presumed to be backdoors. I would think that defects and intentional backdoors would both be findable on an SEM. Do you think otherwise? I don't have a ton of experience with bare silicon, so I'd be interested to know if that's unreasonable.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've heard you can't install apps you made on your own iPhone without a $99 a year developer account, even if you're not going to publish anything on the appstore. That seems unnecessary. Anyone know why that's the case?
...take the same approach as Amazon, offering low-cost hardware, like the Kindle, and subsidizing some of the costs through advertising.

Except that, by its own admission, Facebook hasn't figured out how to make advertising money on mobile devices.
Happen to remember the text you used?
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4031451
Why? They are Web Sockets, and we have AJAX already.
If they were going through (presumably) private middle men, then were their purchases = a matter of public record in the first place?
It sounds to me like grant-proposal language. I wouldn't call it hype, but it is meant to convince people that you have done something important, and you are deserving of more money to do further research.
Functions are very simple maps to functionality; they only act as name-tags. Link's requests share an API for functional descriptions which are mostly "name," "verb," and "content-type." That enforces a structure that's recognizable and specific.

So LinkJS is dependency injection. It makes it possible to configure code into the application.
I found this discussion: http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/u7551/teen_solves...
I have to disagree with this part:

"do it with drive and intensity or don't expect results"

I made a pretty radical change in my diet and dropped 82 pounds. I think the first 70 or so came off in 6 months. It required some focus, but not a lot. I had done a lot of reading about habit, and was already professionally trained as a hypnotist, so I combined habits with hypnosis and made a fairly dramatic behavior change with pretty minimal effort.

Likewise, at the same time, I was going to the gym every day, but because I had a severe health issue, I was working out very, VERY gently. I was basically walking on a treadmill at 3 miles per hour for an hour every day. It's more active than not exercising at all, but I couldn't call it a "drive and intensity" situation.

I think this whole "drive and intensity" myth is the major problem with Hacker News as a community, in fact. I abandoned hacking entirely for almost a year, during which I just sold how-to videos and coaching on my blog. I made decent money and there was not a lot of drive or intensity involved there, either.

Drive and intensity can be great things, but I've definitely had a great number of experiences which point to them being inessential to success. I'm happy to go so far as to say that neither are of equal value to research, clarity, good logic, or sound strategy.
Yes, the article is supportive of new work (like lighttable), but its still very heavy on "we've done it before". The title "Hey Kids, Get Off My Lawn", and the closing sentence "when that new thing comes along, I’ll tell you we built an early version of it at the Media Lab..." pretty much sum up this sentiment that irks me.
I'm guessing it's just intended as a proof of concept.
I think the author meant single load (load one page, fetch the rest by async javascript).

But as I've commented, having built edgeyo and Strangers for Dinner and having tested in-page (iframe) and redirected authentication, redirected authentication seems to garner more trust
I've sometimes wondered: Is there any country that has "free" dental care?
Also it's about the control that Facebook, like Apple, might be able to deliver better UX if they could design for and thoroughly test on very specific combinations of hardware, instead of trying to function across so many different chips and screen sizes.
Earphone have Differences Between Left and Right
In present, most music files are using stereo recording, having different sounds of the left and right earphone.
You keep repeating the ad hominem but there's not much to your critique. Actually, you didn't offer a single valid argument and seem much more biased than the report, I don't think HN is benefiting.
Shai is an incredible teacher; his video lectures on theory of computation were a major part of what made me understand the beauty of CS theory (automata, CFG's etc). It was sad to see that they had to shut down ADU; but I guess it was an unsustainable model; if I recall correctly, there was absolutely no tuition charged to the students.
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention INQ - there've been rumours around a possible linkup there for a while.
The biggest climate victory you never heard of
Pretty much all the reasons I don't use coffeescript for js.
That is correct, only people with developer accounts can install apps on an iPhone. I couldn't say why this is the case.
Larry Ellison bashes Cloud Computing hype
Thanks. Yes, that's what I meant.
What is to prevent the browsers from also eventually becoming walled gardens, as they reach the complexity of the increasingly locked down operating systems? We already are seeing multiple threats to even the open web with things like content pay walls, cloud services, and Facebook. Sure if things got really bad, we could fork WebKit, use Linux, and run our own mail server. The problem is that the majority will use what is simple and safe - what they can understand. Whether browser, operating system, hardware, cars, or any sufficiently advanced technology, that will always end up being a walled garden of some sort.

