skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do that many people still use Visual Basic? Honestly, I'd like to know. I'd think surely that group of people would be on C#/.NET?
Actually, it's not true in mathematics either. A line is something which has one and only one dimension, and a point is something which has no dimension. A zero length line would not be a line, as it would have fewer than one dimension. So, there is no such thing as a zero length line.
Surprisingly, out of all the comments, this one caught my eye. I've been hiring programmers since 2005 that have to maintain or extend PHP systems. In 2005, it was difficult to find programmers that knew only PHP (or Perl, which was still used) who had any familiarity with object-oriented programming. Over time, PHP has bolted on features, and at each point, the vast numbers of available PHP programmers are (understandably) not familiar with those features. And obviously the systems that have to be maintained don't have these features. So the armies of PHP programmers are well matched to the old systems. This eliminates a huge risk to the business -- finding relatively inexpensive developers. This is an often cited advantage of PHP. But only the PHP of 2007 (or so) is relevant.

The PHP of 2009 might be worthwhile for the creation of business value (and possibly the reduction of maintenance-related risks), but as I said, the easily available programmers have no experience in those features or concepts. The more common scenario is that a particular programmer has experience in some other language that already included those features and doesn't mind working on old PHP systems. Believe me, there are not legions of these people.

And regarding the 'PHP of 2012', the major problem isn't the availability of programmers who have experience in the new features (they almost don't exist). It is the availability on distros stable enough to support an SLA or provide a modicum of security assurances. This problem applies to all languages though. I'm just pointing out that the 'PHP of 2012' is not as much of an option as it may appear.
Somehow Apple forgot that he was borrowing (let's not use stealing) many ideas from other companies. The "Slide to unlock" probably was inspired by Sony walkman's "slide to open". Surely, they must have got a lot of experience in suing other people over ideas they borrowed back from the windows GUI case in 80s.
Testing the User Interface with Automated UI Tests
Even in math, a line goes through two distinct points. You can't define a line with just a single point. And a segment is a piece of a line with a measurable length.

So, in English or in Math, the answer is no.
I wrote a little bit about installing swank-js a couple of posts up. You can also check out all my emacs-settings on github https://github.com/magnars/.emacs.d/blob/master/setup-slime-...

The only thing missing there is the packages installed through package.el, which would be slime-js in this case.

And here's the code for the bouncing ball: https://github.com/magnars/blockout
Nokia was Symbian, it was the enterprise Symbian devices in Europe contributing to their marketshare. The future of lowend could have been Meltemi, but the hardware would have been made in China and sold by Nokia, Meego is gone (last people pushed into their own company, per the planets today), Nokia (with their Microsoft transplant CEO) announced an EOL for Symbian and marketshare dried up.
I completely agree - It seems like this is one of the only other design responses on this board.

Every point you've made here is right. The harsh angles and general feeling of a "sharp razor" are just not right for Microsoft, or many other companies actually. It's experimental which is cool, but just far too strong to be adopted.
Microsoft's business model was innovative, even where their software wasn't.

Per-unit licensing, bundling, including the browser for free (which, BTW, screwed Spyglass out of any browser-related royalties).
I'd love to see Google and "the market" tell Samsung it's time to slowdown and make some official statements regarding how Samsung will support its products for current and future releases of Android.
The Postmodernism Generator - Reload the page to get alternative content
Ooh, very nice. I'll fix that straight away. Thanks!
agreed. Dart even though it has some awesome features, is still a technology preview, so I also wonder when it will be "stable" (some apis aren't "finished" yet) and it's a Google only thing. On the project's github page, you can read "The problem with JavaScript is that it sucks." ... JavaScript sucks if you don't know how it works, just like another language ... and what's the point of writting this when Dart itself compiles to JavaScript (who the fuck uses Dartium as their primary browser), finally the demo throws 18 errors ... fail.
How ACTA nearly won: the pathology of a lone voter
Agreed. I would be inclined to invest my energy in a new platform that was built for HTML5 from the get go.

This might be useful as stop-gap. But I would hate to bug-test anything built using this method.
Firebird 2.0.x series discontinued (EOL)
So a better logo for Microsoft would be a Katamari Damacy ball?
That's probably true of a large number of services people rely upon, but those services hide the fact by using the royal "we" and oblique references to the "team" in their announcements and press releases.
Trader e-mails over LIBOR manipulation made public
git: 'clone' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.

