skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is a troll, but I'll bite: I'm not going to justify all of these, but this is my short list:

1) Java is slow (the JIT hides only some of this -- see below)

2) Java makes working in Hashes and arrays very painful

3) Very little functional support (yes, Java8 will help)

4) The java language moves forward very, very, very slowly

5) It scalability is a joke. I've worked as a Java contractor at a number of places and what a PERL/PHP/Python solution can get done in 5 boxes, it takes Java 30-40 boxes. This is NOT an exagerration. I think it's a side effect of some developers stuffing everything into the session and expecting clustering to fix everything.

6) Date and file handling is also really painful. (yes, JODA helps, but we're 15+ years into Java and only finally getting good date support baked into the language)

7) Library management. Maven has largely "fixed" this issue at last, but sorting through library conflicts in order to write in an exception is still not fun. And as already noted, this is one of the reasons you can't just jump in with a text editor and hammer out a simple example.

The library support of Java makes up for a lot, but honestly, Python looks better and better every day.

edit: I will add in support for why many, including myself perceive java to be slow. The startup of the JVM is horrendous. If you're doing even moderate web development, there is a minimum two to three second startup period for a web server. That simply doesn't exist in PERL/PHP/Python. There's no such thing as a permgen error in PERL/PHP/Python. I've never seen PERL/PHP/Python go off and spin the disk as furiously as Java trying to load classes. It's ridiculous.

Java's strength is its maintainability and library support.
I think people should be able to see what it's about before having to log in.
I think you missed the point. I think the point is about not having religious wars over languages for ideological reasons but instead focus on the practical cost and benefit of the languages. He pointed out the people running the COBOL mainframes were paying ridiculous licensing fees for their databases.
I agree - I would have loved more mechs on the list. They just don't seem to have caught on with the general public just yet though. We had a half-dozen in the nominations list, but all told they got fewer votes collected than some of the others that made the top five.
Your numbers are in line with what I see from my advisor.

The original also failed to break down paper writing. For a top-tier conference, you're going to spend several weeks worth of full days working on a paper, and you're probably going to do it twice per paper because, as they say, even Simon Peyton-Jones has papers rejected occasionally. This time is on top of work you already did to get your system working! (well, unless the paper is the result, as in some areas of theory)

You really, really have to want to live it. I enjoy it, and as a PhD student I don't mind spending all my waking hours that aren't devoted to my wife or a little bit of exercise doing research. But just to be competitive, that's sort of the baseline. I'm not sure, though, whether it's truly a demand of the job or just the default because academic research attracts people who work like that (I also worked like that when I was a developer at MSFT).
India outsourcing back to USA
91% is pretty respectable for that test at the bottom, among a few clearly distinguishable photos, I got some generic photos of windows and parks, how can I tell if they're in Paris or not?? Edit: the 3rd picture shows pitch black for me.

I got 63%, I despaired at the end but I wouldn't have gone above 70% in any case (only went twice to Paris).

Edit2: they're not random? For example, for the 16th, 17th, 18th or 20th pictures, I can't make out if they're in Paris or not.
You're right, I meant dynamically typed. I edited, thanks!
If you look closely, you'll notice they're the best as voted on by our community. It looks like their tastes and yours differ somewhat.
Microsoft technologies seem to be surprisingly popular here. It kind of makes sense: releasing early and iterating quickly is a strong theme within startups and the Microsoft stack, while not my favorite one, is familiar to a lot of developers. If it takes you one month to learn and one month to develop a first release on a stack like Rails of Django, you'd still release first if it took you 45 days to develop on a stack your developers are already familiar with.

You still have the challenges of scaling on Windows, but, by then, you already know whether you'll need to.
Posted at the article, but the blog is censored ("Comment is awaiting moderation").

On a high level, Java vs Ruby/Python is a question of suitability to purpose.

Java is a great language for large teams of incompetent programmers. You will not be able to find competent programmers to code up the business logic for: Paying with a credit card. Going to the emergency room. Adjusting your 401k. Using your insurance card at the dentist. Filling a prescription.

That code is mindnumbingly boring, and has few technical challenges beyond sheer size and complexity.

With incompetent programmers, you want a B&D language -- Java forces object oriented. It forces a single object oriented paradigm. It forces a set of standard libraries. Etc. It makes it as hard as possible for programmers to shoot themselves in the foot, and it minimizes learning curve to get up to speed, making programmers as interchangeable as possible. If you've got a team of half-wits trying to write an employee management system, that's exactly what you want. The problem falls well within the limitations of the system. If you want to do something more complex -- a startup solving a problem that's never been solved before -- and you have a team of hotshot programmers, you really do want a less constricting and more flexible language.

