skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most open source C/C++, Java, Python, Ruby, OCaml, and other libraries can be compiled against MSIL and called natively from C# or consumed as binaries and invoked via common C calling conventions.

As for the IDE dependency complaint, I think this applies more towards some of the standard libraries such as WPF, WinForms, ASPX, ADO.net, etc. I think it is a very valid complaint, but I don't think it is about the language itself.
(Disclaimer: I should be more knowledgeable about this, having interned at SAP once.)

Perhaps you can do to SAP what Scala, Clojure et al are doing to Java: Present a more enjoyable front-end to the programmer, but target the underlying system.
NYT Settles Absurd Copyright Suit, Agrees To Stop Sending Rival Free Web Traffic
Okay, I'm insane, I know that. But I have this strange urge to nominate The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai in this category. I'm not sure I can explain why. Perhaps it's just to be perverse. ;)

There's just something about the character that rings true. He's a famous superhero, but he doesn't wear a costume or come from another planet. He's a mad scientist, but he doesn't cackle or plot or soliloquize. He's an odd guy with a diverse collection of obsessive hobbies and an even more diverse collection of friends, who are world-class experts in their fields while also being strange and geeky people. And somehow these people aren't his minions or his sidekicks: They're colleagues. He and his band work on things that nobody on Earth has ever heard of, but they don't seem too excited about that -- there are no breathless gasps. It's just part of their usual routine.

There's something about this guy, his lab, and his team that reminds me of the actual basement of the physics department at Cornell, and of the actual people who you might find wandering the hallways of such a place. A place where the pile of junk in the corner is actually the remains of a Nobel-winning experiment from 1967, and the guy who just asked you how to find the men's room is the Secretary of Energy.
You could tie to http://www.opencongress.org/ data for the House members
In the context of Microsoft, isn't this basically an argument for allowing the US to backslide on labor policy? We're talking about jobs that are already fulfilled by our domestic work force, at one of the world's most profitable corporations.
Glad to hear it. I switched to GrandCentral as my main contact number back when Google bought them since I figured they'd be around for a while, but have been rather concerned with the downtime/SSL expirations/domain screwups. If 2.0's coming soon I think I can hold off to see what's in store - most of the time the service works as advertised.
It's not that tough to make a literal syntax for hash tables with a simple reader macro. This may not be the best way to do it, I'm rather new to lisp, but it only took me about 5 min. (and a peek at "ANSI Common Lisp" 14.3, thanks, PG!):

(defun ins-hash (h vals)
(if (oddp (length vals))
nil
(if (not (null vals))
(progn
(setf (gethash (first vals) h) (second vals))
(ins-hash h (cddr vals)))
h)))

(set-macro-character #\} (get-macro-character #\)))

(set-dispatch-macro-character #\# #\{
#'(lambda (stream char1 char2)
(let ((items (read-delimited-list #\} stream t)))
(ins-hash (make-hash-table) items))))

CL-USER> (gethash :b #{:a 1 :b 2 :c 3})
2
T
> Enterprises are moving away from big bulky ERP systems like SAP in droves.

Even SAP is moving away from those. Last time I checked 'Software as a Service' was all the rage at SAP.
I think the m-team types understand "Track Changes" better than they understand comments in PDFs, but if your team prefers PDF, more power to them. I'd obviously rather generate a PDF than a Word Doc, and I'd rather generate a wiki page than a PDF, and an email than a wiki page. But life's pretty short.
Amazing Multi-Photo Email 1.0 [Cracked] |
How to Handle a Press Interview
Crisis claims Icelandic cabinet
I'm thrilled that someone is actually thinking about how to make the presentation of arguments better. Even though the example is a little buggy and hard to read, I think its a great first step.

The visual presentation of ideas in a clear format is such a necessary skill. I'm sick of going to presentations (e.g Powerpoint lectures) where people throw up a ton of stuff on to their slides without a proper gauge of audience understanding. Do presenters honestly think they can put up a paragraph of information and expect the audience to analyze appropriately while they blab on and on?

If presenters were more clear about their arguments, and conveyed those points in a visually appealing way, I guarantee companies would be far more productive, accidents would happen far less often (Edward Tufte NASA reference), and research would be far more innovative.

Just my two cents.
I got a real kick out of watching Pirates of Silicon Valley.
Dropping NSLog in release builds
Well said -- I work from the home office much of the time. If I want to be around people I go to a coffee shop. Meanwhile, my schedule is flexible and my commute takes 3 seconds.

Also, I'm fortunate that I'm excited about what I'm working on and don't feel the need to sneak in scrabble and mute phone calls while screwing around on youtube.
Free the facts - a set on Flickr
I also highly recommend both films.
A perverse point: Not learning other languages might contribute to job security if you are a COBOL programmer. Because if you'd learn another languague you could not bear going back to COBOL.
It also had Angelina Jolie.

