skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've heard many people saying that "Perl doesn't scale" - "90% of the successful startups run RoR, why wouldn't you?" - "If you use Perl and you get web scale you'll have many problems"

I don't give at all credibility to such comments, but I have heard them. Perl's becoming every day more of a niche language.

Maybe some marketing about great Perl built projects could help. Does something like this exist?
"Without a doubt, we need to extend people's working lives (i.e. later retirement)"

How is this a given? Increased efficiency might counteract demographics. Hundred years ago a lot more farmers where needed to feed the same amount of people than today. If your phone can do your medical checkup, lots of medical aid workers can perhaps be freed to do other stuff.

I worry that we are being brainwashed on a constant basis by a rich elite to believe the "we have to work harder and longer" dogma. It doesn't make that much sense, given that we are a lot more technologically advanced than 50 years ago. Granted, the population has grown, too. All I want to say that I wouldn't take your claim at face value.

As for working children: sure, children can work. Does that mean they are adults? I think in our times it basically means being allowed to vote and make responsible decisions. You can still work in a coal mine following orders without being able to make responsible decisions.

Obviously people will do what they need to survive, but while we can, we should probably try to attain to a higher standard.

Even for the child laborers in India it is not a given that things have to be what they are. Yes, the current system makes it so - doesn't imply that there couldn't be another system. Paying their parents more might be a start.
My comment still apply, I guess.
"That's the same model taken by, well, every other OS out there"

... except SELinux.
I'm surprised they didn't release an updated version of XNA for windows 8, that's by far one of the best game dev tools out there.
Just in case it is not obvious: These rejection letters are fictional[1], created as collage of negative reviews Santini received.

Thanks for pointing that out. I hope everyone gives your comment the upvote it deserves. That this submission was just a made-up joke was not obvious from

1) the domain currently hosting the document, one of the first things I check on each submission,

2) the submission title (which is NOT the original article title, contrary to the Hacker News guidelines), which sounds much too serious for a title on a joke article,

or

3) the first few comments, which treated the article as though it reported historical facts. Good for you to let us know what the background is.
Create Live USB with Linux like you have never done before
Well, outputting video and audio should not be too hard to adapt (almost work out of the box).

Decoding does not do system calls, except for hardware decoding, so no worry.

File input is worrying because of the sandbox, but should be doable with some work.

But networking is a nightmare. 20 libraries are using WinSock2 (including some codecs like FLAC), plus libVLC's core. Sure HTTP access is fine, but RTP, RTSP, FTP, HTTPS, multicast UDP are weirder beasts...

To add it to the pain, VLC is a mostly C99 project, but C99 is too new a standard for Microsoft to implement it :)
http://examine.com/health-goals/
That covers the convenience factor well, but not the cost factor. Heroku's great for the right kind of app, but no-one would have heard of WordPress if it required a Heroku install.
> Wow. That's pretty ridiculous. So DirectX is allowed?

DirectX11 with 2 compatible modes (D3D9 and D3D10)
Just because it seems that everyone can now get government subsidies it does not make it right.

It's like saying - Eat sh*t. Billions of flies can't be wrong.
Things don't really work like that. You don't want your platform to only have 1000-2000 apps. Why? Because you'll never get the "top 1000" apps in there. Plus, people have different needs for apps. On the real Windows you can find a program for just about anything. You won't be able to say that for the Windows store and Windows RT.

It's not about having the "top 10 apps". It's about having "all the apps you could ever need". And if there are 2000 apps, it most likely doesn't mean that it contains "all the apps you'll ever need". And which platform would you go with? One that has and will have all the apps you'll need or one that has "2000 apps"?
Why America Can't Have Nice Things
FTA: It can sometimes feel scary when faced with a few risks to lose perspective of what has already been achieved.

Just to be clear: my own comments about Python the last few days are driven from a purely pragmatic desire to ship a great product, on all screens, using Python. I cringe when I see comments like this that seem to conflate these pragmatic concerns with emotional language advocacy.

Python is a beautiful, high-productivity, generally pragmatic language with millions of developers.

That's why I chose to build my product around it.

But all good things can be made better, and generally the best way to find the local optimum is to have lots of feedback from users -- especially developers who are pushing the envelope by doing ambitious things with the language.

We are going to ship on iOS and WinRT using Python. Whether that's anything that the core Python devs particularly care about, and whether that helps Python in the gladiatorial combat between languages, is mostly irrelevant to me.
Wholly to be expected at this point. Until Windows 8 hits the shelves and people start using it there is little incentive to build specifically for it - and since Win7 apps run perfectly well in Win8 there is little reason to focus on Windows 8 by itself at this point.

Once the WinRT tablets get into peoples hands the call for RT-specific apps will increase.