COBOL is obsolete. Java vs. Python/Ruby vs. LISP/Scheme is a question of suitability to purpose -- primarily problem difficulty and team composition.
He's riffing off the parent's use of the word "fad", where the parent used it in a quote as if someone had once called it a fad, even though it turned out to be something that stayed around.
If those tweets actually appeared in text somewhere on Hacker News, they are foolish regardless of the context they were taken from. Dropping down to node.js to get close to the metal? Come on!

Love it.
I think it's because those are the criteria that our readers - who nominated the keyboards that made the top five - prefer over mechanical keys. Their preferred feature set just differs from yours, and from most developers, I think.

That said, there were plenty of mechs in the nominees, they just didn't get enough votes to make the top five. Personally, I love them, but majority rules.
Keep WordPress From Compressing JPGs
When I went back to Wikipedia after an absense of about 3 years or so, I found that there were some remarkably intolerant and rude editors who seemed to be able to do anything with impunity. Luckily, the main editor in question has since left, but it was ridiculous.

Regrettably my depression flaired up while dealing with the issues, and I left the project (again), but this time most definitely for the very last time.

Also regrettably, the Admin's Noticeboard - which I founded - seems to be a hotbed of intrigue and oftentimes is more a hindrence to the project than a help. It's still necessary, but I suspect that it has centralized power far too much. It may have changed as it's more than a year since my last foray on the project, but that was my experience.
Robotic welding
There are two popular types of industrial welding robots. The two are articulating robots and rectilinear robots. Robotics control the movement of a rotating wrist in space.
'I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.'

Henry David Thoreau
Another paper based on OP, from the same author, published in 2007 and including discussion of non-software failures: http://klabs.org/DEI/lessons_learned/aerospace_corp/lessons_...

Other lessons learned from the space industry: http://klabs.org/DEI/lessons_learned/
Java ... It’s one of the fastest languages

Languages aren't inherently fast or slow, that's rather the quality of the underlying virtual machine / hardware architecture the compiled binaries run on. I think everybody can remember the days before Java 1.4 where the official JVM sucked performance wise. Did that mean Java the language is slow?

Of course, in designing a programming language, the architect can make some tradeoffs that will make the resulting implementations of certain algorithms run faster or consume less memory. So on one hand the architect can make tradeoffs regarding some features of the language that may help with performance, but on the other hand those tradeoffs can also stay in your way when trying to do higher-level optimizations.

Community governance via that JCP (pre-Oracle).

It was Sun that refused to give a license for the TCK to Apache Harmony. The JCP was never nothing more than a bunch of people and companies bending over to Sun, now Oracle.

Of course, because of OpenJDK and because Sun always projected this "open" image of Java to the world, the genie is out of the bottle because OpenJDK can be forked, and because APIs aren't copyrightable (although that's still a gray area), so even third party implementations are possible (as seen in the Google vs Oracle trial). So Oracle has to be a good citizen here, or else they risk losing whatever control they have left.

But the JCP was never and probably will never be a standards body and Java will never be a published standard, in the same sense that C/C++ are.

It’s popular to hate Java

You should definitely have feelings for programming languages, but only immature people think in terms of love/hate based on what other people think (basically you're kind of incompetent or still wet behind the ears if you hate Java based on what other people say about it).

Many of us in the trenches avoid using Java because it's lower-level than say, Ruby, or Clojure, or Scala. But Java is still there, still kicking ass, whenever the high-level abstractions are in our way, or whenever we are part of something bigger that imposes Java on us (like company politics). The same can be said about C/C++ - still kicking ass, but you don't really have to go that low level for 99% of the times, unless the project or organization dictates it. So why should you? Best tool for the job, right?

... are the industries that
are still stuck in the 50′s the problem?

Because you know, we should rewrite everything from scratch every 5 years or so.
This response is less on Java and more on the author's opinion of mainframes.

Large companies are risk adverse and generally for a good reason. That mainframe running COBOL has probably been reliably processing orders, crunching financials, and managing inventory for 30 years. No one is going to replace that on a whim because COBOL isn't cool. What are they going to use instead? It's certainly not Mongo DB and Lua scripts on AWS. SAP possibly, but you still end up with an expensive system with even more unpredictable cost and licensing terms.
"Dotcom’s new venture, Megabox — a service that allows artists to sell music direct to users"

Direct, through a middleman? Ugh.
Fair enough, but then the "salt" is not really a "salt" anymore as that term is known from "password salt", because it is no longer a random input value unique to each different password. It is simply a piece of known-plaintext input for every "hashing" session.

