skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is going to be fun!

I know he's joking, but I agree-- to a point.

First, if you write Haskell-in-Java code, you're going to do a horrible job unless you have so much autonomy that you end up reinventing Scala... in which case you should just use Scala. (See: Greenspun's Tenth Rule.)

Second, I think you learn a lot by studying other languages, but most of the superiority of Lispers or Haskellers comes from the fact that good programmers in general tend to be a curious set. Learning Lisp will make you a better Python programmer, and possibly a better C++ system architect. Will it make you better as a subordinate grunt on a gigantic C++ codeball? No, absolutely not. It will make you a morale problem and get you fired.

Third, you learn a lot more in expressive languages that makes you a better programmer but the languages itself don't get all the credit. When you use a Lisp, you can get a lot done quickly if you know what you're doing and cover a wide swath of computer science. When you use a true fringe language, you end up implementing a lot of libraries you'd just assume work in Java. These experiences are highly valuable but not rooted in the languages per se. It's just that a lot of the work you have to do to make a non-mainstream language usable in primetime contributes to your long-term awesomeness growth.

Fourth, if you want to be a Corporate Programmer (TM) and not be challenged too much, then maybe get tapped for management in your mid-30s, then Haskell and Python will poison you. I've written a lot about the progress of developer competence (see this, just today: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/gervais-macle... ). Once you cross the 1.4 rubicon, there really is no going back, and you'll be in conflict with managerial authority forever. Well, at least until you become so good that it's eminently obvious and you can escape the CrapFactory (or is it CrapVisitorSingletonFactory?) Corporate Programming world.

However, if what you want is to be a great programmer (not an easily employable one) then Haskell and Python will do you favors, and learning a few more languages (also C, because the low-level will always be important for some domains) is probably necessary.

This was written in 2006; I wonder what he'd think of JVM languages, especially Clojure.
Earplugs don't block out all noise. You will still be able to hear a loud unwanted noise near to your bed.
Japanese people who "abuse" Tor could be blocked
Agree. Stand ups are about syncing up, focus and helping each other, not status reporting to line management. I ranted about it this a few days ago: http://blog.flurdy.com/2013/04/i-dont-care-what-you-did-yest...
would you prefer a feigned empathetic interaction to an honest one?
WebP is a pretty "meh" format. The improvements it offers are, at best, very marginal.

Given the large amount of work required for widespread adoption of new image formats, the effort would be better spent on better formats.

[E.g. (and I'm no fan of MS) MS's new image format, JPEG XR†, which seems vastly superior to WebP in almost every way—it actually does have compelling new features.]

† http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XR
German Court Nixes Selling Used E-books
It's a calculated risk. Chances of this happening to any given person so far has proven to be almost infinitesimal, so people (rationally) don't care and treat GMail like they treat electricity.

But yes, if this indeed happens to you and you were depending on Google services for your work and life, you're completely screwed.

Sometimes I feel afraid of this happening to me, but I don't know where to move some of my data to, as every other mail/calendar service I know sucks hard in comparison to GMail and Google Calendar.
Great post, we (Formstack) built DailyStatus (http://dailystat.us) to ease our standup meeting pain. We're a remote company so dealing with timezones and internet connections for video was always a pain.
"Most forecasts are pegging them to declining profits and drastically slowing sales."

Citation needed, and sensationalist analysts don't count.
Facebook to Build a $1 Billion Data Center in Iowa
Analyzing the Market of HTML5 Games
Thanks for your reply.
Thats a great list of books. In fact I did a whole course of macro and micro economics so I do understand some of these concepts. But now when I am really trying to implement it, it doesnt turn to be that straight forward.
Except the last line from Bob Parsons does stand out.
I personally agree with TFA. Being able to change your environment is really key--I write Java in my job and it's just awful for me. I definitely lose motivation from knowing there are better alternatives.

He's not saying you lose anything, more that it's harder to use those things when you're constantly thinking about how wrong they are. Similarly, the overuse of certain habits is not always avoidable.
It's interesting to see how far C# progressed since this was written. Just a couple of years later, C# 3.0 came out and his example becomes:

mylist.Select(foo => foo.Description())
.Where(x => x != "")
.Aggregate((a, b) => a + "\n" + b);

Which is, I think, pretty nice.
– Delicious
Reading this was like reading a nightmare. I have all my life on my Gmail account. All my plans on my Calendar. Important documents on Driver etc... I'm way too dependent of Google. Same thing if iTunes Match or Dropbox dump me tomorrow.
Like people mention above, the hardware isn't the only impediment; Apple's control is what helps them a lot with this. Desktop Windows' support for DPI scaling is anemic at best, and this is only partially fixed in Windows 8 by having ad-hoc dimensions per-device, or on PCs just "big" vs. "really big" mode.
Probably none of you care, and some of you will hate me for pointing this out, but look, here are a few previous submissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=407796 <- Lots of comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=946258

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1883663 <- A few comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2410202

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2489298 <- A few comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3171630

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4828284 <- Lots of comments

It will be interesting to see if this discussion raises any points not in the earlier one. Or the earlier one. Or the earlier one.

