skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I said closest equivalents, not close. And, in terms of understanding a 1975 comment with 2012 language comparisons, I challenge you to do better.

As for Java, it, like COBOL, was intentionally designed from the start to subtly restrict programmers so that large groups could work together on extremely portable programs. Both became popular in lots of "boring business applications" that will live forever. And if you think that current opinions about Java are dissimilar from old opinions about COBOL, you need to get out of your echo chamber and learn what adherents of various scripting languages think about Java. If you're tempted to retort that there are more Java programmers than scripting programmers, and Java programmers like the language, a 1975 COBOL programmer could justifiably have said the same thing.

The Perl vs PL/I comparison is not original to me. A bit over a decade ago MJD took a 1967 description of PL/I, did word substitution, and came up with http://perl.plover.com/perl67.html. The description fits - both languages combined several previous ones in an idiosyncratic way, with a strong emphasis on making it easy to get stuff done. The result in both cases was a language which made it easy for "sysadmin types" to solve real problems, with solutions that in time could become problems of their own.

The FORTRAN to C comparison is, admittedly, unfair as languages. But both have the characteristic of being low-level languages that are not (by current standards) very expressive, with large established code bases, riddled with repetitive mistakes that cause problems.

You admit that BASIC to PHP is better. If you think that I have failed to give the PHP language, core library, and community the full iota of respect that they deserve, then I likewise believe that you fail to give Kemeny and Kurtz full respect for deciding in the early 60s that computing was going to be a universal right, and there needed to be a programming language, for non-programmers, that would let them unleash that potential. And then designing a language that successfully served that purpose for decades.
In early highschool, I carried around one of these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Radio_Shack_TRS-80_Model_1...

Which seems to me like the best form factor you can have if you can't have a flip-up monitor.
I don't equate desire and positive outcome. Sometimes the waiting is worse than the thing itself. especially if you know it's coming.
You're assuming that with correct information comes correct/moral behavior, and that it's clear what that behavior is.
I went back and read both the thread and the original article and I think the OP is right.
There are 35 questions on the application. A question can be one we consistently pay attention to without being in the top 10.

Also, we added at least 2 new questions we care about more since we added that one. (The field names of one or both of those may be those of previously existing questions, but we changed the question itself in a way that made the answer more important.)
> Source? This seems extremely anecdotal.

Source is the darn kids on his lawn.
not even close - I can read everything on the site - I might need to put on two pairs of sunglasses, but there are lots worse - any site with a tiled background image for starters...
Could see it used if you ran it to a fixed hub in the back. You could have multiple rations while keeping cleaner lines and all. But you would still have shift hardware....

Definitely an enthusiast product looking for a problem.
It just seems amazing how slow and ineffective was RIM to react to the market changes. They had a golden opportunity.
Goodle Chrome flags FeedValidator.org as hosting malware
It has prodded at least one HN reader to speculate about making these patterns with robots[1], and another to wonder about solving shortest path[2]. Sounds like "of interest to hackers". This is late Saturday and peoples' interests wander further afield than optimizing CDNs.

[1] Can you make a business selling robots that let a ski resort decorate itself? Can you sell ads on unused winter pastures?

[2] If you consider each footprint to be a salesman's stop, then I think the answer is "Yes, but…"
Not even in Mexico they are cool anymore. The cool thing for teens is whatsapp with all the androids and iPhones around.
The only reason blackberry is cool among teenagers is the price point. An iPhone is just too expensive. That's also why they still very well in third world countries. The truth is that no teenager or even college student that has a blackberry wants to have one. They are forced on affordability.
Looking at the source, I can't see any evidence of malware, but maybe sharper eyes than mine could discern otherwise.
I, could, agree with that. I must have misinterpreted the article; I read it as good design has become the new baseline, so it can no longer be used as an indicator of quality.
Geez, many major Japanese retailers' websites are far worse...

e.g. Bic Camera (market cap $70 billion): http://www.biccamera.com

The basic design goal of Japanese retail sites seems to be "complete visual overload" (stun your customers into buying?)...

[Come to think of it, this rather matches their physical stores, but it's a lot more annoying crammed in your browser... in a store, it's kind of fun...]
JavaScript FizzBuzz, Generalized
The problem is that good design actually increases the desirability of a lousy product proportionately more.

Suppose when you went to the supermarket every, say, can-opener looked perfect, like it was cast out of solid stainless steel. If some were actually much better quality than others - if some would last a week and some ten years - then you'd be in problematic situation. Our judgement depends on, as the article says, to an extent judging a book by its cover. If all covers are amazing, the world is indeed nicer looking but we are in a bit of a quandary.
The fact that he didn't rhyme off data structures to your question alone doesn't mean he is unfamiliar with them. He may just use a different naming convention and calls them whirligigs instead.