It... motivate me to be a hacker.

And yet now that I am a hacker... I am no closer to Angelina, funny that.
I saw myself pretty much in the same hole as you do now. I worked for a couple of years as an SAP developer but then got bored with the ABAP stuff. Luckily, I had the chance to do a lateral move within the same company and coded in Java from then on. Finally, I left the whole SAP field and now develop industry automation applications for a mid-range company (another hole, but that's a different story.)

What I want to say is, yes, you can get out of that hole. Of course, you will come across recruiters who will label you as the SAP guy. But there are others out there who know that there's more to it than just the programming language. So take the advice given in all the comments here, create something in your favorite technology and apply for the jobs that really interest you.
A relatively equivalent question to ask is why does my University costs are equal to nearly 1.5x the Avg US yearly salary?

It's an investment, like property, that can't easily be foreclosed on.
I've found that "business" email is usually best expressed in a few sentences: Issue, suggestion, next step. Usually the next step is a formal discussion and decision.

In business you can't expect most people to read a multi-paragraph email, realize what their role in the decision is, and act on it.

Also, some of us have much higher mental bandwidth for email communications than average. So it's a good idea to start the "handshake" with a very simple communication and take it from there, regardless of how intelligent the recipient may be in other areas.
Easy solution... Don't work at home, go to a library, book store, coffee shop, anywhere with other people but not too noisy. Take headphones to block out times when you need more concentration.

Don't get an office if it will only be you working there. Do consider working at a hacker space/coworking place.
It's not trolling, it's shock. When you wear something unexpected, then it's a lot funnier and more effective. Nowadays, offense is the most shocking thing there is.

Not to say this is as good as A Modest Proposal, but wouldn't you say that suggesting people in Ireland sell babies as food is a similar thing? I wouldn't call that trolling. I'd call it satire.

EDIT: The reason it isn't trolling is that you have to put your name behind it. One of the essential elements of trolling is that what you say can't be tied back to you whatsoever. The minute you say it with your own name, it's not trolling. It's an offensive statement made by an actual person.
I don't get why all the responses are basically, "this guy's a jerk and is completely wrong." No, he isn't--Linux is still terrifying black magic to most of the general population. But, this article _says exactly how to fix that!_ You have to go after the perceptions around computing, and change the way people view computers. The author is absolutely right that on average, PC == Windows. However usable Ubuntu is won't change that. It's basically attacking the wrong problem, but it _is_ possible to attack the right problem.

(Intelligent) Trolling usually makes a point; HN should know this. I don't understand why so many people responded saying, "he's wrong, (insert numbers here), cars vs horses" and ignored the valid point he was making. The troll said it was impossible to overtake windows; come on guys, as hackers we should take that as a clue he means it isn't!
I wonder why this was down-voted so much..
What former physicist could resist? It's like trying to resist saying boxen, only more so, because matrices is an actual word.
We found a great project to test working together was a todo list. There are many questions and paths you could take, and it seems to be a good project to determine if you can get on the same page together.
August was pretty bad. I just watched it Friday. What did LandShark do?
As a real programmer I cringe at the Polymorphism example, only because I see the point of objects is to encapsulate data with the associated methods and this breaks all of that. Indeed you try to avoid inheritance and use composition instead because of the very problem exposed. These examples struck me as a deeply procedural low level way to represent these concepts, although that common simplicity does suggest that really all objects are is a way to do if statements better. That in itself is a idea that everyone knew but few people ever said.

I find the GUI editor with a mouse painful and this GUI isn't helping! With a heavily user optimised interface with at the very least some of the smarts of Excel and a lot of hot keys (get rid of the dialogs, stop making me right click to splice etc) then it has some potential.

What I think we need is this approach translated into a real language with real libraries that have side effects and all the lovely mess that is a real programming environment. Right now its hard to see just how bad it is for the other 99% of programming that is grabbing from a DB and throwing data on a screen (those poor corporate drones!).

How about the author hosts his website with the language! Building enough infrastructure to do that is bound to help advance the language to the point where its more than just a toy.

An interesting simple way to consider logic will be interesting to watch this evolve.
Loads, but Revolution OS for Stallman fanservice, Johnny Mnemonic (which everyone criticises, but Gibson did write the script), Sneakers DVD commentary (Canadian R1 DVD), and I'll be cute and say Ferris Bueller for his hacks.
Interesting. Who invented the transistor? the integrated circuit? Who created UNIX? Visicalc? MS Windows? ARPANET?

Maybe he thinks this issue affects the dearth of high-tech startups in Iowa. Maybe he cares about more Americans than just those living in his state. Sure, it's probably just vote pandering, but that isn't the only possibility.
Living abroad as I do, with lots of Italian friends, I can't help but take the side of the guys who want a shot at living and working in the US. I am in favor of helping out US workers with things like more or less universal health care and unemployment insurance, but also in favor of letting in immigrants who are capable of taking care of themselves: if you're in the US working, more power to you. If you're mooching, maybe it's time to move along.