“Once you have something that grows faster than education grows, you’re always going to get a pop culture.”
- Alan Kay

The problem with computing is not any particular platform or our tools. The problem is education. As tinkerers, we learned how to make computers do what we want, and eagerly raced ahead while leaving the majority of humanity in the dust. The direction computing is moving can only be attributed to our own selfishness.

We can now either accept the walled gardens as computing for the masses, or we can work to create doorways out for those trapped inside by simplifying access to computing and improving education.

Lay less bricks, build more doors.
One of those icons was designed for an app of mine :
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bill-organizer-manage-track/i...

We (the designer and I) ultimately rejected it, because it just did not stand out at 57x57.
As good as some of those icons look, you have to discipline yourself to view and evaluate them at 57x57, cos thats how the user is going to see them. Also bear in mind that the user will see them among a multitude of icons, so they have to stand out for more than just being pretty..

I am tempted to conclude that these pretty icons just don't matter as much as we think they do, and the most effective ones may well be those with a solid bloc of color (like the path icon), cos they are easier to make out on a crowded screen .
Wait a little longer and, if we are very lucky, multicast will be "re-discovered" as well. That way, instead of having servers shove data down many sockets to many clients, they will write their payload down 1 multicast socket to all interested clients, with said payload crossing the network as little and as far as necessary but not more.

So goes the wheel of progress...
I'm sorry but that song by Sweden was just awful. Ok, not as bad as the singing grannies from Russian but still awful.
If I were in this game, I'd host everything locally and secure the crap out of it. In fact, securing your data and services against governments is likely to become a big business soon.

Business depends on the acceptance (or at least tolerance) of government. Expect anything that slows down the government to be outlawed.
I don't see how using selectors like:

'#id .className': do ->

is preferable to:

#id .className {

Also, the fact that this looks like CoffeeScript could really confuse people who see this code in a project and assume it compiles to JS.

IMHO If you're after more from your CSS, just use Sass (or LESS if you don't want the Ruby dependancy).
Coffeescript for CSS? I certainly hope this kind of thing doesn't become common place and people start using it for their CSS. Anything that heavily abstracts CSS making it more difficult to work on, debug and understand isn't helpful. This is a proof of concept more than anything by the looks of it, I hope it stays that way.

If you want to write prettier CSS without straying too far away from standard CSS syntax, I suggest using LESS or SASS/Compass which allows you to have functions, nest CSS rules and even write normal standard CSS.

This Coffeescript trend for JS is really starting to scare me as a developer that we are going to see a whole new generation of developers who don't know actual JavaScript, only the frameworks built upon them hiding the language itself. Is saving time really worth the cost of not understanding the code these compile-to-Javascript libraries generate? If the same thing were to happen to CSS to the point people don't know what real CSS syntax looks like, then we are all in trouble.
Say what you want about walled gardens, but their flowers are more beautiful and their grounds better maintained than their wild counterparts.
Any and everybody can bypass Wall Street to purchase US Treasury bonds:

http://www.treasurydirect.gov/
Not really. I use Debian Lenny which by default comes with 2.6.x but I've manually compiled and installed the 3.2.9 kernel. Works flawlessly.
Http://www.graduates.com/vg.aspx?i=3134948
Works on the new Evo 4G LTE.

I wish it had drawing ability, but your art skills are way better than anything I could do.

Was this inspired by Windoodles? http://windoodles.tumblr.com/
Did you see the new iOS and Android versions that launched last week?
UK Government launches £82.5m startup loans scheme for young entrepreneurs
Newer designs are not used because the environmentalists would rather have political power than electrical power. We have the know-how to design standardized reactors and build them by the hundreds, but not the will.

The meteor problem is even easier to solve. We need to build observation telescopes, lots of them. We then use off-the-shelf rockets to paycheck off-the-shelf nuclear bomb interceptors mounted on almost-off-the-shelf delivery platforms.
Maybe price won't be the most important factor, as some commenters have pointed out. Maybe the more important issue is the use of an "open format".

I'd like to see "ebooks" that can be converted to plain text (and hence other typesetting formats). What are the chances of that?
I've yet to see an RFC or standard that some developer somewhere didn't totally cock-up. :)
Introducing Photobook: KDE’s Answer To Shotwell
Some of the advantages listed in the article are questionable. A talent pool so small that everybody knows each other, potential partners who are so out of the loop that they don't know about your established competitors, and the opportunity to hire ex-finance guys who were unhappy with their last bonus.
I prefer to think that it will just briefly cross the Chandrasekhar limit, spew hordes of information out of the system in a supernova brighter than the galaxy of the entire Internet, and then subside to a neutron core no one cares about.

