skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here’s more of a "challenge" than a problem I’d appreciate feedback on. Our team-of-two is creating an iPhone App for Kiva (no, there’s not one already). It’s obviously down to the wire on what functionality will make it in for the launch tonight. Knowing you guys are probably familiar with www.Kiva.com, any feedback on the functionality you’d most want is appreciated. More specifically, what's the one thing you'd want your Kiva App for iPhone to do?

Now back to work.
Yeah, like the Lisp Machine from 1980.
Command: (software-type)
"Lisp Machine"
Command: (time:parse "twenty-nine years before yesterday")
0
0
0
4
4
80
4
NIL
:RELATIVE
"..ad hominem attacks", are you kidding? They are questioning the writer's objectivity, as do it. The writer's points/ conclusions are incorrect. The solution is not to constrain or eliminate Google, it's for the Guardian and the other content providers to adapt to be relevant.
The WWW was a lot less useful back then, because linking doesn't actually work very well.
Meanwhile, the C# developers go all the way laughing to the bank. ;-)

Here's hoping that Scala will help to fix the Java issues. However, given the similar way such languages work, I fear many developers will prefer to use something else, really, like PHP, C#, Python, JavaScript, ActionScript...

If Scala means more open source developments, there are many ways to go about that.

Celebrities and their audiences, huh? Both the Scala guy and the JRuby guy are celebrities in their own rights.

Here's how worried Ruby is that Scala is gaining traction:

dewd@senna:~/in_motion/ruby$ ls -l
total 32
drwxr-xr-x 5 dewd dewd 4096 2009-03-29 15:44 ironruby
drwxr-xr-x 18 dewd dewd 4096 2009-04-05 15:23 jruby
drwxr-xr-x 20 dewd dewd 4096 2009-04-05 03:05 macruby-experimental
drwxr-xr-x 16 dewd dewd 4096 2009-03-25 12:13 rubinius
drwxr-xr-x 25 dewd dewd 4096 2009-04-05 16:18 ruby
drwxr-xr-x 18 dewd dewd 4096 2009-04-05 16:27 ruby-1.8.6
drwxr-xr-x 18 dewd dewd 4096 2009-04-05 16:27 ruby-1.8.7
drwxr-xr-x 24 dewd dewd 4096 2009-03-06 02:58 ruby-1.9.1

As the Ruby community has grown throughout the years, there have been some controversies among Ruby users every now and again. For example, now that there are many Specs and Tests to run when testing a Ruby implementation, there has been the implementation of a minimalistic and fast runner for them which was not meant to be fully compatible with RSpec and Test/Unit, which has caused some discontentment at times... :-)

JRuby too is not without its own love/hate feedbacks among potential users. ;-)

That said, Ruby and its ecosystem is not "too big to fail" yet. Other languages and systems like Java and C# are "too big to fail" and it can be hard to compete against them with other less-supported tools. Scala builds on top of Java and to some extent it works great that way, right? Ruby "loves" the Java world in the JRuby form and it works quite OK that way, without the static typing and absolute performance of Scala.

Scala and Ruby belong to different typing systems, static and dynamic, and may well be extremes on each end of that spectrum. Ruby has had a "motto" of encouraging "duck-typing" as in "if it walks like a duck, quacks like duck, then it's a duck", so no need to check the is_a?(Duck) with Ruby. It kind of betrays the way Ruby is "meant to be" to do stuff like that. If big systems weren't to be built in Ruby, Ruby on Rails is that exception, that wonder of a miracle, really. Ruby on Rails with all kinds of plugins and stuff can be quite a featureful framework... And yet, it's constantly under development and the (lack of) typing system hasn't killed it just yet...

