skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nah--I wrote that about Amazon's initial design for an internal-only enterprise backup system, which was created by an MBA and given to me to make happen. (I scrapped it in favor of hiring someone who knew how to do it).
huh? Whoever considered facebook data private..
>it seems to have too much syntactic overhead

yeah, it's pretty ugly. I don't think anyone in the Go community would disagree with you there.

>Go code generally uses if branches when a type-safe case is due (e.g: When analyzing return codes).

Sure, that's mostly true of that use case. The difference is that if you return multiple values, one of which is an error, the other returned value is often the zero-value for that type. If you have an error, the other value isn't de facto nothing. I have to admit that I've never used that "feature" and I can't even contrive a hypothetical situation where I would want to.

The reality is that it's not a sin to branch on a value. If you want to do something based on whether one date is earlier than the other, I can't see why you would need to bring a type system to a boolean party.

I think Rob Pike summed it up really well, when he said something to the effect of "people ask me why we would make a language that's not theoretically interesting, and they're right; Go isn't very interesting from a theoretical standpoint, it's just useful". They're not really setting out to revolutionize programming theory; they're setting out to revolutionize programming practice. Go is designed to let large numbers of non-genius-level programmers make concurrent software that's pretty stable, while Haskell is designed to scare the everliving shit out of anyone that sucks at programming. From my experiences, the Haskell programmers that I know are probably the smartest programmers I know that have never made anything that's of any interest to non-programmers. That's not really meant to say something about the value of that type of programming; I think it's valuable, it's just not the type of programming that I'm interested in doing. A friend of mine that is a Haskell programmer once showed me how great of a programming language Coq is by showing me how to prove that multiplication is commutative, which is probably the most intellectually masturbatory thing I've ever seen anyone do with programming. Of course, some of my other friends who were into that type of programming thought it was very, very cool. By contrast, I made some toy that I showed to my infant niece and it made her giggle and that made me happy. The happiness of my users is more important to me than the purity of my code. So... it just depends what you want to do.

I think you're actually correct, and I appreciate what I've learned about Haskell's type system, but I think you're just missing the point of the Go project or what makes people like it. They haven't set out to make the most perfectly safe, beautiful and pure programming language, because Haskell already did that and the world doesn't need two Haskells; we just need a saner Java for writing big concurrent programs that can quickly compiled to machine code.
There's a very large Windows developer community. And some of those developers have thought about "working individually, in smaller companies, or in startups, building consumer-facing apps or services", and then thought about having to learn a new language, and thought about having to learn a new development environment, and thought about having people seeing you with one of those phones (1), and decided that it wasn't worth the effort or pain.

So some of those developers are just the sort of people who might make the leap into the Windows 8 ecosystem. Microsoft has always looked after developers so I agree with fpgeek that it will be more about PR and marketing and image than the ability to attract developers. Indeed PR and marketing and reality distortion was what enabled Apple to become the dominant player in the smartphone market.

(1) See the religious wars article that happened to be on the front page concurrently with this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4150951
We end to judge people by our own standards, and exptect them to be like us. This is something I've been dealing with a lot, and have noticed other programmers dealing with it, too.

I always have a problem with smiling. I smile a lot, and am generally a happy person. People hate that. They want me to look down, be depressed, and generally be a party-pooper. But I just cant do it. Have even been called names a work because of that.

My daughter is also like that, and usually gets the same treament yours got. And I'd like to apologize for that lady. Don't let that get in the way of having a great time.
Fact is, the most fun I have is when I'm out with my girls (wife and daughter) and we just start having fun with whatever is in front of us.
Last time we went to fly kites I found two broken kites, and used both to build one. Everyone was looking a me like I'm a nutjob, and even made some comments. But you know what? I gave my daughter that kite and it was he highest flying kite in the whole park!

Like the internet says: "Haters gonna hate". To which I add: "Let them hate while I have a great time, mate."

:)
He vastly underestimates the dedication of .NET programmers and enterprise IT to Windows. Visual Studio / C# / .NET is still the best development environment I've ever used. Devs who love it will stick by it through thick and thin (see: WPF, Silverlight).

Windows 8 may not be successful in the consumer space, but I imagine it has a serious shot at doing very very well in the workplace.
Someone's afraid of iOS 6 Beta 2.
https://developers.google.com/maps/terms
10.1.2(a): "You must not charge users or any other third party any fee for the use of the Maps API Implementation, the Service, or the Content ... "

You can use it on a commercial site, but the maps implementation must be available to free users. It limits your options but there are plenty of sites that are commercial ventures and work within these limitations.
Just a marketing stunt.
I'm curious to see what new fonts might be in the works for retina displays. Most (all?) existing fixed-width fonts seem to have legibility on low-res displays as a major design consideration. Since that factor is now eliminated, could we be in for some awesome new typefaces?
I'd love to run some of these ideas by you too
The natural Microsoft developer community isn't someone looking to make the next killer app for the public, instead most of that community are inhouse corporate groups who make internal apps. Microsoft does a very good at supporting this community with tools and other goodies.