Just to get my wife (not some random person) and mother of my daughter into the country is a 3 or 4 month process. She has a doctorate in biochemistry and speaks English well. To add insult to injury, she'll apparently have to go through a doctor's examination before she can get a green card, should we decide to go to the US.

The US has some serious issues with regards to immigrants, which is especially ironic for a country where a very minimal percentage of the people are really people who have been there for hundreds of years, let alone before 1492.

Furthermore, the US has some weird import policies - we can't send prosciutto to my parents because of some BS health regulations (as if Italy didn't care deeply about the quality of its food products).

Yes, there are practical issues: Luxembourg couldn't open up its borders to India and China, for instance, without some serious issues, but on the whole, I have to come down in favor of openness and opportunities for foreigners. Part of that might means some practical measures like loosening the restrictions on H1B workers so they are better able to seek market rates once they've arrived. Another thing I strongly believe is that if you opened things up between "wealthy" nations: US, Canada, Europe, Australia, NZ, etc... there wouldn't be any huge population shifts.

... Wow... it's easy to write lots when the rant is strong within :-)
Thanks. We'll give it a look.
P2P Money with App Engine, OAuth, and QR Codes
Ask HN: Why would anyone go for ASP.NET ?
"ASP.NET is a web application framework developed and marketed by Microsoft to allow programmers to build dynamic web sites, web applications and web services."

While other alternatives like PHP, PHP based frameworks (CI,Symfony,Zend), then Rails etc... really make the job easier when compared to asp.net.

While in PHP you would be writing 5 to the point lines to do something, in asp.net the same would need you to have things that are irrelevant to the goal, in the code...

have a look -
<%@ Page Language="C#" %>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<script runat="server">

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Label1.Text = DateTime.Now.ToLongDateString();
}

</script>

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
<title>Sample page</title>
</head>
<body>
<form id="form1" runat="server">
<div>
The current time is: <asp:Label runat="server" id="Label1" />
</div>
</form>

</body>
</html>

Now how much of PHP would the same code require ?!
So, Why would anyone go for asp.net?

I understand that number of lines doesn't matter after reading some great comments, but don't you thing it slows down quick learning in some way... because you've to go through big chunks of code that do simple tasks... while on this front, other languages make learning really easy and fun with short straightforward codes.
Your wife has a linux expert at home. Sadly, none of my friends that knew linux were close enough/evangelical enough to help me with my driver issues.
"More than 3 days a week at home and you start to lose the benefits."

As someone who has been exclusively working remotely for several years, I'm not so sure about that. I guess it depends what you consider the benefits to be and from which side of the employee/employer fence you're on. Are the benefits that you have a more relaxed and free adult life - in both work and play? Or are you looking for a hack to try to forcibly increase worker productivity beyond that which is attainable with a full time in-office approach?

When working just a couple days a week or month remotely, it can feel like a nice break from the distraction-filled office life and so it's natural to treat it as such - maybe you work harder/longer to get the most out of it so as to not squander the special time and privilege. When you're home all day every day, you have to pace yourself or else you'll burn out in a matter of weeks - same as if you worked sun up to sun down in the office everyday. That self-pacing could feel/look like suddenly it becomes less useful to work remote all the time, but I think the reality is that people can only work so hard for so long no matter where they physically locate themselves. (And each person has a different threshold.) If the "work from home 3 days a week" thing is really nothing more than a piece of "aren't we an awesome place to work" cheese dangling in front of the employees noses, I think eventually that backfires and people burn out more completely (and cynically) - so they begin to slack off on those days at home and think of them as a good time to take a "much deserved" break by "sneaking" out to have fun during the day. Inevitably the company responds by requiring phone checkins during regular office hours, demanding you be online/IM/email/webcam at certain hours, snidely pointing out how long it takes you to reply to a message, etc. At which point, you might as well go into the office everyday because, frankly, you are getting none of the true benefits of working from home anyway.
Microsoft is a chartered corporation under the United States of America. If they are not serving the interests of the people of the USA, then I see no reason why they should not be punished in some way.
While Brain Age's advertising contains a number of questionable correlations (increased brain blood flow indicates beneficial mental exercise; improved game scores indicate a delay of cognitive decline), I found it odd that a researcher trying to disprove them would pile on a few more assumptions:

The study tested Nintendo's claims on 67 ten-year-olds. "That's the age where you have the best chance of improvement," Professor Lieury said. "If it doesn't work on children, it won't work on adults."