In celebrities wars, we are just fans really...
Questioning the writer's objectivity rather than rebutting their points is an ad hominem attack. I'm not kidding. If you think the writer's points and conclusions are incorrect (I do) you should write a rebuttal, rather than pointing out that the writer isn't disinterested. Interested parties can still make valid arguments!
You dismiss anyone who's job applies to the topic at hand? Shouldn't you dismiss Alex because he's writing a book for O'Reilly on Scala? Should the only people allowed to discuss this be the Erlang people? Just asking because I'd bet they would say that Kestrel is a crappy version of RabbitMQ.
Google is not amoral in that sense; it's an ideologically-driven organization consisting of people, led by leaders who are also people. Those people make moral judgments, and, contrary to the claims in the article, a great deal of Google's path has been shaped by those moral decisions, including the decision to engage in China. (I think they made the wrong decision there, but I might be wrong, and in any case the moral calculus figured quite explicitly in their discussions.)
Sleep = GC and more available synapses = smarter*

So smarter people need less sleep?

Is the converse true?

* http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/scie...
Hardly news

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE writes in 1912 !

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/22357

"It is an amazing thing that the English, who have the reputation of being
a practical nation, never saw the danger to which they were exposed. For
many years they had been spending nearly a hundred millions a year upon
their army and their fleet. Squadrons of Dreadnoughts costing two
millions each had been launched. They had spent enormous sums upon
cruisers, and both their torpedo and their submarine squadrons were
exceptionally strong. They were also by no means weak in their aerial
power, especially in the matter of seaplanes. Besides all this, their
army was very efficient, in spite of its limited numbers, and it was the
most expensive in Europe. Yet when the day of trial came, all this
imposing force was of no use whatever, and might as well have not
existed. Their ruin could not have been more complete or more rapid if
they had not possessed an ironclad or a regiment. And all this was
accomplished by me, Captain John Sirius, belonging to the navy of one of
the smallest Powers in Europe, and having under my command a flotilla of
eight vessels, the collective cost of which was eighteen hundred thousand
pounds. No one has a better right to tell the story than I."

Captain John Sirius is, of course, a submarine captain.

and as submariners say :

"There are only two types of naval vessels:

Submarines....... and Targets!"
This may be the best game EVER, but games on HN? What's next?
Is there some inconsistency in the article that leads you to believe that it is inaccurate, do you have some other source for information about what happened at NITI, or are you just deliberately ignoring any information that tends to contradict what you already happen to believe?
Well, it was my impression. It seemed to me that the language and concepts seemed really old, in a way that furiously contradicted its sci-fi nature... When I read Dickens, for example, I don't get a feeling that its thinking is old-fashioned. Although written centuries ago, the thoughts are still fresh and powerful.

When I last re-read parts of the Foundation series (I didn't get through the whole of it), there were so many things there which seemed... passé. Part of it was the language, and part of it was, I guess, the technology.

I think this is the curse of science fiction. Because it gambles on predicting the future, and predicting the future is so damn hard, it invariably diverges from the real future more and more as time passes. And the more it diverges, the more the science seems pointless and outdated.

I shudder to think how "hard sf" novels like "Red Mars" will read in 30 years, when another bunch of major technological revolutions will have come to pass...
He has only written one of those books (The Rails Way) the others are just books in the series. I don't think he choose the covers either.

He also states at the end:

"Have I been guilty of this stuff in my own past as a Rails advocate with a strong agenda? Yeah, probably so. Which is why I know it when I see it. :)"
Watch out, you might run into some nasty memory leaks
Even if they were completely selfish, Radiohead makes any money lost by their DRM free stance back on press and popularity. Based on what I've read about them, this isn't how they operate at all, but it's nice when you can change the world and make a profit at the same time.
I think that it should cover both
In yet another example, the overhead for automatic memory management is shown to be prohibitive.
I need a lot of sleep, so I must be dumb.
I'm aware of bugmenot, but for me it's an issue of principle not convenience. If everyone took this stance, Bugmenot wouldn't even be necessary.
It has a quite good hardware support.
Unfortunately, flash isn't available, but you can run skype with the linux emulation layer.
You need to have access to and be competent on all systems.

My weapon of choice is the MacBook Pro. Pretty fast hardware. Swap in a 500gb hdd and triple (or more) boot os x, windows (xp and vista), ubuntu, bsd, etc.