So the type of apps you're going to see for this platform aren't going to be ones sold in app stores, but internal mission critical apps. This community is also very much about supporting legacy and in no rush for the latest and greatest. And while this ecosystem may not be sexy it's very profitable and it's a focus that both Apple and Google are weak at.

Also Microsoft already has the sales relationships with these large companies so they will place orders. To me this is more about Microsoft going after the turf of companies like Dell and HP than anybody else. I have to wonder if we'll see Microsoft branded PCs and servers in the near future. In my mind this is in the same league as Oracle buying Sun.
I'm not a big fan of TIOBE [1], but Ada is in the top 20 and ranks above Lua, Go, Haskell, Scala, Clojure, Scheme, Ocaml, Erlang, and a bunch of others that get more mention here. If an article called Haskell or Go "mainstream" would you have called them out on it? Ada is still popular in a lot of fields.

I don't get the hate on Ada. It has built in tasks/threading, strong typing, low level access when you need it, generics, native compilation, a decent toolchain, an open standard, ...

[1] http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....
But what about all of those software businesses that have built on top of the iOS API + App Store? Would you say that they are also taking a massive risk?

Yes, without question. Business doing so should at the very least diversify across platforms and technologies.
Iran could turn around tomorrow and reassign everyone from its nuclear weapons programme to cyberwarfare instead.
Can someone explain this part to me:

"And during that decade, almost every such developer I knew switched to the Mac if they weren't already there, partly because it was better for developing web apps."

This is the first time I've ever heard anyone make this claim, which seems dubious at best. How in the world is the Mac better for developing web apps?
Euro Mobile Carriers Staring into Abyss
I think you've rather missed his point - it has nothing to do with how good the car is to drive or not, it's a judgment on what buying the car would say about your aspirations. As usual from Clarkson, it's extremely opinionated and nobody sensible would take it as the final arbiter on anything, although it is a unique and fairly perceptive take on the car.
Europe, especially Margret Thatcher in Britain were very against German Unification... but in the end Unification was a victory for captitalism or communism... which was an important at the time.
Honestly - the guy should apply his thoughtfulness and drive toward not eating so many hamburgers. There is a good reason why the insurance companies want to see that information.

I'm more or less young and healthy, and I think that my purchasing history would probably reflect that. But if they dug deeper, or took a look at my social networking profiles, they'd find out that I'm a climber. There are even picture of me on Facebook climbing ice without a rope.

I have heard that banks will be looking at our profiles in order to help determine our credit worthyness in the next few years; could medical insurers do the same?
What do you mean nothing would change? If the Federal Reserve all of the sudden prints 10% of the dollars in existence to pay the US's debt, won't that devalue everyone else's salaries and such by around 10%?
The fact that we are having this conversation is a measurable effect of consciousness.

Consciousness interacts with the world and causes bodies to do different things. This is a measurable effect. A p-zombie in an unconscious universe is less likely to talk about "qualia" than a conscious being.

Hopefully we will discover some simpler effects to measure in the future, but for know we're stuck with "people sure talk about it a lot for something that doesn't exist...".
Yes, it is where John Goerzen works.
That such a thing is possible blows my mind - a company placing an explicit bet on someone's death?

Um, life insurance is also a explicit bet on someone's death, right (a short bet, but a bet nevertheless). Also, a defined-benefit pension plan is a long bet on someone's death.
Good ol CLAD!
TomTom is reportedly Apple's supplier of map data

Apple get some of their data from OpenStreetMap.
Developing Self-Confidence: Why Most People Approach It Completely Wrong
Hey thanks for that. I wasn't aware I could type smaller sizes into the font selector. It doesn't seem to work very well though. iTerm2 still renders a scaled font when I do that. Terminal does render the bitmap font, but bold text is all screwed up - apparently it's bolding by rendering twice, slightly offset - only that offset is now multiple pixels, so it doesn't look bold, it looks like two overlapping renders. Emacs has issues with the font selector dialog in general, and doesn't appear to accept typed values at all. Further, when setting the font the normal emacs way (using an X11-like font description), it errors out when trying to give it a font with a fractional size. Monaco 5 does work, but it's not quite right.

