skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a sysadmin, I can totally relate to those thoughts.

If you run nonstandard, you basically have to learn vim/vi as a default install for an OS and another with all your add-ins and customization. Sure the key bindings are similar, but I don't have my macros and why is my tabbing funny, there's no line numbers, and damn it, the backspace key doesn't work. I forgot I set that in my .vimrc.

Sure, I can remember most of the latter with set tab and set no, but when you're popping around systems, switching to root (with it's on .vimrc), keeping applications as stock as possible is very helpful.

I personally have a slightly custom .vimrc for my local use, but I don't rsync my dotfiles across the globe for my other home directories. I basically try to keep it as code development (with .vimrc) and sysadmin (may not have niceties, but I'm not editing code).
I wish i had the time to learn that much languages and spend couple of years per language... I think the problem today is that we try to learn 3 or more at the same time what often results in bad code....
...in US. There are quite a few T-Mobiles.
Still faster than walking to the gas station and back :) but yes, you're right. I hope they are not put down by a media scandal or legislation before that happens.
Nokia is hooked on Windows Phone, now has to pay for it
I don't ignore calls from people as they could be important. Someone may need help, or they may need to notify me of something immediately. This is a good use for interruptive voice calls.

However, if someone keeps calling me for very unimportant issues, then I would ignore their calls, and check voice-mail later to confirm if it was important.

I expect to get down-voted for this as it is a bit unfortunate, but if people think they can have my time whenever they want for whatever they want, then I'm not going to have any time left for myself. Plus, if an important call does come through and I'm stuck talking to someone about something unimportant, then it's the important call that is going to be stuck in voice mail.
Pro tip: Link your demo from the top of your readme file, especially when you're handing out the Github URL.
“Those that Don’t Know History…” - Stephen Few
What's the selector count and how does it tackle specificity?
Foursquare Down
This is the Modem World: The Internet used to be better
This has been one of the things that scares me the most about the future. I really don't want to end up in medieval times, i fear something like this would lead to a weird high tech medieval world.
And remind me again who would want to license technology from a company who has zero experience in delivering mission critical solutions.

Plus cars are 10-20 year commitments, is Google going to be there and still interested in this? I am not even mentioning the strings Google might attach, like using Google Tires to be "compliant and be able to use the {brand}" (see Android)
The issue is that it's 5-10 minutes to scan each man page every single time I want to use sed, find, xargs, etc.

I quickly reach a point where I just think "Fuck it, I'm writing a Python script for this."

A simple tool that only takes a couple of minutes to learn, then a five second look at the man page to refresh the syntax is very valuable, particularly if it focuses on doing the one job that people want to do most often.
Computer Files Stored Accurately on DNA
To me, this list is great except for one small thing.

- C
- Prolog
- Erlang
- Smalltalk
- Javascript
- Hakell / ML /OCaml
- LISP/Scheme/Clojure

Javascript?! Over Ruby or Python or Lua? What is it with people liking Javascript. I really don't get it. What can I do that is so beautiful or mindbending that I can't do in python?

From my experience there is only two reasons to learn Javascript: to be able to build web applications, or to write document store queries (MongoDB or Riak, although in Riak you can also use Erlang). Otherwise I just don't see what the big deal is.
This article has some interesting info and is not denying climate change.
You just made his point.
The only thing I get from this resume is that Philippe Dubost (the author) is selling himself like a product.
Why would you want that?
Traffic tickets, BIH.
Just for a moment, consider who this man is and what he has done. We would all do well to take a step back and consider his manner of response. Notice that he continued learning new languages after creating Erlang (instead of just evangelizing it at the one true language). He did not immediately say "choose these three languages" as if they were the only ones you could possibly learn.

Does it really help our profession/hobby at all if we engage in language-elitism and snark? Even on Hacker News I've seen vitriol directed at Ruby, Python, Javascript, Haskell, to name a few recent targets. All languages have their place, even if that place is only as a lesson for future language designers.

Encouraging people to build stuff, whatever the language, whatever the library, whatever the framework; that is what we should be doing. IF someone wants suggestions, or help deciding what to use, that is fine, but criticizing someone for the language or framework they use has become all too common and a stain on the character of our community.

That's not to say honest criticism is unwelcome: All languages/libraries/frameworks/software can improve. But to belittle people for the choices they make, or to segregate ourselves into voluntary language-ghettos we are compelled to stay in by the force of public opinion...that goes against the spirit of what people like Armstrong worked hard to build. Maybe it started with "Worse is Better", maybe it started with alt.religion.emacs being taken a little too seriously, but it has been perpetuated by all of us, even Paul Graham (in Beating the Averages).

At some point, this has to stop. We, as a community, must grow to support the betterment of hacking by creating and encouraging creation; not by petty vitriol and conformism based on fashion.