That means that an attacker who can somehow obtain the salt value can now mount a known-plaintext attack against the outputs of the algorithm. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Known-plaintext_attack

I am ignoring the fact that in a general sense an attacker with resources to obtain the salt can also likely log the master password, in which case no attack against the algorithm is necessary.
I think you missed the point of Jonathan's article as well. It wasn't even about COBOL. The point is that innovation needs to happen all the way around, not just in languages. The industries that still make use of COBOL are stuck in the 50's, and the language is just a small part of that issue.
I have a feeling this thread will be made pseudo-dead. [and this post haha]
I've been using Go recently and it's pretty good, but the main problem is the lack of generics. If you use a lot of generic code in Java, you're going to really miss it in Go.
How hard is it to get the master password when one knows 1. the encryption method 2. the encrypted password 3. the decrypted password ? (I don't have the foggiest idea about it, really)
NYPD and Microsoft track people real-time through NYC
I work in the banking industry and agree 100% on the mainframe usage and costs. There is a vudu/cult following that stack that likes to keep itself away from any controversy and keep a low profile. The biggest winner in this is IBM.
There are still a few features that C++ lacks. If it only added a s-expression syntax and macros, and built-in logic programming support, it would be perfect!
I couldn't care what language industries use. As long as they expose a better API than transferring damn text files and I don't have to wait 15 minutes for a response, I'm happy.
Ask HN: ORM useful in Analytics having star schemas?
can we build object model from star schemas. Suppose It got fact table with set of foreign keys which together makes a candidate key. But how tough is that to make use of ORM for datawarehouse?
It makes distribution a PITA and faffing around with the classpath string is also a PITA
It's a smart move to target the people who are often turned to by family members and friends for advice on buying smart phones.
Java is a fine tool for many applications. And like it or not, it is going to be around for a long time.

The problem I see with Java is that we're not sure whether Oracle is taking good care of it.
Oh, that so totally needs to be tweeted.
I agree with all of this -- Maven has fixed the issue with package management to some extent.
As a German I always cringe when I see Kim Schmitz speaking or a video of some stupid stunt. He isn't even a convincible trickster or a sophisticated con man! He is just an immature joke, a narcistic simpleton. He compares himself with Martin Luther King without even blinking an eye. If life would be a movie you would criticize his character as totally unbelievable and badly written.

That he managed to live in a 15 million Dollar mansion and is cheered on in many corners of the web makes me despair.
A monopoly position is not defined by share of profits.
I hear stories like this, but have not run into it myself, with the exception of areas that are inherently contentious anywhere, such as Israel-Palestine or current elections. What kinds of areas is it in? I most often run into the opposite problem of just not enough people around. I'll ask for comments on a talk page and nobody will answer for months, if ever; and even some of the WikiProjects are ghost towns if I ask a question over there. The people who do answer are usually polite and helpful. I mostly edit in history- and geography-related areas, along with a little bit of computer science. Are those unusually polite areas?

If anything, I personally find Wikipedia-writing a bit of a relaxing break from the often-rancor-filled tone of other online activities (even HN can have an edge to it). Digging up some books from the library and using them to write a new article or two, along with adding a few citations to other articles, etc., passes a pleasant afternoon.
DC's growing startup scene faces hurdles
I love you guys.

EDIT: Done. Tweeted.
Now I'm confused. Is it made up tweets? because I recognized two or three of them from threads I've read
I've recently come back to java after around 5-ish years doing mostly ruby. Know what? It's been a breath of fresh air. Code performs as you'd expect, and when you need to track down behavior, it's usually very straightforward (completely the opposite of ruby, in my experience). Almost everything runs super-fast. IDE's actually work with it. Docs are very good.

When I hanker for dynamicity, I've been reaching for groovy...a language I tried years ago which has come a LONG way and brings a lot of the features (namely, anonymous blocks/closures) I liked about Ruby. I'm nervously courting scala but in the early days.

What I liked about Rails can for the most part be found in Play (http://www.playframework.org), although I must admit I felt better about Play in its 1.x days when it was written in java. The core is now written in scala (though you can develop your app in either java or scala)...perhaps as I learn more of this language I'll feel more comfortable opening Play 2's hood. We're already started converting one of our Rails applications to Play, and it's been a great experience so far. And oh, by the way, we're finding that whole "rails/ruby won't slow you down...your database will slow you down" argument isn't always true.

Anyway, count me among Java's (and the jvm's) fans. It probably doesn't hurt that I have been working with it in one way or another since 2001, but I tried my best to leave it, only to find that sometimes you can indeed go home again.
Moon Lander Project to Continue Despite Crash
Struggling GameStop reinventing itself
Anthony Eden has a project for this from a while back: http://activewarehouse.rubyforge.org/ Not sure how well its maintained at this point but it looks like a pretty good mapping of the concepts to me.
Startups: Shut Down Your Companies Right
What I want to know is who's running that account?