Anyway, I wasn't really trying to get Monaco 9 back, I'm actually happy I can use "real" fonts now and still get as much code as I'm used to on screen.
We switched from Google Maps to OSM because they were too expensive. Now that we are using the Leaflet JS lib, we are really happy with it. Not only is it a fairly nice API, but it is open source, so it is much easier to debug than working with Google's obfuscated code. Even with this price reduction, I see no reason to even consider switching back.

The only downside to OSM is that we needed the tiles served up through https since our site is always https, but there are workarounds for that. ;-)
Easy, it's a POSIX-compliant OS and the vast majority of the web is deployed on servers with a similar environment. This is doubly true of the consumer-oriented web apps that Marco's talking about.
Ahhh EPROMs, so much fun to be had with these lil guys. They're everywhere!

It really is a lot of fun to dump old chips and see what they contain. I have a few devices here at the office that I like to update configs on just to hyper-terminal in on and play around with once in a while. EEPROM's are a similar sort of fun, but always feels just that much more nostalgically "legacy."

I've got a USB based EPROM burner which makes easy work of the burning and flashing.

Got my start with this type of thing when I used it to burn EPROM's for my friends and modify their ECU's to accept EPROMS vs the factory read-only chips that came in them.

We'd dump the original EPROM values, adjust things, burn it all back to an EEPROM and pop it in the freshly added ZIF socket. Voila, new fuel/timing maps. :)
Cool hack to take a photo of yourself on every commit
a company placing an explicit bet on someone's death?

This is what the entire life insurance business model is base on. What's amazing is the level of information gathering possible now, not the fact that they're (still) doing it.
I agree with you there and I'd be happy to see "use strict" in PHP.
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The idea of hashing the server side token is still a good idea, just incase the db of valid tokens is ever stolen, they would be useless. But I don't really see the need of hashing the server side token+the encrypted password, since, as you said, just invalidate all tokens on password reset.
Reach out to Guenther over at http://www.opoloo.com/ – great guy, reasonable prices.
I have a very healthy diet, but I buy all of my produce at markets that only accept cash. I wonder what conclusions an insurer would draw from my supermarket purchases (mostly meat & dairy)?
The change was an improvement .. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make? Maybe I misunderstood you or you don't understand the change.
Apple Stores’ Army, Long on Loyalty but Short on Pay
article is pure fud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt

and why is OP trying to make up a word where one already exists?

http://www.marco.org/2012/06/22/microsoft-developer-problem#...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oughts
Well, besides an environment impact, and the fact that we're running out of resources and should be trying to get the most out of these devices?

No, I don't. I'm listing the three competitor OS's and explaining that they all suck.

Yes, it does. Because there is nothing wrong with the device from a technological standpoint, and it most certainly can handle the tasks. There are a few new things in iOS 6 that are going to be rolled into almost every new application, and they aren't in iOS5. So as a developer, I can either use Apples version and reduce my headaches by 1000 fold, or I can support iPad 1. This means that the list of available software is going to diminish significantly.
I often switch between:

* office desk
* standing desk (really an ikea shelf)
* kitchen table
* couch
* cafe (very easy to carry)

Have a three pound computer means I don't even have to think about these switches.
What a bizarre article. Garbage collection is several orders of magnitude slower than manual memory management? I don't think that's ever been true.
Nimbus iOS Framework Visual Catalog
I see a lot of admiration towards Germany because they recovered after 2 world wars + the fall of the Berlin Wall. On the whole Germans are hard-working and ingenious people and you can't help admiring them for that.

Quite the contrary, people in the European Union hope that Germany will bail out everybody. In my opinion this is unlikely and if I were a German citizen I would not agree to have myself and my family indebted because of the EU ... however I hope that they'll understand that together we are stronger.

The EU is already the biggest economy in the world and if it survives this crisis it will also be the strongest for years to come.
Agreed. I've worked on a few much smaller scale social sites, and it's been common practice to create a slew of fake accounts for testing purposes (especially for commenting and user interaction), and in our case we didn't really add any value to the conversation as they had achieved.

I can see how it may be misinterpreted, but for us it was essential in creating the best experience for our users in the end, not for any strategic purposes. NBD
FYI, the Facebook app does this as well. I changed my Facebook password and the app still worked fine on my iPad.
Iceland is a very good option, I live in Reykjavik and I think you should be able to find everything your looking for here.

* Iceland has reliable internet.
* Everybody here knows how to speak English.
* Same timezone as UK.
* Very safe place so your laptop won't be stole.

The flights don't have to be to expansive if you book them in advance, it is cheap to stay in hostels here. You can work from cafes here since they all have internet connections or if you want I could perhaps assist you in finding a short term office space.