There is something to be said about using a common nomenclature, and I understand why you might be hesitant to hire someone who isn't speaking the same language as the rest of your team, but underneath he could still be an algorithms genius.
Rob Pike - Concurrency Is Not Parallelism
I came here to say the exact same thing. During fetal monitoring the #1 thing they are looking for is heart rate variability. If the heart rare is constant that is very dangerous sign for the fetus.

The reason is simple: If the fetus has the oxygen it needs then the heart rate will constantly change, low during rest and high during activity. But if there is a shortage of oxygen the heart will run at the highest it can manage with the oxygen available.

This is also true for adults: The military figured out that the best soldiers for special forces training had a constant heart rate - their hart rate doesn't spike during times of stress, making them very good as resisting interrogation.

But it has a downside: They don't live as long as people with constantly changing heart rates.
There are plenty of mathematicians that don't program very well. Keep in mind, there are many "programmers" that are not really the sort of programmers Dijkstra is talking about. He's not talking about whipping together WP sites with a little JQuery to make dynamic menus.
This makes sense for machines - if your server is always running at a constant rate then it's probably maxed out. If the rate changes, and has no "clipping" (flat areas at the top of the peaks) then it has the headroom it needs.
The first time I understood a formal proof was with Dijkstra:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1311.PDF

He is an exceptionally sharp thinker who is able to communicate his thought process with clarity. Even if you don't follow the math you understand how certain proofs can be abstracted from proofs made earlier.

I think you are correct, Dijkstra was exceptionally interested in formal verification to the point where he wasn't willing to envision a computing world that was not formally verified. When he said that programming is more difficult to mathematics he was probably envisioning the problems of formal logic with increasingly sophisticated programming structures.
Herp. You just reinforced his point.
That keeping "up to date" on programming is not reading the latest blog posts on updates to Backbone.js, or learning yet another Web based *MVC or ANTI-MVC framework.
Also, RIM has been paying developers with Amazon's credit to attend online meetings to discuss why they aren't developing for their ecosystem.

It's great that they're listening to the community, but I can't stop to wonder if they don't really see their faults on their own.
He didn't use computers much, other than for email and browsing the web. Most of his writing was composed by hand using a fountain pen. He did work on ALGOL 60 and it is believed that he approved of the language.

Source: Wikipedia
Vend: Web and iPad POS
I couldn't say the reason, but the I/O for db59 [http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/latest/graph_all_periods.php?h=...] is much higher than the other servers as well.

Also, despite the switch on db59 happening a few days ago, there doesn't seem to be a significant change in overall CPU usage: http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/latest/graph.php?r=month&z=...
It seems like they could reinvent the brand. But it would be a pretty major shift.
You seem to be under the impression that being difficult to understand is a sign that you're working on difficult stuff. I disagree. It more often means that you've got so much jargon and such poor expository skills that you're not understandable. See http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/11/why-i-left-math.html for more on my perspective about math in particular.

What programming achievement is comparable in difficulty, complexity, or scope to the Classification of Finite Simple Groups or the Poincaré conjecture?

Let's compare the Classification of Finite Simple Groups with the Linux kernel.

The classification spans tens of thousands of pages over decades, was done by about 100 mathematicians, in the end large key papers were so poorly reviewed that some of the most pivotal people in producing that classification came to the opinion that the whole cannot truly be trusted and began an attempt to redo the whole proof in a more understandable and verifiable form.

The Linux kernel is about 15 million lines of code from a few thousand developers (most of whom, admittedly, only contributed one patch) over a period of 20 years which is widely tested in the real world on everything from phones to massive compute clusters.

I agree, they are not comparable achievements. The Linux kernel is bigger, involved more people, and we have more assurance that it actually works.
I understand the point, but I'm not convinced. Looks factor into quality, and are not merely an indicator of it. If I can have a market trend which increases quality across the board, I fail to see that that can be a bad thing because it took away a shortcut for assessing quality. It just means we need new shortcuts.

If you're interested in the durability of a can opener, the weight of the material sounds like a good candidate.
It'll load much faster if you strip out resources that still load server side on it (like images).

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YAoaA6A...

(just add strip=1 to the end of cache searches)
Is it really that shocking though? RIM made its nest in the business community, not exactly a demographic you would anticipate would care a huge deal about apps. When the market shifted in the way it ultimately did, RIM proved unable to cope because it required a fundamental shift in their platform, which is not an easy pivot for a company of that scope.
This kind of reasoning is in fact why I oppose most copyright law.

Copying something into your brain is always legal. It's ok to hear a joke and tell it to your friend. But technology is basically augmenting our mental capabilities. A smartphone with a camera is a device that lets you remember images better than your brain can - if our brains could already do it, we wouldn't need the smartphone.