I also found it dubious that the Nintendo and pencil-and-paper groups both improved 10% in logic tests, while the control group improved 20%... So both Nintendo and pencil-and-paper training effectively degrade your logic ability? Or perhaps his 10-year-old subjects are improving in all areas so rapidly that the extra hours spent doing the exercises are detracting from something more important to development -- which might not be the case for adult subjects.

In Stimulate Your Neurones, a book due out this month, Professor Lieury says: "There were few positive effects and they were weak. Dr Kawashima is one of a long list of dream merchants."

Ah, a book... It looks like someone wants to add his name to the list. :)
US import restrictions on food are notoriously brain-dead. They're even bad inside the company; for instance, it's difficult to ship raw milk cheese. But that's neither here nor there.

I'm married to someone who moved to Switzerland for work, and my understanding is, the US is not alone in the world for onerous immigration and work visa policies.
Ask HN: How do you handle/manage/record requirements?
I realize that many HN users are using some kind of agile methodology and likely do very little as far as formal requirements. I'm interested in learning about how various companies deal with requirements for different types of software. Do you do separate user and functional/system requirements? Do you use requirements management software? What are your arguments for/against various requirements practices?
intersections might mean street intersections.
As for live current, just because you own cricket.com, doesn't mean you have any traffic going to it. Premium domain names are just ego trips...

do you have any data to support that assertion?
> US is not alone in the world for onerous immigration and work visa policies.

That's correct - basically everyone treats their immigrants like shit. I was in Italy more or less illegally until I got married, although it must be said that they do respect the institution of marriage more than in the US: once you're married, you can stay, no questions asked.
That doesn't really make sense, why doesn't Circuit City do what the trading companies are doing but cut out the middle man ? After all Circuit City's stores should be a fine "established channel". And why would the trading companies by from Circuit City when they could contact the manufacturers directly ?

I don't think there is a rational reason involving trading companies or some other established channels for Circuit City's pricing; instead, consider the possibility that Circuit City is run by idiots. Occam's razor dictates that idiocy is more likely explanation here. It also is consistent with the reasons they are going out of business in the first place.

That said, I also suspect that there is a large downturn in consumer buying, and it might shake out even retailers that aren't run by idiots.
Your comparison is overly simplistic and doesn't really prove anything. I'm a unix guy, so my exposure to ASP.NET, while existed, was limited. ASP.NET tries to make writing large apps be a manageable process, tries to use the existing .NET library and plugs well with other Microsoft technologies. I can't really argue on much deeper levels, but comparing how many lines of code some mundane task takes isn't really saying anything.

I can create my own DSL whose sole purpose in life is to send dates to a browser, and all it takes is a file with the character "x" in it; that doesn't make my language any better than Rails, ASP.NET, php or anything else. Different languages and platforms exist to solve different problems and cater to different markets.
If you liked King of Kong, you might like Chasing Ghosts: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0479879/

It has a different focus, but it's about a lot of the same guys (Billy Mitchell, Walter Day, Roy Schmidt), and is also really well done.
"it can be hard to find the time to make a good product"

So that explain their last decade!
I feel enlightened and awakened... Thanks :), seriously.
I end up writing in second person a lot. In fact, some of my comments in this very thread ended up in second person by the end. I really need to watch for this! I'm not the original blog author, but thanks for pointing this out - it's something I'm going to be watching for in my own writing from now on. (I'm kind of surprised I never noticed how bad it can sound.)

I think I fall into this trap when I want to generalize about my experience with others. For instance, if I observe some common behavior in virtually everyone I know, I might start saying "when you're such-and-such-ing...." because it seems easier than constantly reminding the reader that I'm simply generalizing based on my experience. However, I can see your point - that this really could be messing with the people who read it who maybe aren't directly my target audience. This might change my writing style significantly. :)
The reason I was thinking of online projects has to do with having critical mass for a given technology (say Django) in a given place (say Montreal, where I'm located). In Montreal, for example, Rails seems to enjoy more popularity, and Django seems more isolated (just a feeling). So if I was to organize Django-themed meetups, the circle would be limited (again I'm not sure, but just to illustrate).

You could say I'm being picky here, but why not use the power of the Web which is a known solution for such situations? And btw real-world meetups often happen after online ones.

I don't have anything against real-world meetups, but I just came back from one, and there were presentations, but only a single project and you worked with people you already knew, mostly. So I didn't end up meeting much people, as chatting without a goal in mind isn't, err, my greatest strength. I'd really like something much more goal-oriented. The Six hour startup formula is really good, in that sense.

Thanks for the suggestions, though. I have heard of Free Hacker meetups in my area, for example, and I really should try showing up at one. Yet I think the goal is a bit different.
The Firefox equivalent is Flashblock (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433) which I can't live without!
I'm not a big ASP.NET fan, but the number of lines of code to do something is less of a concern to me than the underlying hardware requirements and licensing costs to produce a running application.