skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's easy: the best recognize languages are just a means to an end. Language snobbery, in my experience, tends to be highly correlated with being a "wannabe" rather than "great" and a useful filter.

You will find any number of C/C++ programmers who think you can't write anything in Java. Many Java programmers think you can't write anything (beyond 100 lines) in Python. Many Python programmers think you can't (or simply shouldn't) write anything in PHP. And so on.

Some people are insecure.

Some people can't separate their language from themselves (and see a criticism of their language as a criticism of them as people).

Some people exemplify the Dunning-Kruger effect [1].

Some, like teenagers, are just asserting their identities.

Some simply have biases that are mental blocks.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
I'm not the best and the brightest, but I'm sure the people they are going after are more excited and concerned with the quality and quantity of problems that facebook is in the unique position to solve. They could probably care less what they use to solve said problems.
Still need to distinguish between a large insect and a plane having the signature of a large insect. Otherwise you'd have a lot of false positives.
June 29th, 2012 - Facebook, Twitter cut into U.S. Productivity by 28%
RIM Apparently Not Interested In Switching To Windows Phone
Probably referring to Apple's market cap being twice that of Microsoft:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=apple+market+cap%2C+mic...
I have one concern with flash dying: It means that annoying, crappy ads will migrate to HTML5. Annoying HTML5 ads will not be as easy to selectively block. I suspect that the low quality UX will simply migrate and crash a bit less.

Flashblock was a great method of filtering annoying content.
It's what Google has been doing ever since it was founded and why AGPL was invented.
The problem with this is that they are adopting a good tool because a wrong reason. Linux is not immune to virus, and then what would happen when Linux is popular enough to bring malware's writers attention? Are they going to switch to OSX?
Agree. Horrible headline.
wait a few more months and experience a few near-death moments or failures regarding your startup and you will see that the hard part is keeping the energy your started out with while doing the marathon that is startup-live!
So this is free for now, what are you thinking of charging?
You make your own banking system or something. Say you give a class of 10, $2 each. They all owe it back to you which makes the balance -2 each. So ask them how much you're owed back in entirety. I bet most of the class will crack it themselves without you and your rules :)
That's what they call "The Internet". They may wonder why everyone else likes it so much, or they like it well enough as they see it that they're not even aware of what they're missing.

I'm not much of a car guy, but I like my car just fine. Someone who's really into cars and has test-driven hundreds of them could probably point out dozens of deficiencies in my car and the way I drive it that I'm totally oblivious to. He might not like my car at all, but I'm happy with it and see no reason to 'upgrade' it.

Same goes for any other product field, hobby, interest, etc. People who are more interested are better acquainted with what's available and the way to get the best experience, and people who are less interested are happy enough with their point of view and oblivious to any short-comings.
It's possible that they might do that.
>"Well, I doubt it would ever become popular if it wasn't useful and easy to use."

Like Windows 3.1?
Burning in a Module with Random Unit Testing
I hear about them a lot. The difference is that PHP is so much worse. Yes, every language has warts. But PHP is the only popular language I know of which is essentially nothing but warts.

Of course that's subjective, and people disagree, but there really does seem to be a real, qualitative difference between the warts on a mostly nice language like Python, and the ubiquitous bizarro world that makes up just about the entirety of PHP.
In 2008, shortly after App Engine launched, I was running an app that was a totally bad fit for it (tons of concurrent writes to the same rows). I actually talked on the phone with a Google engineer to try to figure out how to optimize the problem. That was pretty sweet.

On the other hand, I was managing the community for that same project through a Google Group, and one day the group simply disappeared for 24 hours or so -- it was as though the group had never existed, but couldn't be recreated. Then it popped into existence again, no explanation. There was absolutely no way to even ask for support, let alone get it.

My takeaway, was, I guess, the obvious one: if you're relying on a web service for something important to your business, you need an SLA. If you're getting a service for free, you should assume it might vanish one day and never come back, taking your data with it. (Especially with a company like Google that's known to let old products languish and to have no meaningful path for reporting problems. ) Sometimes that's OK, sometimes it's not.
I'm thinking of the following: audio track of the video ---[process (language recognition)]---> transcription ---[process (classifier based on textual language model)]---> answer to "gibberish?"

So good transcriptions would be good, regardless of the noise environment. It might give some false positives, but I expect that a good price to pay to avoid the kind of mess they create now.
That's a case where they see it as worth it, and the entire purpose of the project was to contribute back. Part of the NSA's mission isn't just to hack everybody else, but to help defend, as well. At least some part of the agency actually does seem a bit dedicated to that task, despite my natural cynicism causing me to be a bit surprised each time I see it.
"And people find all sorts of real criticisms in the process - yet none of them matter!"