What? I don't know if this is allowed later and everything is sandboxed.
Technologies That Need To Go Exponential
Android spam bonnet discovered
Be safe with your selection of android apps
Ask HN Tea Lovers: How often do you drink green tea?
You underestimate just how much Perl there is out there (hint: a lot)
This has irked me because those who don't know anything about touch screen technology don't seem to understand that 'taps' are actually small swipes. The sensors have a far higher resolution than your fingers ability to stay still, so the system rounds down small 'swipes' based on x time over y legnth into what the user meant as taps. It senses the touch down (start point) and the touch up (end point) which may or may not be a zero length swipe or even a small distance swipe.

At a a hardware level and strictly speaking, taps are swipes, Apple just abstracted tiny swipes away into a tap function.
I program Go on both emacs and sublime text 2, very good support for both editors.
Yeah, that would be pretty cool. I'll be making something along those lines to aid me while I'm making that bouncy ball into an actual game. I wouldn't know how to start making it general purpose, but as a wrapper around canvas and requestAnimationFrame it is definitely doable.
I've seen download corruption effecting apps from the Mac App Store.
> The "Slide to unlock" probably was inspired by Sony walkman's "slide to open".

Or you know, the physical slide to unlock bars on gates. I don't understand this misguided uproar around company Y suing company X for patent infringement. Why don't people start addressing the elephant in the room which what I assume is the USPTO.
I can't stand HackerNews
Flops in the Technology of 2012
The technology world is always full of surprises. While some small ideas and decisions turn into big business.
The 4 yo was excited about getting a computer, but didn't care at all about using it. She just didn't 'get' the steam locomotive. She was willing to participate (and was interested) in typing characters on the screen and having something happen, but I just didn't have enough at an appropriate level to maintain her interest. I had hoped to work up to the gui and tuxpaint, but we didn't get that far before she completely gave up. I think there would've been (general) merit in this approach, but there's just not enough command line apps that are suited to this age group. The 2yo could also make the train go, but he didn't recognize it as a train. It was probably too fast to decipher the ascii art.

Somewhat strangely, starting the following day, the 4yo started calling her fake baby cell phone a 'computer' and is really in to pretending to do things on it. Crazy stuff like talking about how well she's doing at playing videos games. We don't play any video games in our house. It's as though I unlocked some possibility of having her own computer and her mind is running with it.
I think the author addresses this quite effectively in the article starting with:

"I'm sure some people reading this are going to say "But language FrobBub has had NoduleFoos for years cretin!"."

Priceless :-).
Given that the Neonode N1 had it first, I suspect that we would.

I think it probably would have come about not long after capacitive touchscreens became the standard input device for phones no matter what. It's the easiest gesture to make that is fairly unlikely to happen by accident when the phone is in a pocket.
I slid to unlock the bathroom door in elementary school in the early nineties. I fail to see how doing it on a phone is new or innovative.
If I were to venture a guess, it's got more to do with the presentation of those ideas, rather than their substance.
I have found that browsing new gives you a whole different perspective of this site than if you just hit the front page. I never use the front page. Sure you have to slog through a little more junk links, but HN has a pretty good format for skimming.
India-Pak Foreign Secretaries discuss terrorism, J&K
>You do realize that Go compiles to machine code and Python is a dynamically interpreted language?

Which doesn't matter much if Go's machine code/runtime is inefficient or if Python libs are written in C in the first place whereas Go's are written in Go.
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There's still a lot of legacy software running VB, e.g. the camera software that I'm currently working with now. Software written in VB.net for the most part plays nicely with C#.net, so there's no hurry to upgrade.

I find it hard to believe that it actually _increased_ in ranking though.
Most used is not the same as most popular !

People use objective-C when programming for iOS or iPhone. These are popular, not the programming language.
> On the personalization point, no you don't have to. Honestly, I find that all changes done to Android by manufacturers tend to make it worse and not better.

We never talked about whether the others were any good at software either. The reality is that the iPhone was a transformation from a hardware centric device to a software centric one. And most manufacturers are terrible at software. Have you ever heard anyone praising the quality and usability of software from Samsung, LG or HTC?

Android let them avoid doing software, but for commercial reasons you still want to do something. If you have exactly the same software on two devices then the user will use price as the differentiator. Software is an easy way to make them look different, and to give people a reason to pay more you need to have something unique. As a Motorola person explained there is no way Verizon is going to stock a bunch of different phones where the only difference is a little Samsung/Motorola/LG logo.

Nokia's plans were all over the place. They were developing multiple different platforms concurrently, but weren't getting traction on the new ones. They had no idea there was a problem, hence no inkling of an Android solution.

If they went Android they too would have customized it to give people a reason to buy their devices over the competition. (The million people a day activating devices are not you or me.)

You can of course prove every manufacturer wrong by starting your own company that does stock only, and make reasonable profits. We'd all love to hear a success story like that :-)
I have noticed women tend to give a lot of empty compliments, and I have seen it more with women than men. I think this article is trying to get away from basic straightforward compliments with something more crafted, but it seems like the (rushed) conclusion was that something genuine that feels like it just had to be said is the best compliment.