Like MySpace. Although MySpace never really had the mass, and is I suppose currently a white dwarf.
Yeah, I remember not even having a diskette, and getting angry at my mother for turning off the computer and destroying all my work.
I'm biased as I'm a writer covering Boston, but it's worth noting that New York's rise is tilted in the direction of a specific area: internet/mobile startups. But if you look at other innovation sectors like healthcare, energy, robotics, etc. New York is still extremely nascent.
i somewhat feel this is facebook trying to justify the massive IPO money and hence expanding into other areas that will make use of this money. Its the typical scenario were a company gets more funding then they probably need and in turn leads to that company addressing areas they might not have, given they had less money.

Facebook should get into mobile hardware but not in such a short time. Im sure there is lower hanging fruit they should be aiming for that could help boost their revenue many times over and get them back in the good graces of their shareholders again (if they care about that :) ).

If they get into the mobile space by having their own device it seems like such a high barrier simply to add to their advertising revenue, it almost seems like they are leaving their web and mobile apps business cause in terms of revenue, what they have (in web and mobile apps) is all they can figure out and NOW they need a new platform to expand on ?!
I think that the tech scene in nyc is anti-correlated with the stock market. I remember there was no activity when I was there and it started picking up post 2008 when the banks started laying off/stopped hiring technical people...

If the stock market picks up again I think that the tech scene will start receding. It is hard for quite a few people to turn down the pay that banks offer for the uncertain economic rewards of a startup.
> can not be built by only delegating your civic responsibilities to somebody else

I'm not suggesting we "only" delegate our civic responsibilities. I'm saying that every citizen shouldn't have to make politics his life's study and sole devotion in order to not get screwed out of his liberties.

Otherwise, our society's only point is to bicker endlessly about politics. What a sad society indeed.
If curious programmers end up spending several hours trying to beat noprocrast, wouldn't that, like, defeat the purpose of noprocrast? ;)
I read hacker news from thunderbird via RSS. This problem doesn't exist for me :)
The biggest problem I have with tools like Visual Age and XCode is they want to replace my tool chain. I want it to tie into my tool chain comfortably (I really hope Emacsy[1] succeeds; I would contribute time to that project!).

As I look at Light Table, I really hope they learn a LOT from Emacs:

• Editing is not secondary. In many IDEs, it feels like actually writing code is an afterthought.

• Mice suck[2].

• Allow me to integrate external tools easily.

• Make everything easily customizable and replaceable.

1. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/568774734/emacsy-an-embe...

2. They are fine for detail-oriented, fine-motor-control work. Coding is not one of those.
Why isn't X more popular?

WHY AREN'T YOU WRITING MORE CODE IN X???

If you like a language, use the language. I like Lua, so I code in Lua.

A friend of mine really likes Objective-C, and he writes in Obj-C at all times.

Please write code, it really doesn't even matter what language, just write code.
Dropping carbs dramatically after living a life where you ate a normal/high amount of carbs is going to, most likely, make you miserable. If decreasing your carbs is of interest to you, do so slowly over time.
I don't get it, is he noteworthy at all?
Android Sooner, ill-fated prototype killed by iPhone
I'm not sure I agree with this particular approach, but I have been wondering lately if things would be simpler if styling was accomplished in a JS dialect instead of CSS. The popular CSS preprocessors are getting more and more like full-blown languages already so why not just do everything in JS anyway?
> despite the name, CoffeeScript is not required;

So think of an original name instead of latching onto the cachet of another project.

> it just makes writing objects (as well as everything else) easier.

I actually find the CSS example in your README to be far easier to understand than the convoluted mess above it.
It would be even cooler if I could tell it to ignore replies to relatively recent comments (say, less than 24 hours old). I don't want to get flooded with notifications about threads that I still have open in a tab somewhere.
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This is true, you can already see with the iDevices restricting browsers to Safari only (and similar restrictions in Windows 8) that the web as an applications platform could be easily killed by the restrictions on the device.

I sometimes think there is a false dichotomy presented between usability/security and flexibility.
This seems a little like suggesting that we should install a totalitarian dictator so that the masses don't have to worry about messy subjects like voting and politics.

I think that the popularization of "walled garden" computing really came with the iPhone. Since the iPhone was more usable than any other smartphone to date there was an assumption that everything apple did was right. When really it was just that other companies did (and continue to do) an inexcusably bad job on usability.

Let's assume that the iPhone had somewhat less restrictive policies about what was allowed onto the store (assuming that malware and scamware was still disallowed) and also allowed side loading onto the phone, would this have impacted it's popularity in a negative way?
The problem with the Internet is it can be difficult to know which governments you have to be tolerated by. And that is where hosting your own and securing it might be helpful.