I'd like to mention something similar that I found in human behavior with respect to manufacturing jobs that we used to do for customers at a company that I was at. What we found was that people had 1 or 3 major complaints about something that were pretty valid. But what they did then was feel that they needed to build a strong case so they ended up coming up with as many nits as they could to build their case as if that somehow made the true concerns stronger. Just my experience but I have found that if you have a true concern about something to simply focus on trying to get that fixed. If you throw everything in the other party sometimes feels that they will never be able to please you and then they don't even try to fix anything. YEMV.
Did anyone read the post? 1.9 will still support ie6/7/8, so just use that for compatibility. Let's move the web forward. I still use XP at home and don't care because I use Firefox. So if grandma/grandpa and corporate america don't get all the new bells and whistles, they are probably used to it, because they don't have rounded corners, text-shadow and box-shadow on everything anyway. They probably won't even know what they are missing on that HP/Dell POS. :p
Amazon RDS East Having Issues
Amazon east RDS currently having "connectivity" issues according to their status page at in US-EAST-1 http://status.aws.amazon.com/
He's been an HTML coder for about 10 years doing sites with front page and other html authoring tools.

Him figuring out <? print date('Y'); ?> is fairly easy when he already understands html.
Would be great if browsers could provide a "black and white" contentEditable that just lets the user edit the textContent in an HTML element.
Let's be honest: you are upset because you have sometime committed to saying the GIL is a huge deal and you feel insulted by anyone saying it isn't, which is why you are using emotionally loaded words like 'petulant' and 'childish' and 'ignorant' and 'bad'.

The GIL is the single biggest target for language-advocacy FUD against Python by advocates of other languages. I would be a rich person if I got a dollar for every time I saw someone trashing Python as a toy language because of the GIL, without significant knowledge of how to use Python. It's just a much huger issue to someone without real Python experience than it is to people with Python experience.

Setting that aside, there are a vast number of use cases where someone might try to use threads when actually that's not a good solution. It actually isn't incredibly easy to come up with cases where the GIL is this huge fatal flaw. It's really sad how many times I have seen people ranting about the GIL and totally unaware of multiprocessing, unable to give a technical reason why they can't try processes, unaware of greenlets, wholly unaware that the GIL does not exist in Jython/IronPython, etc.

I'm sure that doesn't apply to you, which would put you in the minority. Thus, "often says more about the person doing the complaining".

Threads should be used judiciously, because they dramatically increase the complexity of a program and the difficulty of debugging and reasoning about it. Shared-everything is a great way to blow your foot off if you don't specifically need it. So if you throw threads at every problem indiscriminately, then that really is a weak point in your programming. (Note: I am not saying that using threads is always a bad idea)

If you are a good programmer then you should already know, and not be offended to hear, that threads are a tool of specific applicability, not a panacea to scale up everything.
The API is what it is, but the real biggest problem with PHP is also it's biggest feature: it's got the lowest barrier to entry of any server-side language.

The result is that a lot of PHP is awful, cargo-cult stuff glued together by people who have no idea what they are doing.

It's possible for talented developers to create really good programs in PHP, but I don't see how a new language is going to solve the essential problem. People who don't really know how to program and just want to accomplish some simple goal are going to use whatever language is the quickest means to their ends.

Copy/paste spaghetti is a nightmare to maintain in any language. And the people creating it are the same people who are /not/ going to read Atwoods post, don't understand very much about how programming works in general, and will continue to create cruddy programs no matter what language it is written in.
Ask HN: Are you happy with product search?
While trying to buy a new phone online, I suddenly realized how much I dislike product search.

I'll get autocomplete and recommendations, and I'll most certainly end up with a nice list of products to choose from, but I find it very hard to make a final decision without reading through pages of reviews, google for more information or check youtube for hands-on footage.

So, I thought I'd ask what the HN community thinks about product search.

Thank you for your thoughts (:
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I think it is for the command/control center - or at least that was my take on the article.
Raldi, I respect you a lot, but this statement is hardly reflective of what's been going on. Criticism of Kahn academy, especially by math teachers has been going on for years, only to be consistently ignored. This is them going 'well, I'm not being heard any other way, so let's try this.'