Then the other day my husband and I went to the bagel place down the street and he randomly told a guy in a Pink Floyd t-shirt "great shirt" with a genuine smile to which the guy responded "thanks, I like it too". This really surprised me because my husband isn't extroverted at all and especially not before a cup of coffee. In fact, I don't think I'd ever seen him randomly strike up a conversation with a stranger. Its something I'm more likely to do. And then 10 minutes later as we sat outside this strange came out carrying our order and said with a jolly laugh, "where's my tip?" before heading to his car.

Something happened there, they connected and it felt nice. And I was just the observer.

We sat and talked about the interaction a bit, because we are in the suburbs before and pondering whether it was due to the fact that people in the city half expect you to be crazy but maybe our new town was different. If feel like I am still detoxing from living in SOMA for 2 years, but it reminded me just to be more friendly and open to people.

So maybe the best compliment is just one that is simple, well meant, and not overly personal or threatening. It sure felt good in that interaction, not at all like the shallow "nice shirt" exchanges amount women in Barneys or the creepy "nice shirt" exchanges with men walking by me on my way home from work.
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they're going after what they think they can win. Getting a patent granted is one thing, defending it in court is another. if a patent gets invalidated by a judge it is forever worthless, but if it has yet to be tested in court it can be used to bully smaller players who can't afford to defend themselves. bringing a patent case against google's core business will cause google to fight back with all their might, and it might end up the wrong way for apple. They have to save that case until they create a situation where they are sure they can win.
Out of curiosity, who uses Ada? The DoD?
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My old man has been working in radio and electronics for decades. We discussed the Amazon outage and when I told him two generators had failed, he smiled grimly and muttered "Murphy's Law".

No matter how much you test, you simply cannot know how a system will behave in a critical state until that state is reached.

The other thing too here is availability bias. We see the outages, but we don't hear about the near-outages. We're not seeing a true baseline for the occasions where the system behaved resiliently according to its design.
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I have a cron job that emails me the results of nightly tarsnap runs. I noticed two failures, the first and only time tarsnap has ever failed for me.

And I was OK with it -- I knew Colin would be working to bring it up as soon as possible. I further knew that the envelope for minimal downtime was determined by Amazon, who were also working to repair matters as soon as possible.

Natural disasters happen. Somewhere in the world there is always an unprecedented disaster going on. Living with it is part of life in a strictly uncontrollable, unpredictable universe.
Not really surprising: Except for some very limited cases, I found that python performance is comparable to C++ performance for solving problems (obviously using python/C++ idioms where relevant). I rarely use C++, opting for C for performance reasons.
You don't even have to look that far back - pre iPhone, it was used on the Neonode N1m:

http://youtu.be/7ru2GjBTHRY?t=3m56s

Even if the iPhone were the first to use it, the patent is still ridiculous. If you tasked 100 engineers to come up with an unlocking solution for touch screens before the iPhone existed, I'd bet good money at least 50 of them would consider it an option. That's not non-obvious.

Patents in software are no longer about inventions, they're about being the first do obvious technique x in context y.

And sometimes, that's not even necessary - I've had a technique I used for displaying cross domain ads in Flash that I considered obvious at the time patented out from under me later on. The "in Flash" bit being the novel part, I assume - I try not to spend too much time dissecting insanity.

At least we're starting to see notable investors rally against them, like pg and Fred Wilson - the very people who should be benefiting the most from a non broken patent system.

Edit: Clarified line about the 50/100 engineers.
I believe that it is, so long as you can compete on that driver. It should not be held against someone that they work for money, after all it is the foremost reason most people work. As long as they have passion the underlining motivator of that passion is for the most part irrelevant, unless you cannot provide that motivator.
Microsoft’s Azure Accelerator In China Debuts Inaugural Class
I'm really interested in doing more machine learning work (my current projects, as interesting as they are, dont really require it).

I've done a few weirdo projects with NLTK, tho, and its great fun. By stream hacking do you mean offloading learning sets (active or initial) and that heavy overhead into the "cloud", or am I misunderstanding the terminology?
Haxe (www.haxe.org) also has ported a decent subset of the API, and can simultaneously target Flash, JS and C++ (native). Not sure about who has better coverage of the full API.
I'm sorry but there is no way there could be more perl out there than javascript.

Although I agree that a lot of people underestimate perl generally speaking.
Amazon are in the content business which is why they sell below cost. Additionally because of DRM there is significant first mover advantage - people can only drop your platform by dumping their existing bought content.