It happens that the smartphone is external to your brain, but over time, we might add that functionality to your glasses (which is closer), then maybe to your eye sockets or cornea, or eventually integrate it directly with your brain.

At which point, laws preventing you from copying things are basically laws that force you to limit the capabilities of human beings.

Current copyright law is based on human limitations - humans are bad at remembering verbatim entire books, so we have copyright laws for that. We don't have copyright laws for short jokes because we can remember those. But that framework of law stands in opposition to actually improving human capabilities. That's fundamentally wrong.
Perhaps "Nothing else solves the deployment problem as well as PHP did."

(No, not even "git push to deploy".)
Why does Amazon allow it? It's somewhere between outright fraud, and DOSing or Amazon's search functionality; It's clearly something that constitutes abuse.

Similarly, if I were to fund a human team of title-writers to create plausible original titles for a hundred original titles per hour, and fill the actual pages with random words from the OED... Advertising that as a book on a particular topic would likely be some type of fraud. The result is not far from what I've seen of this guy's work.
Man of Many
I think the value of TopoJSON is a bit understated here. MBostock reported some pretty awesome results about a month ago. "With TopoJSON, reduced 2.2M shapefile to 628K (-72%, 176K gzipped)!" https://twitter.com/mbostock/status/269548330663677952

Additionally, smoothing shapefiles with tools like http://mapshaper.org can really help trim down filesizes.
> A question can be one we consistently pay attention to without being in the top 10.

Sure, but the query was about "pay most attention to".

I wonder if hacking the YC app process via PR stunt became too obvious an answer to the question over time.
Declaring property belonging to someone else as a national treasure is a highly contentious issue that is often litigated. It is an odd model to follow when I think the author really just wants to convince Yahoo! to tread very carefully with a product feature.

The problem with his post is that it doesn't even attempt to point out what's in it for Yahoo!, the owners of Flickr.

You can hold the position that there doesn't need to be anything in it for Yahoo! to declare this a "national treasure", but then you are fundamentally for redefining the internet and putting in a control body to dictate API versioning just like we have a local control body to dictate what is considered historic.

May be I am taking this analogy too far but that is my point: analogies without explicitly stated boundaries are almost meaningless in communicating your position.
I think one issue might be that everyone knows about this question and primed by the earlier comments on the importance might end up over optimising this. There might end up being lots of really impressive answers to this question that didn't correlate well with results.

In earlier rounds when less people that were applying knew the question it might have been a better indicator.
The Poison Pill In Startup Fundraising: Optimizing For Valuation
Are you implying that's too many or too few? Or are you just stating facts about the world? Can I join in?

The red-tailed sportive lemur (Lepilemur ruficaudatus), or red-tailed weasel lemur, is native to Madagascar like all lemurs.
I think we are slicing this a little too thin. My original point is that it is important to understand that the choices made when representing data can be important. My off-the-hip example was not meant to be definitive.
Let's get the government to force a private company to do something that is potentially extremely expensive and perhaps not even possible because well, because the API might break 'apps'. You're argument is terrible.
Your Optimal Creativity Time May Be the Opposite of Your Optimal Cognitive Time
I think this one has it beat: http://www.bountytowels.com
We already have these restrictions on us now; that joke in my post was in part to point this out. I know most of the Dead Kennedys songs verbatim. If I perform them publicly, it's copyright infringement already. If I write them down from my own memory, it's copyright infringement too.

Just getting rid of copyright law is dangerous, though. It'd be unilateral disarmament, because there are plenty of other mechanisms, like EULAs, that can be used to control what was previously copyrighted. We'd need massive reform of all the legal systems at once, lest we eviscerate the only tools we have (i.e., copyleft) while leaving all the opponents' tools in place.
>there is nothing on the landscape that is really equivalent to APL

I beg to differ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_(programming_language)
Why is it necessarily the case that "stars would compress into this material rather than into black holes"?

For example, why can't it be the case that there are two kinds of matter, one that can be used to build infinitely strong wire, and one that can't, with stars being made of the latter? Or why can't it be the case that the crushing process doesn't take matter through the infinitely strong configuration on the way to black hole configuration?
How to Make Your Site Look Half-Decent in Half an Hour
The cost of this system worries me. The "casual rider" around the world rides very inexpensive bikes. For instance, it's rare to see someone in Japan commute with a bike that's over $150. Low end Shimano components are pretty inexpensive due to their massive volumes. I'm concerned of the possibility that this product is being developed without having rigorously tested for product market fit.
And you are welcome to be as certain as you wish. But I would point out that without black holes having an interior, there can be no Hawking radiation in the first place. Your statement is therefore internally inconsistent.
I understand. Generally, we should aim to build tools that address the greatest gaps in quality. You might say that design is currently not the most important gap to address, and that may be, although it hasn't been my experience. Although design has been getting a lot of attention in recent years, the tools for design are still very much in their infancy.