The worse part is that you describe this as a fight. It's not a fight, and I know that those teachers who are most outspoken against khan don't want it to be a fight. They want a collaboration, but it's not happening. It's really too bad that any criticism of khan is viewed as coming from the 'what's wrong with education' side of things. Pedagogically speaking, Khan academy is stuck with stuff known bad decades ago. Khan academy is like using rocket ships to transport telegrams. Yeah, the technology is cool, but the teaching practices need to be there too. That's what's currently missing from Khan academy, and there has been very little apparent effort on their part to actually fix that.
The World of Art and Copyrights
//-- sarcasm --//

Wow, fantastic work guys! Your condescending commentary on the methods and content of the Khan videos is sooo helpful to a bunch of people who have benefited because of them. I know that my own kids, who augment their math from school with the Khan videos, really appreciate your mocking sentiment toward totally free content that has raised their knowledge, acumen and confidence toward math.

//-- end:sarcasm --//

Seriously, you want to "raise the level of the discussion" with this type of piss-poor commentary? The only thing you're accomplishing at the moment is simply re-inforcing the stereotype that traditional education teachers are threatened by this content.

Want to change the conversation? Don't sit around critiquing things; get off your ass and produce some content that includes your oh-so-much-better approach. Right now, you're just bitching about it and -- this I can promise -- nobody will care.
Spec by Spec: China’s 5 Hottest Homegrown Smartphones
So you think the Navy (and their contractors) will be maintaining their own fork of linux and continually port changes over from mainline linux into their fork? I doubt they are that ambitious/stupid. It'll be much much easier for them to get whatever changes they make accepted into the mainline and maintained as 1st class pieces of the kernel.
Well, if the Taliban capture a drone, would they be entitled to a copy of the license under the purposes of the GPL? :)
"Fix the problem, not the blame." - I first heard this in the movie Red October, I think. The other one that come to mind is John Wooden, the famous basketball coach, claiming that he liked players who made mistakes because those were the ones trying to make things happen.
Some is from compression, some is from friction. A flat plate aligned with flow will experience heating and not compress the flow.
You might want to read the fine print there... These companies aren't morons. A guy sitting next to me, on a United flight, and I worked out the math. At best you saved $50 on your airfare. You didn't fly for free. There's annual fees on top of limits sometimes on top of redemption restrictions... You just fell for the gimmick I'm afraid. In particular that Mileage Plus card. There used to be a better one from Continental. No free miles up front, but free checked bags and a % that you spend goes to a travel bank. I saved $40 on my flight to Austin, coincidentally, with average spending over a year or two. It's simply my travel cars now. The thing with these cards is that yes you can save a few bucks...a few...but you gotta go crazy over which one you use for which purchases. Dunno. It's a gimmick.
That's not a problem though, is it.
I should have expected someone with more knowledge of the system on HackerNews :)

What I mean is that whilst you guys at Facebook are using PHP you're not using it in the sense of 'we write code anywhere and deploy it anywhere'. There's an additional build step in between the developers and the final product, rather than just straight up serving PHP as is which is one of the biggest PHP recommendations. Although HipHop is open source so I guess you could still say it's within reach of all developers.
On the contrary, this is a excellent example of the benefits of open publishing. A very dubious paper is hyped in the press and the actually published work is available to all to be read and critiqued as thoroughly as it deserves. This, in my opinion, is completely independent from issues with the benefits and problems of peer review.
The funny thing is that I think everyone here could have predicted those outcomes, i.e. blue screen of death and in-operational craft. You wonder what it is like to work in an environment where the obvious is not allowed to be taken into account or ignored when you build systems.
Your problem here is that you are using your own experiences and extrapolating to the general. You think any math teacher you see teaches like that. This is not the case. The teachers that have been the loudest critics of Khan tend to be really excellent teachers. You know why? Teachers who teach like you describe don't care enough about their teaching let alone worry about what some website is doing.
Want a Ticket to eCommerce Hackathon? First You’ll Have to Solve a Puzzle
I think that was the last CEO, who no longer works there.
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/eng99/eng99460.htm
Also, ever hear about paying taxes with credit card for points? People do that too. Still not sure it's worthwhile.
A github pull request shares tools with tool developers and tool users. Are teachers sharing those educational insights with students ? if not , why ? and if so , is there a problem of reaching students with good educational content ?
Obviously they will not be releasing the entire source but it is certainly possible that DoD/Navy/Gov engineers could contribute certain modules, pieces, or resources back to the community.
This shouldn't be much of a surprise at all (if confirmed):
- Microsoft's rumored pricing strategy leaves little room for profit for the HW manufacturers.
- Before the Surface announcement Microsoft was seeing very little traction with ARM device manufacturers. ARM devices have been noticeably quiet during all of the tradeshows.