Plus, the WinRT dev environment really isn't as fully baked as we've grown accustomed to in the Windows world. So many things just simply don't exist at this point. I've been looking at building a Javascript-based WinRT project - one of the suggested app build paths suggested by MS and discovered that there is no touch-and-drag support built in yet. You can roll your own using JS-events but .... really, things like that dampen the enthusiasm.
In fact, I would argue that Hacker News is more social than "a traditional social network": there is much more active and deep discussion that occurs here than I've ever seen on, say, Facebook.
I'm one of those developers who was ready to jump right in and go crazy on the platform...until I fully realized how the ecosystem would function.

1. The Windows app store is Metro only.

2. Developers as well as normal users are actively looking for ways to avoid having to interact with Metro.

Developers have zero interest in personally using Metro, so they have less of an incentive to port their apps. Other desktop users will also not like being thrown into metro just to use a one-off application, maybe unless it's a game, so they'll continue looking for the desktop version of an app.

The whole ecosystem is really a buzzkill for me.
Retail Lighting Revolution
You can use the ANGLE library [1] to translate OpenGL ES to DirectX. It's used by both Chrome and Firefox, so it's widely deployed and also tested for OpenGL ES conformance.

Re: networking, you are of course right. At the same time, I can sympathize with Microsoft's decision to abandon Winsock. Cross-platform use of BSD sockets is mired in a deplorable mess of #defines and '90s incompatibilities. For new code, the non-blocking WinRT API is a million times better -- the question is, what can Microsoft do to make porting easier?

[1] http://code.google.com/p/angleproject/
Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2010 Professional upgrade price: $249. Visual Studio 2010 Professional to Visual Studio 2012 Professional upgrade price: $499.
Google Maps - New Perspective
When JavaScript becomes a more stable general purpose language, Python will have to make a run for its cash.

We have seen node.js and jslibs exists, as well as OpenGL bindings for v8. Microsoft has bade WinRT where JavaScript is a first-class citizen for desktop programs. What can python offer then? Numpy and scipy and twisted? Those are just libraries, and bindings can be made from JS to their respective hot-spots of C.

JavaScript is already beating Python in speed.
Wouldn't it just make life easier for all of us to use auth via apps? I know that right now different providers use different layers of shit for their own purpose but there's gotta be a common ground for all of them that we could leverage for the sake of getting passwords out of the game for the most part of it.
Email best practice
Either cut everybody off or cut nobody off. Philosophically I'd rather the former, but practically I prefer the latter. The riots we'd get with $20/gallon gasoline are pretty off-putting.
about python on mobile, and making it run on the NDK. Checkout kivy.org, it's a nextgen UI framework with pure opengl ES and multi-touch support from the ground up. It's pretty fast, especially since the core parts are written in C and it uses a sort of JIT graphics compiler.

It runs on win/osx/linux as well as iOS and android. In fact through the android-for-python project (github.com/kivy), it does pretty much exactly what the author talks about in terms of making it run on the NDK. There is also the pyJNIus project to go along with it in order to call java code and sdk directly.

python on mobile really is an option, and it lets you write cross platform apps in a very nice manner.
Barefoot under the Desk - a Creativity Booster
To be honest, do we really need so many apps? Yesterday I prepared the new phone (Galaxy Nexus) for my mum. I don't think I installed more than 7 apps from the market: Chrome browser, Google Sky Map, Rail navigator (for German railway tickets), Google Authenticator, Kindle reader, Öffi (public transport for a lot of cities), Google Goggles.

Did I miss anything important? Honest question - I'd like to prepare the phone as good as possible, it is her first smartphone. Perhaps some kind of news reader, but personally I don't use them, wouldn't know what news sources to set up.

"We need 1000s of apps" is just something Apple marketing has installed in our brains.

If Windows 8 comes with a decent browser, calendar and email app, they are good to go.

As for desktop PCs - I think only few people are still interested in creating desktop apps? Not counting games.
It's Not an Issue. It's a Bug.
He should have worded it better - "aiming to provide the best, trying hard for a comeback, want #1 though in this competitive market may have to settle for #2 or #3 in sales"
GoogleWithoutGoogle - weekend project for a simple startpage
> Furthermore, it would seem that Apple is fully aware that the iPhone 5 is easy to scuff — and yet it knowingly proceeded to manufacture (and sell) record breaking numbers of the new device.

How dare they!
Is this a serious article?
Should the JSON returned be the set of weekly numbers or daily numbers? It doesn't say and since you mention that it's going to be crawled daily it seems like it would be daily numbers...
Cheers! I've been wanting to make a beer app for a while and always had BreweryDB in the back of my head. Maybe you should open up your database via an API too:)
> Re: networking, you are of course right. At the same time, I can sympathize with Microsoft's decision to abandon Winsock. Cross-platform use of BSD sockets is mired in a deplorable mess of #defines and '90s incompatibilities. For new code, the non-blocking WinRT API is a million times better -- the question is, what can Microsoft do to make porting easier?