Or you can get a bunch of different machines and use synergy. I found that to be most useful for testing web stuff across platforms.
"Ender's Game" is like the Harry Potter of the sci-fi genre. It's good adolescent reading, but I prefer more sophisticated science fiction; like Vernor Vinge, for instance.
I'm sorry -- Republicans? How did Republicans get into a discussion of the missile capabilities of China and/or defensive mechanisms carrier battle groups might or might not have?

Come on, guys. Take the politics somewhere else. People of both parties have lots of differing opinions as to various threats posed by various entities. Until it gets to funding, it's a professional judgment thing, not a partisan thing. And we're not discussing funding.

I don't think we're in danger right now of unlimited war with anybody, but then again nobody is paying me to worry about it. I think the point of strategic surprise is to maneuver your country into such a position that it could launch a surprise attack and get away with it -- your opponent has no time to build a counter-measure.

Of course, believing that a dominant weapon system from the 1940s is still viable today might be completely crazy. History tells us that things change dramatically in warfare. On the other hand, if it is not total war, then who cares what systems exist that are not going to be used?

There's a very interesting discussion about military theory and history here. Let's take the politics out of it if we can please.
The really big difference of the iPhone is that it's mobile, and is therefore around in social settings. Because of that I think the killer use case for a Kiva iPhone app is evangelizing Kiva to others: showing them the investments I've made, the repayments, the status updates from the entrepreneurs, and letting people look around for other people on the site that appeal to them. Help me show my friends - over dinner - that they should put money into Kiva. Actually signing up or doing lending on the iPhone, I think will always be simpler on my full computer.

When you were pitching the idea Dave McClure mentioned that the biggest problem Kiva has is inventory of borrowers, not of lenders. I think that didn't come properly over the mic.

I think what you're doing is great - I'm stopping by Startup Weekend later on today and will say hello. Have they fixed the wifi problems yet?
This article makes it seem like there's a choice, when honestly for the vast majority of all cases, there isn't. If you have the option, you should always get your undergraduate degree in Computer Science instead of Game Design or Security. Even better would be an undergraduate degree in Philosophy or English, but let's not pursue that line of reasoning lest I say something controversial. Suffice to say, programming (and Computer Science in general) is essentially a task concerned with representing ideas. As the blog sphere proves, most people have absolutely no training on how to represent ideas, and the result is rather painful. English and Philosophy are far older disciplines than Computer Science; consequently their methods of teaching students how to represent ideas are far more developed. A major in English or Philosophy and a minor in Computer Science will make you a far better programmer than most of the pure bred Computer Scientists. Indeed, if I was designing a Computer Science curriculum I would integrate English and Philosophy courses into at least the first year of study.

If you want an example of a success story for the above doctrine, do some reading about this man: http://www.beckman.illinois.edu/directory/rpowers
As a consultant who considers himself a generalist, I say it depends. If a client needs a short engagement to fix some set of specific problems, then they should get a specialist. OTOH for a longer engagement or for a fulltime employee, get a generalist. The problem with specialists is they tend see solutions only in their domain. If you hire an Oracle specialist, you are going to get an Oracle solution. If you hire a J2EE specialist, you are probably not going to get a Django or RoR solution.

Generalists are more expensive in the short run, but in the long run the solution is probably cheaper.

If you are a specialist, you get work quicker, but it is the same work over and over. About a decade ago I was working at BEA and one of my coworkers was a CORBA specialist. He quit when they transferred him to the WebLogic group. He wanted to continue to be a CORBA specialist. I wonder what he is doing today.
Please try to pay closer attention. That was my conclusion after reading what he said. He claims good Ruby code would have helped Twitter. My experience and apparently the experience of Alex and his team prove otherwise.

And as for Kestrel, you can call it a crappy version of X all you care to, and it may be depending upon how requirements for X and Kestrel differ. One thing to keep in mind is that essentially the Twitter engineers are doing the software engineering equivalent of rebuilding a jet aircraft in midflight.