Just send me an email if I can assist you in any way.

regards,
Haukur @ bungalo.is
Do you have a license for that backpack?
The author's logic seems lacking. How would small labels continue to exist if no one ever paid for music? Small labels are no more immune to a fall in the music market than the large ones; probably less so. And how are musicians going to keep finding time to make music if they can never get paid for it? Why should they have to bus tables to pay for the privilege of entertaining you? The sense of entitlement in this post is a bit much for me.
http://eragnew.posterous.com/private/fHHEsjlCtc
It is hard to believe that the majority of web developers are on the Mac since there are so many more ASP.NET jobs posts than Django or ROR jobs - at least here in the UK.

Having said that the main reason I chose Microsoft as the platform for my products was their commitment to backwards compatibility and the It Just Works policy. As an example, I have an Itanium server running Windows and my applications developed on x86 just work there, maybe not optimally but they do. I believe the same was true of Alpha machines. Windows 8 partly does away with this since the ARM version does not support Win32 applications.

Assuming that ARM is the winner in the tablet arena, any tablet application will have to be built from scratch which poses an interesting dilemma: Which platform should I choose for tablet development? The iPad, Android or Windows? At this moment Windows is the worst choice because it is not ready, there are no devices in the market and, what could be the reason to wait for it, my applications will not "Just Work".

Microsoft does not have a developer's problem but the times ahead are pretty rocky for anyone with a large investment in the platform.
Pinstagram and the rise of mash up apps
Kind of a joke of an interview with the creator of Pinstagram. What do you think about mash up apps?
There's a number of scientific researchers on HN (I'm recently ex-neurosci, and I've contacted a number of other people through their profiles to chat about biology stuff).
How do you spend your time as a business leader? [PODSCAST]
"deserve" is probably the wrong word (forgive me for hastily typing out my comment before running off to a meeting).

My point was really about PadMapper acting in good faith with Craigslist; they do send traffic to Craigslist for the full data on the properties and such. They're a good company doing good things--and it's sad that Craigslist's refusal to innovate has now bled over into "no one else can innovate for us"
We’re mortgaging the future of the younger generation (Niall Ferguson)
Just for whatever it's worth: the majority of ASP.NET job listings are probably for line-of-business apps at non-technology companies.

Now, it's worth knowing that line-of-business dev jobs probably constitute a gigantic chunk, maybe the majority, of all programming jobs in the industry. So it's not nothing that those jobs are dominated by ASP.NET and J2EE.

But to Marco's point, line-of-business developers don't have a great track record of marketing applications directly to consumers. "Enterprise software" has picked up its connotations for a reason.
Marco didn't hit the target here: beyond the risk to be an attractive platform from the point of view of the developer the speed of development in Visual Studio /.NET is superior than Eclipsr/XCode. Beyond average developers will feel comfortable with their platform of choice but below average developers can go to market very fast
Marco didn't hit the target here: beyond the risk to be an attractive platform from the point of view of the developer the speed of development in Visual Studio /.NET is superior than Eclipse/XCode. Beyond average developers will feel comfortable with their platform of choice but below average developers can go to market very fast.

I would add that the relationship between developers and microsoft is more deep than in Apple/Google. I always tell the same story: My company reverse engineered several Microsoft products without APIs available and their test team asked if we need some help to integrate those products with Windows 7! I can't imagine Apple and Google doing that.
http://eragnew.posterous.com/private/oakshqJGqJ
Real US unemployment is way larger than the official numbers:

http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-chart...

The numbers in the EU are also manipulated, but not by such a wide margin. When Europeans talk about unemployment, the statistic they're using is equivalent to the broadest US U6.
Agreed, this is too little too late.

We're about to roll out a major maps-based feature that we've been working frantically on for the last several weeks (a yelp-like discovery system for amateur athletic events). Despite having extensive past development experience with Google Maps, the price forced us to go with an OSM-based system (MapQuest tiles + Leaflet).

The surprise? Leaflet/OSM is actually a lot nicer to develop against than Google Maps. Leaflet is a superior API, and the fact that it's open source means I'm never left wondering "WTF?" when there is some strange drawing glitch. I'm never going back.

There are a handful of features that Google Maps provides that OSM does not, and the quality of the Google geocoder is slightly superior. But for drawing a map and icons/polygons, scrolling to determine search bounds, etc, OSM is a superior solution. I would never have discovered this without getting "pushed out of the nest" by price.

One catch: To do HTTPS, we have to proxy the tiles. No big deal.
I believe I can add value to (one of) the (many) team(s) you are currently building. Can we discuss more, either via the tubes or IRL?