That is not a reason to not code and offer a code wrapper for BSD-sockets-like API based on WinRT sockets.

Of course, no need to cover 100% of the API and they could use lots of warnings to force developers to slow transition.
Add to it that they had to abandon the Metro name due to trademark violation.
Missing c99 support is really a pain in the ass. I can't believe they don't care about it.
That would feel like inventing UUCP again.
And here I thought Apple's main selling point (at least to justify the price) was this hard-to-quantify "build quality" meme.

Granted, the iPhone 4's could be broken and shattered left or right if dropped, but if you avoiding actually stressing the device in any realistic way and avoided making calls without "holding it right", it should at least present an appearance which shoved off this "build quality".

Now "build quality" is reduced to mean even less, almost little more than "looks nice on photos"?

From the way I'm seeing things, Apple is lossing its cool completely.
Microsoft seems to have borderline personality disorder when it comes to supporting developers and standards.

Good luck with it – I’m sure you know it’s one of the Killer Apps on any platform.
You just need to put it in water and re-anodize it.

I can just imagine a recall after months of complaining.

Be sure to watch the video at the end, fascinating http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZhVOy-ytJY#!
It was a joke: http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag
Schiller ignores that in his response, which could well mean that Apple doesn’t plan to replace or recall damaged iPhone 5s

They have already been replacing them. In some cases they are letting people switch from black to white models if they are very concerned about scratching. I've yet to see any evidence that normal wear & tear causes scratches or chips to appear. It's probably metal on metal damage you have to worry the most about. So no keys/change in your pocket with your phone which is kind of common sense. I've had my iPhone 5 since Friday and I don't treat it with any special care. It gets throw into my bag, floats on my car seat when I drive, no case, etc. Haven't had any problems with scratching or chipping. I think if it was going to be a problem I would have seen it by now.
History of the web from 1940 (work in progress)
Hi,

I'm french.

She's saying that you can protect your computer from illegal downloading stuff form internet using a firewall, and you can get one for free. (fun)
She wants to give an example, and she said that on hers gov computer she got an opensource one which is called openoffice.
After that she become a meme on french websites.
Outstanding article. Well overdue for the Mongo community. There are always the haters whom find themselves ignoring documents then complaining about how things are setup.

Thank you for going back through mongo articles to iterate the key failures to understanding points.
How web application security can be done with PHP
This is exactly what I'm aiming for in developing Instahero (http://www.instahero.com). Your traditional analytics software has all this data, why can't you get a metric you need right away?

Instahero lets you just write one or two lines of Lua and visualize/report on any metric you want.

Sorry about the plug, this tool is just similar to what I'm working on to solve a more general problem.
As a long time Linux user, I have to say this is sadly true. I actually like Google Docs better than LibreOffice although it has less features.
Isn't DirectX part of a walled garden? If more games are written in OpenGL, for example, they will be easier to port to Android, Linux, Mac OS, and even the iPhone. A decade ago, it looked like OpenGL was dead. I, for one, am glad to see its resurgence.
Premium C++ error detection is now available for Visual Studio 2012
Tent is probably like CIA?
"RIM is spending a lot of time designing an OS that will appeal to everyone. I think they are going to find its going to be used by no one."

Absolutely.

They should not be chasing the consumer, iOS-esque market. Some would say they've lost it, but I'd actually challenge that they never had it. Blackberry has always been an enterprise and small business solution. Historically, unless my numbers are way off, most consumers didn't own smartphones in the Blackberry Era. By and large, those who owned Blackberries were either using company-issued Blackberries, or had used company-issued Blackberries and purchased personal ones on the side. Kids and casual consumers had Motorola RAZRs and other non-smart phones.

The critical implication here is that the Blackberry did not open the floodgates of mass, consumer smartphone adoption. The iPhone did (and lately, the iPhone and Android have been).

In the years of Blackberry's dominance over the smartphone market, the smartphone market was comparatively small and concentrated. And, very important, it was use-case-specific (email). This was differentiated from the predominant mass-consumer use case (SMS). So there was a clear and safe divide between the two segments.

RIM was making a fortune in those days, but then it assumed that it needed to follow suit when the iPhone launched. And it's been all downhill from there.

Meanwhile, there are still a fair number of enterprise and small business owners and CTOs who prefer Blackberry to iOS/Android for business, and who buy Blackberry for their businesses. That number is dwindling rapidly, as you point out, the more Blackberries start to resemble half-hearted iPhones. But it's still a very lucrative niche that RIM can purpose-build for. I would bet, however, as you seem to, that RIM fails to capture it.