Now, I've strayed pretty far from the point of the post itself, but Armstrong closed with such a salient point: If we stopped bickering so much about what is the "right language", "right framework", "right library" and instead encouraged particular protocols and documentation standards we'd all be better off for it.
I don't seem to get the UI, it feels cluttered to me. Some actions have several variations that sound almost the same and apparently do different things (ie. send to device).

I guess that because I don't use it frequently, I always have to click around several times until I find what it looks like the thing I need, and I'm almost never sure of it :)

That sort of "what's going on!?" feeling I got with the new anaconda installer of F18.

EDIT: typos
For a second I thought someone had posted their resume as an eBook on Amazon.com and then used the product description options Amazon gives "publishers" very creatively.

Since it turns out that this is not what this is, I might do it, post a link on Hackernews, get lots of eyeballs that way, and subsequently receive a super-awesome job offer. Assuming the latter is also phildub's intention: Good luck!
Out of curiosity, do you think there would there have been blog post apologies if the harthur post was written by a guy?
What it boils down to is that 403, 404, 500, etc. pages are there to identify a problem loading the resource you're after. In the case of a 500, I might agree, but with the 404, you're getting what it's supposed to give you, and that's a heads up that the url you were shooting for was not found. Some companies get creative while others create useful links and guesses, but either way, you got the intended message, "not found".
As much as I appreciate innovation and inventiveness, the last thing PHP needs is another framework.
Looks very interesting, how does this compare to mixpanel? Is it event based? Can you compare segmented numeric values? This has been a big limitation in mixpanel for me, you can only really do comparisons between event counts, not any numeric values that are attached.
I'll note for the record that the Hacker News guidelines

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

currently say, "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." The original title of this article was "10 most-hated companies in America," which runs into another Hacker News guideline, "If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," which comes just before the general guideline to use the original title.

I'll also note for the record that I'm a reasonably satisfied long-term customer of T-Mobile. I started with predecessor company, Voicestream, back when it was the only GSM network in my town. I like to use GSM phones for international travel. I started using mobile phones when I lived in Taiwan. I'll have to agree that T-Mobile investors must be disappointed by T-Mobile's market share in the United States.
Interesting... I might take another go at it then. To be honest, the playing around I did with LyX made me think that it would be fine for what I was looking for, which was essentially "nicely formatted books", where "books" was a definite over-exaggeration of what I can truly expect the outcome to be.

I can appreciate the separation that you are going for, but I also have to wonder how much time you spend in LaTeX? If I were writing something that was worthy of LaTeX, it would probably average to less than an hour a week. I'm not sure if the effort is worth it for me. Again, to be completely honest. Whereas if I was doing a lot of writing that I expect to be read, I could imagine the investment being worth it.

I look at like the way I looked at HTML formatting: I knew how to do the markup, but the WYSIWYG editors got me where I needed a lot faster. Having said that, I now find myself handcoding divs and spans and then using more CSS... so maybe that is the argument I need to read up on it!

Well, lots to think about anyway. Thanks!
tl;dr: wild idea with no real notion of how to proceed. Wants everybody else to do it.
The core Javascript design is a mix of Scheme and Self, which is interesting in its own right.

Most people will recommend: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596517748.do
Do We Really Want to Live Without the Post Office?
Facebook, the 4th most-hated company in the US
Javascript is a very different language from Python. It is in some ways more flexible and less prescriptive. You point out one of the non-overlapping use cases. Javascript performance has seen really intensive efforts. Javascript has grown a rather nice async ecosystem that Python just doesn't have. It's also exciting for people from the standpoint that everything feels newer and more up for grabs. Python is a rather old language.

Any language is Turing complete so the big deal is a matter of style and tools and libraries and ultimately it's who you are working with and what you want to do.
> If we stopped bickering so much about what is the "right language", "right framework", "right library"

Programmers are sometimes maximizers rather than satisficers for this kind of thing. We don't want to know if something is ok and will get the job done, we want the best one.

I think people argue for their language out of some sense of the network effects involved: if I can get more people using my language, there will be more libraries, more people to ask about problems, more people to hire/to hire me, more books, and so on and so forth.

So I think there is some economic rationality to it.
I think the site is a little more creative than glitter, pink paper & comic sans.
Has it had commercial success? I proposed a similar system about five years ago to my wife who was working as a bartender at the time. She thought it was a dumb idea :-(

I was convinced that she was wrong, but I wasn't motivated enough to find buyers for it.
Saying that smartphones make you unproductive and then making a big announcement online about how you're giving up your smartphone is just a hip thing to do right now. The truth is that smartphones are just another tool. It's like saying you won't drive any more because you could get in an accident and die.