Asymco has good data on who is making profits in the industry: http://www.asymco.com/2012/05/03/the-phone-market-in-2012-a-...
Something I've wondered, presumably for several hundred years, Ptolemy's observations could be thought of as the standard model, and consistently day after day, year after year, the sun rose in the east and set in the west to 5 or 6 sigma etc.. that it could be said was proof he was correct.
Ptolemy is often spoken in the pejorative, but for so long until the man from Krakow came along, how could you prove otherwise?
Does this situation apply today and that a future "Copernicus" will turn the Higgs Boson on its head?
Genuinely interested how a consistent set of findings which correspond to predictions, can really be said to prove a discovery?
At this stage there are alternatives like PhoneGap or RubyMotion, allowing you to bypass objc entirely
Nice, but I think it's far too few. Stuff that this tutorial could be handled with tar as well. I'm not sure if it would encourage to use git somebody who doesn't know much about version control. Somebody who know, probably don't need it because commands like "git log", "git add" and "git commit" are quite obvious for someone who used SVN or other version control system.
In the situations you listed many of them are protected classes of items related to race/creed/ or religion. I would say that it would be more akin to Google saying that they will no longer take advertisement from people / companies offering abortion services. In which case they would see a similar outcry from a different group of people.
I'm Japanese and living in Japan.
I drink green tea everyday.
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How about anything that isn't developed solely for iPhone/iPad?

Objective-C is high on the list because it's trendy to write iPhone apps, so people blog about it and write a million "How to get started with objective-C" tutorials for it.

Outside of that niche, and a really small group of OSX developers, there's zero Objective-C development. It's barely even possible to write Objective-C on Windows or Linux.
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>>Since most benchmarks are unscientific, this one is as good as any.<<

>1) You seem to be using "unscientific" as a nothing more than an insult.

More like preemptively declaring I don't want to deal with HN crowd replying with "but benchmarks are worthless".

> 2) Your conclusion "this one is as good as any" doesn't follow from your premise that "most benchmarks are unscientific" -- "this one" might well be different from "most benchmarks".

IMO shootout benchmarks are better than random benchmarks on the web as they detail the testing environment, provide the source code and can be re-created
Just reject the binary -- better to wait a week for the update than to be in this situation.
You will be surprised how used/popular VB6 is. Some results from a Microsoft's VB6 survey on [1].

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/a/637671/417685
I glance at TIOBE from time to time. My biggest gripe is just because a language is searched does not mean it's being used.
A few months back I created a bookmarklet to render the html when looking at the raw html page -- https://gist.github.com/1831405

I've ended up using this bookmarklet on a lot of non-github.com sites too.

For instance, you can see how it renders http://c.sente.cc/hcVg/xkcd.txt here:
http://i.imgur.com/DNVqd.png

here's the code in snippet form:

javascript:function write_window(content) {top.consoleRef=window.open(%27%27,%27git-r-done%27,+%27,menubar=1%27+%27,toolbar=1%27+%27,status=1%27+%27,scrollbars=1%27+%27,resizable=1%27);top.consoleRef.document.writeln(content);top.consoleRef.document.close();}function dostuff() {$.ajax({url: document.location.href,dataType:%27html%27,success: function(content){setTimeout(function(){write_window(content)},500);}});}function add_jquery(attempt) {var jq=document.createElement(%27script%27);jq.type=%27text/javascript%27;jq.async=false;jq.src=%27https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js%27;var s=document.getElementsByTagName(%27script%27)[0];s.parentNode.insertBefore(jq,s);try{var foo=$(%27*%27);dostuff();}catch(err){if(attempt < 5){attempt = attempt + 1;setTimeout("add_jquery("+attempt+")",1000)}else{alert(%27could not load jquery..try again!%27);}}}add_jquery(0);
TL;DR version: an after-the-fact account of how a man counterfeited millions all in the pursuit of "art". It makes for a romantic story, if nothing else -- although it certainly is not as sexy as the Leonardo DiCaprio/Tom Hanks Catch Me If You Can version.
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According to a study done by the San Francisco State University, a person, who invests in exotic vacations or tickets to concerts to impress other people, does not get as much of happiness as he/she would when he/she spends in a trip or adventure.
In terms of just the expression, yes, you just count the largest term. In cases where you count more closely, it's either in the constant (quicksort vs mergesort) or in terms of removing randomness or amortization.
Objective-C passed C++ and C# on Tiobe
Harmonie et Médiation active
Line segments have a minimum of an infinite number of points.
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Everyone was expecting that the shareholders of facebook would be benefited and would get huge amount of profit but facebook really disappointed everyone.

I don't understand why a giant like yahoo appoints a person at such a high position without verifying their qualifications.

Truly disappointing technology flops such giants.
Reddit community cracks a cyphered message found on a subway station