I want to buy them a chocolate heart or something. Maybe some bacon.

Shaped as a heart.
I don't think I've seen more bullshit graphs in one slide deck in my life.
Congrats.

https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says/status/234550205679271936
Image printed with the highest possible resolution
Using maven was a horrible experience for me every single time :(

It seemed to download the whole internet and POM files are using everybody's favorite configuration language: XML
There's a Chrome app for tos;dr as well:

https://github.com/shybyte/tos-checker

(You have to install it by hand, so remember you need to be in Chrome's developer mode).
It's common to use a different (not sub) domain for static assets, especially when you use gigantic cookies in your web app. If the static assets aren't under access control, you usually don't need session information, etc to serve them properly. This saves time and bandwidth.

It's also common to spread assets across multiple hostsnames (typically subdomains that resolve to the same server) to parallelize loading by browsers.

So I try to give sites some leeway, but I agree about scribd. If I can't make the site work by allowing the primary domain and a CDN domain, I generally bail.

I never ever allow unknown domains like those above, especially on a site where I'm coming to view user-submitted content.

I trust the JavaScript sandbox well enough, but if I get to the point of having to wonder about the provenance of code delivered by a site I'm visiting, I'm usually too disgusted to bother continuing.
As someone who (casually) knew Kimble back in the BBS days I confirm everything kahawe wrote.

He shows his true face when things get heated. Legalities aside he has repeatedly turned around and backstabbed whoever was nearby, in order to cover his own ass. Definitely not the kind of person you want to do any business with.
It's actually not as bad as I expected it to be from the title.

However, the lack of links to sources as well as the obvious limitations of Twitter mean this idea could be executed much better.
That said, it hurts my brain to understand why in 2012 we're still forced to create our own empty getters and setters, and why there are no anonymous blocks. I know that closures/anonymous blocks are supposed to be delivered in java 8, but I'm not sure the elimination of redundant getters/setters are even on the road map. I'm so tired of opening classes which are comprised of 20% business logic and 80% getters/setters simply because one might need to override that behavior in the future. It really increases the noise.
There's also an Open Source clone of RenderMan itself...

http://www.renderpixie.com/

which (I believe) has received some official support from Pixar. More information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixie_(renderer)

EDIT: Wikipedia link
The iPhone popularized a lot of best-of-breed technologies. There were start-ups trying to do what the iPhone did. Apple is claiming those as Apple innovations. This is very similar to Apple popularizing the GUI invented at Xerox, and suing Microsoft.
my bad..my english is not good..what i meant to ask was ORM needs Object Models of data schema..And its easy to make from relational database perspective..but when it comes to star schema perspective, what can be the trade offs?
I don't think hypothes.is have rolled out any system yet.
I've often wondered why BSD is not more popular as a desktop system. Since it seems more "stable" it would surely make an easier target for development?

There must be a reason Apple chose it instead of Linux to be the core of OSX.
Not sure what you mean by "act like a monopoly". But you're right that Apple never forgot that microsoft ripped them off and dominated the industry with their sub par OS. (I know about the Xerox stuff). This is why Steve Jobs said very clearly at the iPhone launch "and boy have we patented it".

Many companies in the tech sector have effectively been using Apple as their R&D department for decades. Samsung is just the latest and most blatant.
Hi,

I'm French and lived in Paris since 12 years (and 13 years in the suburb before that) and made... 95% percent! (well I think it helps to read French).
Anyway it's interesting, even for a French. So thanks.
Spotify is great, unless you happen to be part of the 90% of the world population that they don't support.
That could be a real scenario. "I'll just Dropmark this file stored on Dropbox, and also Dropsend it to my colleagues, then I'll Droplet the client for payment."
with a slightly different approach, we've built a website so people can publish project ideas. since it's only a prototype, it's a bit messy right now but we'll release a new version at the end of the summer, with a specific category for weekend projects.
http://www.gullibear.com/
BSD vs GPL License?
Really? You want a shithnsays.com? The beauty of this idea is providing smiles in your Twitter timeline once in a while. Not to execute a cool-lean-webscale-startup.
I think the "official" rules for rejection therapy explicitly exclude hitting on women, if I recall correctly.
IIRC Warren Buffett doesn't allow the independently-run businesses that are part of his conglomerate to borrow from the banks. If they want to borrow money, he will lend it to them at 15%. So I guess that is a yardstick to judge oneself against. Could I repay a loan where the interest rate is 15%?
IMHO, logic can only be correct or wrong. There is no such thing as cruel logic.