Part of the point of having a modular architecture is to try and set up API's that act as firebreaks for intra-module changes. So if you need to switch out your message queue for performance reasons, rewriting a brand new one that conforms to the API the rest of your system expects might be the best solution at the moment. Otherwise by breaking compatibility you can set off cascading changes which require rewrites all across the system.
I am not a weapons expert, but some questions pop in my mind:

How do you hit a moving target from 2000 Km away? Using satellite images? UAVs serving as spotters? Well, worst-case scenario the U.S. carriers could release collosal amounts of smoke and create such a thick smoke-screen that no light or IR radiation would penetrate.

The Chinese could try to guide the missile remotely with a human operator being fed with "real-time" video, but good luck steering a missile at Mach 10 with a joystick, LOL.

Moreover, at Mach 10 the transmission delay could be a serious problem. After all, electromagnetic radiation takes some time to travel 2000 Km -- approx. 7 ms (to which one must add the processing delay) -- and controlling a missile with super-fast dynamics with a 10 ms delay is not trivial. A thought experiment: try driving your car on the highway at 200MPH, with your windshields covered and with no sensing other any "real-time" video of the road ahead which has a delay of 100 ms. Good luck!

If the enemy missiles use radar, they're giving away their position. Advanced high-speed anti-radiation missiles (HARM) could perhaps try to intercept them. A desperate counter-measure could be to release immense ammounts of metal strips to fool the missiles' radars.

If I remember right, the U.S. Navy had plans to equip carriers with super-mean machine guns capable of shooting 1 million bullets per minute, thus creating such a thick cloud of lead that no enemy missile would be able to pass through. Sounds low-tech, but it could work, right?
here is a reasonable list for someone who actually reads a lot of books.
this is a list weighted by voting, critical reception, and awards
http://home.austarnet.com.au/petersykes/topscifi/lists_books...
Scaling from one end of the performance/team size/code size scale to another using a single language is a very difficult problem no matter what language you choose. Things like static type checks that get in your way at one end of the spectrum become much more useful at the other end, and different languages fit different problem domains; when your problem space essentially changes on you, the tools you chose initially might no longer be the best choice. That doesn't mean the tools themselves are broken, just that they're no longer a fit.
> just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products

and sell one to the president of the US
Oh, only over a decade after the technology industry? The only thing large telecoms are good for is price fixing. The cost of a text message is nowhere near 10 cents. In a free market, the price wold never stay so far inflated. We should break all telecoms up into much smaller companies. The competition would ensure that we see some real innovation and fair prices for the consumers.
"Live the Silicon Valley Startup Experience"

Sounds like trouble to me. I'm generally skeptical of anything that tries to polish and make accessible an inherently risky and difficult process. If you're using Startup House as a way to test out working on a startup, be careful that you aren't looking for the "startup lifestyle." Only if you'd do it anyway would I think that this could ever be a good idea.
I think that carriers are completely obsolete in an all-out war, but the article is moronic. They certainly aren't obsolete because of "ships have no defense against ballistic missiles."

A ballistic missile is basically a bomb with a different delivery mechanism. Instead of being dropped straight down from a plane (like dive bombers of WW2) or diagonally down (like laser-guided bombs of today), it's boosted to altitude with a rocket motor, and then gravity takes it back to earth. The flight path at the end is basically the same, though. That's what makes it "ballistic".

Carriers have never had a defense against bombs - they certainly didn't in WW2. But y'know what - they usually didn't need one, because the bombs would often miss on their own. Or if they hit, they wouldn't cause serious damage, instead being stopped by the carrier's armor plating. The Harpoon doesn't pop-up to avoid CIWS (it's usually easier to hit something coming down at you from above than something skimming just over the waves - there's less radar glare from the water, and the angle of attack changes less as the missile moves in closer.) It pops up so it can hit the more lightly-armored superstructure instead of the armored hull, potentially causing fires and knocking out critical electronic systems.

We moved to cruise missiles for a reason: they have a much higher chance of scoring a hit than ballistic weapons. If 80% of your weapons will miss on their own, you don't need to worry about getting through the enemy's defenses, you need to worry about increasing your accuracy. Cruise missiles aren't particularly easy to shoot down either.