So what can RIM do to stay relevant in enterprise? For one thing, don't shy away from the keyboard. Embrace it. It's a point of clear differentiation, and though the cool kids will scoff at it, many business executives still prefer it for email. They might always prefer it. Second, develop more robust enterprise software. Blackberry should be able to handle spreadsheets, Powerpoint, word processing, data visualization(!!!), cross-device integration (printers, etc.), and other key enterprise solutions in a way that iPhone and Android don't.

This is not going to be easy. And it'll be especially difficult, in as much as many of the standard enterprise software solutions are offered by Microsoft, a competitor. Nobody's going to use a RIM-only spreadsheet program that doesn't integrate with Excel, for instance.
Is this why the "Perl is dead" trolling is disappearing? The Python people are busy with other things... :-)
What would you like to see in a web API's pre-launch landing page?
I'm launching http://www.onemusicapi.com soon and hoping to build a mailing list of developers interested in using the service.

The landing page is currently sparse with little detail. What extra information would you like to see on the page before it convinces you to hand over your email address? Likely pricing? API examples?
Try for the moon, reach the stars?
This makes me a bit sad since I don't need software to make a heatmap.

The graph would be two dots, split between 33% of my time at work, and 66% of my time at home.

+/- a few percent to go and get groceries.
antaneagate - get a case,
glassgate - get a case,
scuffgate on a phone - get a case.

People will complain that the iPhone 6 is not grease proof, calling it now.
Working Through Data-Intensive Text Processing with MapReduce
Change on-line porn into something better, with no profit. Wanna help?
Lowering the 30% tax would be a very good first step.
Of course. But this isn't a question about what is or isn't in the documentation. Of course everything you need to know should be in the documentation, and you should RTFM.

No, it's about obfuscation vs clarity, and to an extent, about how good the overall design really is. Look at it as a measure of quality. If I have to read every word of the documentation to find the tiny part on page 18 where it tells about that one flag I need to start it up with in order to ensure that one feature works the way I want; versus a sensible default and clear documentation and even clear design where perhaps that flag isn't even required (think automated memory management that Just Works, versus a dozen command-line or config-file switches about memory buffer size and such).

When you run into issues, it's not a useful excuse to say "Well, you should have read the documentation, it was all there." That's like a shady credit card contract where the rate goes up 30% if you miss a payment. It's easy, even if you read it, to say "well I won't ever miss a payment," and even easier to miss that clause completely. Can you blame people for not reading the fine print? Sure, it was their responsibility. Will people still do it? Of course. Will people who read the contract fully still run into issues if they make one mistake? Probably.

And the point: is it a crappy contract? Yes. It has a crappy feature to begin with, and it's made worse by its obfuscation. This is almost unarguable: a credit card with a lower rate penalty is better. A piece of software with good defaults and sensible design is better.

The requirement for asinine and lengthy documentation isn't just a big warning sign that you should read it—it's a sign of poor design, or at least the word everyone's been using to describe Mongo: immature.

Good design includes the whole experience of using the software, and takes into account good integrated systems and human interaction. Bad design requires you to read the documentation extremely carefully. These are not hard and fast rules, but they're certainly warning signs. Really clear and obvious warning signs. And the overall point is that the well-documented issues that come up with Mongo are not just stupid people who don't read documentation—they are statistically relevant pieces of evidence pointing to some poor design decisions.

You should really think of this whenever you see a trend. You have a choice. You can blame individuals for "not reading the documentation"—or you can look at the systematic trend and statistically evaluate the problem. The former allows you to quickly dismiss issues on an emotional basis and make yourself feel better, while doing absolutely nothing to solve the issue. The latter lets you collect useful information and make real changes that have a real impact on the issue at hand. Your call.
It's increasingly difficult to build a solid foundation for a modern progressively enhanced web app in pure HTML/CSS. It's still perfectly doable, but difficult enough that a lot of developers simply don't want do it, justifying it by saying they save a lot of time. (Usually that's short-term savings and long-term losses, but I don't want to debate that right now.) PushState does not address this critical issue.

To put it in a different way, current web standards encourage people to abandon page model entirely. When they need SEO, the thought is "oh, damn, I need to re-implement my wonderful JavaScript on the stupid server". That is backwards and is not progressive enhancement.

What we really need is an update to core standards (not JavaScript) that allows for building dynamic applications in declarative way and without abandoning the page model. Such updates are possible.
I think, and I like to dream, that the next wave of stable general purpose languages will be functional. Given how distributed/concurrent/multi-x everything is, and will keep increasing in importance, it seems that functional languages will become more relevant.

That said, as more and more domain specific languages come to be, and general purpose languages mature, there's probably not going to be a 'single winner.'