I'm guessing is that Microsoft prepared the Surface as a backup plan if they weren't satisfied their HW partners. This turned into a reality and Microsoft released the Surface knowing full well that they'd lose partners.

I wouldn't be surprised if the high rumored cost of Windows 8 is because Microsoft calculated it's profit margin (and risk) if it went the Surface route, then set the price based on that. If it's a zero-sum market (tablet sale is either Surface or Brand X Windows RT machine) then this works out (and Microsoft hubris does believe this is a zero-sum game).
> Linux is not immune to virus

No, but it's a lot easier to create a minimal / auditable Linux installation than it is with Windows.
If Microsoft had taken this approach a decade ago, perhaps Apple would not have grown to twice MS's size simply by caring about the end-to-end user experience.

Can we stop with the cargo-cult nonsense on here?

Apple has been following the same end-to-end approach for almost three decades. They had initial success, and then a decade bordering on bankruptcy. During that same period Microsoft became the most valuable company in the world, with the help of partners.

Seriously it is baffling how people can so easily make these armchair claims about what yields success and what doesn't. Just moments ago I saw another article that claimed that RIM needs to learn from Apple and Microsoft and own the whole chain (???!).
MPAA Using Megaupload Case as Backdoor SOPA, Court Hears
You are writing a forum which includes BBcode parsing, and Python's CPU usage is your bottleneck? Really?

You are devoting multiple cores to parsing an individual user's BBcode?

This is your example of a real need to remove the GIL?
Bad, bad, bad idea. The result is the devs who do most of the coding will get most of the blame that only demoralizes key contributors.

Unless you're also awarding gold stars for every bug-free line of code then this is just an unproductive disincentive.
> One thing that's wrong with PHP is all the bloated OO mega-frameworks people create on top of it to try and make it Java, Rails, whatever...

The thing that really fries my brain is templating systems built over frameworks -- PHP is already a templating system, and building another one in PHP is just silliness of the highest order. I mean, sure, separate out the gnarlies and include or require them as necessary (but, please, don't nest includes so deeply that you can't find anything anymore), but don't throw away what the environment provides just so that you can reinvent that particular wheel.
The best and the brightest appreciate the technical, product, and engineering challenges of Facebook and certainly don't waste their time whining about a language or feeling entitled.
I had to run a few small Clojure web apps for a customer on micro instances because only a few people would use them simultaneously, someone other than myself thought this was a good idea. I ended up running them using "nice" to keep the CPU use away from 100% and that solved the issue of being throttled. YMMV
Through Feminism to a New Humanism
Based on the sarcastic tone and comments of the two people in the video, I find it hard to believe they have any interest in cooperation. They're going for the lowest possible form of criticism. They even make fun of the guy's ethnic name at one point.
The article isn't about HP bailing from Windows altogether, it's about HP bailing from Windows RT (i.e. ARM tablet) licenses.

So yes, in this case MSFT would be more profitable - do you think they can make more money creating a superior experience, without crapware, where they can absorb the entire margin of the device.

Or can they make more money shipping software to OEMs who have historically stuffed it full of crapware, failed to release timely updates, and only give MSFT a tiny cut of the proceeds?
There is no pull request for Khan Academy. I don't even see a bug tracker. Teachers and other involved people have tried to do everything else; it just doesn't get their attention.

The last time Khan posted a call to hire on HN, I reached out to them about a position as a curriculum developer. They're more interested in expanding their back-end currently, not improving their instruction.
If it can track it continuously, I imagine speed will pretty much clear up any confusion.
Can't imagine that would be terribly difficult. They don't move like large insects for sure.
I think you are exactly right. Why pay thousands of dollars for operating system features that are either unstable or unnecessary, when you can use Linux for free and usual make it do exactly what you want.

I think that things like Raspberry Pi and OLPC will also help move linux into the hands of regular consumers.
This is simply a lie, there are plenty of ways to share data across PHP scripts, but like everything in PHP you have to half ass it. Shared memory extensions immediately come to mind.

PHP wasn't designed around a share-nothing architecture, being able to share data across requests is simply difficult with the random pile of features in PHP.

It's odd that one of the biggest users of PHP (Facebook) decided to remove this and share compiled code across requests. Oddly enough one of the biggest selling points of Zend is that you can share compiled code across requests.

If you can scale a database infinitely (as long as you have enough memory) as the OP suggests then I assure you your webserver will not fall down by sharing a few variables, or even keeping your entire dataset in RAM and shared. Infact if you keep these variables in memory shared across requests you'll scale much further than by putting those variables in MySQL (barring sharding and replication, which generally come with codebase changes anyway).