Just as I drive as carefully as I can, I avoid being engrossed in my smartphone the whole day. But that doesn't change the fact that when I need to fire off a quick email, check my calendar, or find out how to get where I want to to go, having a smartphone makes a big difference.
How To Make Your Team’s Code Better
Javascript has some unique concepts, while Ruby or Pyton are just mix of features also present in Smalltalk or LISP. So learning Ruby has no added value if you already know those.
Regarding Facebook, it doesn't surprise me, for a simple reason: they're one of very few companies that people feel like they have to use it, for fear of being left out socially¹, so disgruntled users will tend to feel worse and worse about it.

It doesn't necessarily mean more people dislike FB, just that the ones who do learn to really hate it by prolonged usage.

¹I'm not saying I agree with this view, just that it's common.
>> The crazy think is we still are extremely bad at fitting things together - still the best way of fitting things together is the unix pipe

Is that sad or pure genius?
there alternatives to skype
that are open sourced and you can look up what security features they got.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_VoIP_software
If he were talking about actually thinking about programming techniques I'd agree but here he's talking about languages, and while the languages he lists are sufficiently different, saying it'd take years to master lisp after working in ML, or learning Javascript after knowing C. After the first couple of languages learning new abstractions shouldn't really take that long.

In an ideal world easy programming solutions can be easily explained in the right language. We're not quite there yet but doing quicksort in ML doesn't require 5 years experience.
I am not sure if this helps in any way, but it just popped up in my newsfeed http://mashable.com/2013/01/24/ibm-hydrogel/

[edit: typo]
Joe Armstrong did help create Erlang with Bjarne Dacker:

Erlang was created at the CSLab by an initial team of Joe Armstrong, Mike Williams and Robert Virding.

http://www.erlang-factory.com/conference/SFBay2010/speakers/...
Did I say otherwise? I am rather addressing your claim that the game is to stand out.
> Even on Hacker News I've seen vitriol directed at [...]

To be fair, the author himself is pretty vitriolic about C++:

"I saw C++ coming and read the book - or at least tried to read the book -
there's a dent
in the wall behind my piano, where the book hit the wall - Improvements to
C should make things
easier not more complicated, I thought"
Similar situation, although my phone wasn't broken. My wife and I spent about 3 weeks in New Zealand and Fiji for our honeymoon. I toyed with the idea of getting a SIM card, but realized that I wouldn't have time or need to use it.

I found that I didn't miss my phone at all. I had Google Voice at the time, and could text the family from the hotel while winding down. The occasional phone call would have been nice, but I could have used Skype if I really needed to.

Also, my internet browsing habits have changed completely. I only frequent about four websites regularly. Most of my internet free time is spent reading HN Posts and other similar technical articles/blogs that I happen across.

Side note: While I didn't get a SIM, I wish I had purchased some sort of mobile hotspot. Hotel internet access was ridiculously priced, upwards of $20 per day.
"I'm sorry I got called out on my bullshit.", sounds more like it.
Affirming that is essentially the same as saying that both platforms achieved their respective market shares by accident. However, I understand your point. Linux is a great infrastructure OS, and investing resources in anything other than that is pure waste.
10 Creative And Useful Ways To Use NFC Tags With Your Smartphone
does somebody have a coupon to avail the discount. I'd need 99.9 percent discount :-).
> A couple of years should be enough (PER LANGUAGE).

Reminded me of http://norvig.com/21-days.html
Fern leaves and cauliflower curds are not fractals
Javascript has true closures, Python doesn't (or didn't?)
I spend most of my public transport time reading books - on my smartphone. That is one of the features I'd miss most if my phone broke.

People are engrossed in their smartphones, but whether they're looking at cat pics or reading Nietzsche, you won't know until you ask.
I spat my coffee out at this bit:

if you want a quick fix go buy
"learn PHP in ten minutes" and spend
the next twenty years googling for
"how do I compute the length of a string"
Yeah, like RIM and Nokia. I can see not liking them or not caring about them, but honestly who would go out of their way to actually hate a failing cell phone maker?

I'd like to see some data, some reasoning, something to help me make sense of this information being thrown at me. Without that, this post is completely garbage. RIM and Nokia are hated because their marketshare is declining?
I struggled with that point of his. From a coding speed perspective, he's right. But from an efficiency perspective, even some of the slowest interpreted languages will run circles around a shell script.

However it's still an interesting and thought provoking point. It makes you wonder about other ways of plugging different objects / modules together.
UX Munich 2013 - A conference for developers AND designers
This is a lot what it feels like to blog about something technical, and then have someone swoop in and question not just your article, but your parentage and your IQ. It hurts a lot that people can't be constructive with their criticism, but I hope that Heather continues posting open source projects. Haters 'gonna hate, you just can't let them bring you down.
I read on bus and train every day. Many other people do, too. I use my phone to do it, though.