If you contrast the availability of design tools to say, development tools, I'm pretty sure you'll agree there's a huge gap there. I grant that there has been a recent surge in UX/sketching tools, but so many areas of design are still left untouched. Recently, for example, I was very excited by discovering http://macrabbit.com/slicy/ and http://iconfactory.com/software/xscope - both solve problems many designers have, and they both make my designer life so much easier.

Perhaps to return to your original point - the world is full of people who follow trends blindly. I run an app development company, and if I had a nickel for every time someone asked me to build an app that no one needs, well, you know the end of that saying. Still, if you're going to follow trends without good thinking, 'invest in design' is by far not the worst you could follow.
The integration of an FPGA on the motherboard is one of the most interesting features that differentiates it from regular laptops. The author points it can be used "for your bitcoin mining needs".

I couldn't find which model of Spartan6 it is exactly. However if it is an LX150 (the one with the most logic units, used by the entire Bitcoin community), there is no way he can fit a decent heatsink for proper thermal dissipation. A typical mining implementation generates so much heat that heatsinks this big need to be used (actual picture of one of the first dual-LX150 boards built specifically for mining):
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13472215/forum/angle_a_heatsinks_600...
Nothing changed, it was never a good question. There are many ways to be productive, entrepreneurial, and creative while working "within the system", so the question was intrinsically discriminatory to those who did so.
It's terrible. PHP doesn't "get the shit done", although PHP programmers can. There are far better languages for getting things done. Huge community is not terribly attractive, as plenty of other, better languages have sufficiently large communities.

I'd survive if I had to program in PHP, but it would definitely be a last resort. It could be worse (Malbolge?) but I don't understand why people feel a need to defend it or say it's not bad.
Wait, I'm confused - I'd at least expect you to mention something about us getting into the PR circle jerk as part of the program? Is that not part of it?
Yes, that's exactly the point! Just replace the logo by a breadboard internally linked to the various I/Os and I'm sold!!
Looks awesome. I'd love to have this integrated into a Thinkpad keyboard along with some kind of HDMI display glasses that don't suck.
Whenever there's a Blackberry article on HN I'm surprised that almost nobody (neither in the article, nor in the comments) mentions the development environment. It is decidedly subpar. Now, I don't know for sure whether developer tooling makes a big difference to the success of a company, but I suspect it does.

I mean, the whole thing requires you to use a PC, and it insists you run in Windows XP compatibility mode if you want to use the simulators (which you only find out by trial-and-error). And even then the simulator stops working every ten runs or so. OK - so you want to run on a device instead? Well, not if the code signing servers are down you don't (required for every build). And that's just the tools - we haven't even started talking about the SDK.
Not only is Dave Smith a legend historically†, but he's back in the game these days with his new‡ company "Dave Smith Instruments" (one of the few (only?) companies currently making real, affordable, analog polysynths):

http://davesmithinstruments.com/

† Not just for midi. His Prophet 5 was a seminal, ground-breaking synth (and super popular; it can be heard all over music of the 1980s).

‡ Well, new-ish, starting with the wonderful "Evolver" in 2002.
Priority is the one variable in Agile Project Management
I never really understood the question that well. I was considering applying on a couple of occasions, but this question always made me reconsider.
Matlab and R could be seen as inheriting some of the features of APL; at least APL was my first thought after having written my first program in APL as a middle schooler and then done some work in R many years later...
These aren't actually 'books'. They're mostly business reports, which I hate to say, are already programmatically compiled by interns repetitively applying formulas in spreadsheets and building graphs from database queries. That's why they cost more than paperbacks, because "The 2009-2014 Outlook for Plastics Lamp Shades in the United States" is essential for the people in the business.

He also has medical dictionaries which seem to confuse his cause, as he explains "For health titles, only the format editing and production side is automated. The text in the health books was written by medical professionals and edited by a professional editor; the computer expedited formatting using about 50 odd routines (the preface, chapter intros, glossaries, indexes, headings, margins, etc.)"
Asymmetric sync vs. Dropbox
They had the casual market too, Blackberries were cool everywhere.
It's more about escape velocity. Your neural signals would not be able to escape to an observer "outside" the black hole -- I mean outside most of its gravitational influence -- but they could move around locally.

The larger the black hole, the smaller the tidal forces at the event horizon, so with a large enough black hole, a human body would be fine.
The government should spend its resources on building a death star
Powers by Repeated Multiplication
Interesting point. At first I was gonna say semantics, but in this case it matters. Guess they need to phrase it better when they start quashing the convictions.