As for nukes - yeah, they'll take everything out, as the U.S. found out at Bikini Atoll in 1946. The defense against nukes is the knowledge that if you nuke a U.S. carrier battle group, you will have a few hundred incoming SLBMs within a couple minutes, ready to blow up every single major Chinese city.

Personally, I think the real threat to carriers is the cruise-missile swarm, coming from dozens of small fishing vessels. Cruise missiles are cheap, they can be mounted on relatively small vessels, and if they come at you from all directions, they'll totally overload all your air defense systems. It's not hard to find a couple hundred private boats and put 1-2 cruise missiles on each of them.
Actually, this is sound advice, although for employability, you might reverse the major and minor. Back in the days before the world was cluttered with CS majors :-), the consistently best programmers were musicians and people who never got a degree but liked programming.
As I said in other comments, I support vouchers for most non-parochial private schools.

I am willing to give parents of parochial school students tax rebates as a compromise to make voucher program implementable. Anybody that pays enough in property taxes to have the rebate cover the parochial school tuition can afford to send their kid to parochial school anyway. So, my support for tax rebates is purely tactical/political.
It would be interesting to see data on the types and distribution of degrees that are being laid off. The article does suggest a certain trend:

"In many ways, this recession resembles the deep downturn that began in 1989, “which was really the first white-collar-driven recession,” Mr. Hughes said. Then, too, there was a broad decline in employment in finance and related professions like law and accounting, he said."

If the same thing is happening now as well, perhaps there are better ways to optimize business, even when not in recession?
News at 11: False dichotomies engender controversy, pageviews.
Employability is always a concern, but honestly all you need is enough to get a technical interview. If you really know your stuff (as you should) and amaze the interviewer, they will be just that much more impressed that your degree is not in Computer Science. It creates an air of irreplaceability and uniqueness that is pretty essential. As you noted, there are a lot of CS majors floating around. :)
We think alike.

A carrier group is moving at 20 knots. Taking 10 minutes to reach the target, the group has moved 3 or 4 nautical miles in any direction. And it's not like you can have a radar lock on the target from the instant you launch.

Launching has its own perils. Assuming your launch system survived a first strike, or you start a sneak attack, satellites, airplanes, and ground support personnel can watch a missile being launched. There exists an intercept for ballistic missiles in early boost phase from several platforms: laser and anti-missile-missile come to mind.

But let's say you reach apogee and you have radar lock -- after all, a carrier is nothing if it isn't a big hunk of flat metal in an otherwise noisy ocean. So you're 100 miles or so up at mach 10 and you're heading straight down at the carrier.

At this point the Aegis system kicks in with the RIM-161 system. It's another proven system designed to do what -- that's right, take out ballistic missiles.

Assuming you make it through that, then you've got the phalanx system, a system which uses radar to throw up a hailstorm of lead at a missile headed for the carrier.

Now I've said nothing of Electronic Counter-Measures. You can be assured, however, if you're using radar that radars can be jammed, fooled, and made to spit out confusing data. There are all sorts of other fun games you can play with ECM, but I'll leave that for another day.

I think there's a real danger, no doubt. But the end of carriers? All carriers are rotting scrap heaps? Please. That's a lot of yelling and attention-seeking blogging, not serious analysis. (Not that I know anything, but I do know a few things)
Linux Box running proxmox virtualisation
if you're serious about web developing you'll be wanting to test your sites in multiple versions of I.E, Firefox & Webkit & Opera. That means running Windows at some point, virtualisation is your best way. I run ProxMox virtualisation http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Main_Page which runs a Linux in OpenVZ for running the HTTPD stack and various 2k/XPs etc in Qemu.

But the answer shoudl really be : the one that runs the tools you use in the best possible way.

I run Plan9 for my text editing requirements and I say it was the best I've come across. so YMMV
It's not really a false dichotomy; it's a pretty significant educational choice for many people. I agree with what you imply about the "quality" of the article, but I think it serves as a starting point for a valuable discussion.