Move to Boston, we read here.
Hated by some writer at marketwatch.com. What does that even mean?
State of education in India
You are absolutely correct, of course. But he was sharing his personal frustrations with C++, not engaging in the programming equivalent of "slut-shaming" someone for using C++. That's an important distinction that I think has been lost with the HN community. Without criticism, nothing would get better, but if you criticize someone for making something or making a choice, you might just encourage them to stop being a maker. And that's sad for all of us.
It's interesting that governments are aware of the threat, but they don't take any action against the root cause, which is inappropriate, nonmedical antibiotic uses, particularly with livestock and poultry.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/opinion/antibiotics-in-liv...
Not really. You can create custom listings in Amazon as 3rd party vendor.
A girl, really. ;)

Thanks.
DNA faithfully stores all Shakespeare's sonnets with no errors
Facebook Study Says Envy Is Rampant On The Social Network
Try this - Leave home with nothing and go take a walk around. No bags, no phone, no keys, nothing. Just clothes and maybe $20 in your pocket for emergencies. Leave early and with no commitments later in the day. Eat on the road. Return when you feel like it. Walk at whatever pace you like. Go wherever your legs take you.

It's an awesome feeling like nothing else. Helps if you live with someone so they can let you in when you return.
Beware: The ‘Share Economy’ Is Actually Shaded In Grey
Haskell eXchange 2012: Simon Marlow on High performance concurrency
Thredis is Redis + SQL + Threads
If you want to be uncharitable that could apply to 90% of startups that we talk about here. No reason to be dismissive.
Very interesting stuff. I have been working on my own project this way from scratch too. Gotten so far as under 100kb with all images [raw data URIs] combined so far.

Will give this project a close look in the weekend.
...how was C "portable" assembler if its semantics depended on the underlying hardware? That's by definition unportable.
Sony Fined in UK for Massive 2011 PlayStation Data Breach
"Things improved - I went to CERN and used the CRAY1 this could compile 100K lines of FORTRAN in 1 picosecond (ie about a zillion times slower than my mobile phone today)"

I don't like how he mixes together some precise numbers (, RAM size) with completely unrealistic (you can't do anyting in a picosecond, you can't compile 100k likes of code without noticing the time it takes the even today on any hardware.
Lolcat art: Gallery hosts exhibition of cat phenomenon
So is Lua, just done more consistently...
FWIW, the first time I saw that pull request it brightened my day. I know I'd love to get a pull request like that personally.

I'm also a WordPress developer (I know, I know), so I read through all the ticket changes every day. By far the best are those from a relatively new contributor that makes jokes and is generally more light-hearted than others.

I'd really like to see the open source community take a step back to smell the roses. We're making awesome stuff and it's free for anyone to use. Why not have fun while we're at it?
Britney Spears Through the Years
Python has closures, it just doesn't have a very convenient anonymous function syntax. I can't say I miss function () { .. } very often though.
>>>Telling someone their hard work and best efforts suck DOES hurt their feelings.

And so what? You think books don't get bad reviews? Movies? TV shows? School tests? It's part of life. Take the hit, move on. Do better if you must.

EDIT to add: When it comes to one-on-one being told your work sucks, the best response I think is this: "OK, if it sucks, tell me how, because I'm not yet able to see it and I'd rather not suck." That's better than just stewing in hurt feelings and never improving or knowing how to improve.
What's the best programming language for a hobbyist?
TLDR: There are so many programming languages and frameworks out there... and there is so little time :( Which one would you learn just for the fun of it?

I have some experience with a bit of Pascal, C++ and C# from highschool but not much (I was mainly learning algorithms and concentrating less on actually building software). During uni I did some Java and continued with C# (+XNA). In the meantime I played a bit with PHP. After I graduated I got a job as a PHP developer (PHP, Javascript, CSS, HTML).

Now, after 2 years of work, I realise I need something else. I want to learn a new programming language, or continue learning one I started in school, something that will compensate for the lack of algorithms in my work (building websites with PHP can be tedious sometimes). I want to learn it in my spare time and I want to be able to build something with it, a small application of some sort... not really important what, but I want to use those algorithms I learned several years ago.

This brings me to my question ... what should I learn? What is the best programming language for a hobbyist. The kind of programming you do on weekends just because it's cool, because it keeps your brain moving and because it's fun and rewarding. What's the programming language that puts a smile on your face? :-)
No. The hot button topic right now in open source is "increasing diversity" which means more attention is being focused on this.
Taxes kill the deal
I keep clicking on "1 star" reviews but it doesn't show me anything!!! ;-)
850+ votes, 480+ comments and counting. Who is going to write that easy to use, 'properly written' shell wrapper around find/sed?