And to the inevitable downvoters, I don't care. No, I'm not baiting you. I just wanted to help people see that this has been discussed before, and if you have any respect for the HN community, and if you think the HN community is smart in any way, then you may want to see what this smart community has said about this in the past, rather than re-hashing the same old arguments.

Or not. Go to it.
> Rules are rules.

I wonder how much injustice and how many atrocities have happened due to this type of thinking.
Alright but then how do you safely store your important data? Imagine if the same thing happened with Dropbox (if you're using it).
You should consider secretly using Scala or Clojure in order to see how long it takes for someone to say something.
Game developers famous for getting ripped off... get ripped off again
I'd say that, especially with programmers being able to find agents (10x Management that was just on the HN) - perhaps these autistic, but very good developers will be sought after by those who know they can make them more productive - in effect they're the low hanging fruit of this model because they're probably worse at these soft skills overall I'd imagine and have the most to gain.
Not trolling. Just tired of people believing in socialized medicine. Ask Canadians waiting months or even years for live saving surgeries.
Lech Walesa had a heart surgery done recently. In the USA. He brags all life how good socialized medicine is, but when it is him, he doesn't do it in Poland. Not in UE countries like France or Germany. Not in Switzerland. He goes all the way to the US. Socialized medicine doesn't work in contrary to the propaganda in the USA. Death panels are daily thing in places like Polish hospitals where my mother in law worked. There is just this much money from the state - for a single one heart surgery every 3 months. And when you have on average five patients - who will get it done becomes function of a bribe. Ever heard of a government department with sufficient funding for their operations? And instead of calling me a troll please google the issue. See how many cancer patients in Canada don't get timely treatment because of the cost. Where - mind you - time is the single most important factor when fighting cancer.
Bank Hack: 7.29% on £2,500 by using two different current accounts
Huh. I must have read the unusual orthography "wan't" as "don't want".
This is the part I wish he hadn't glossed over, especially since at least a small handful of studies suggest that we naturally adopt > 24h cycles when left away from light cues and set time responsibilities.
I thought freedom was good.

I thought the Dark Ages were bad.

Tower of Babel ploy -- "general assembly"

I took 5 assembly language classes in college. I actually heard someone imply assembly was for hackers. They are putting people on the defensive and causing guilty consciences like false memories.

Could this drug kill me, doctor? "Well, no, .... well, one in a million, but no."

----

This is like the Communist General Assembly saying... a dissenter used instant messaging. What happens? Suddenly everyone is looking over their shoulder and feeling guilty about instant messaging. Your average person says "I don't need to risk it." He even spreds the fear.
Now is your chance to tell the TSA what you think of full-body scanners
Another Look at Sequence in JavaScript
GitHub users can now upgrade Issue Tracker to OnTime for free for 1 year
Axosoft is offering OnTime Scrum OnDemand, a powerful bug tracker and backlog management tool (with release/sprint planning, burndowns and more) to GitHub users for free for 1 year for up to 15 users. Normally, it costs $1,050/year!
Do you advocate reducing your own income? If it is better for others to be hungry then surely it is also better for you to be hungry. And yet I doubt that you argue with your boss to be paid less.
Paying for managed Webspace that includes email functionality.
A good discussion on this here: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/chromiu...
One problem is that often the data is highly valued -- the team may have spent years building it. And, in academic circles, prestige comes from papers, not data sets. So the team wants to mine papers out of that data set for years.
I don't use Linode but I'll keep that in mind. Thanks for the heads up.
Enterprise apps accounts are pretty cheap compared to your average business expense. Not speaking as a googler, just a concerned fellow hacker. That might not perfectly insulate you from risk, but I guess (again, without any internal knowledge, I don't work on this stuff) that it cuts it by another factor of ten or more.
That's correct. If on Heroku, Faye would run in it's own dyno process, while Pusher is a commercial product. Sync requires a pubsub server to talk to, so either is a must. I suggest prototyping out with the Pusher free plan if you just want to throw something up to experiment with.
The real mess is how in ES6 they (the ES6 WG I mean) are furthering the illusion that JS supports classical OO, which is completely crazy. They should be going the other direction (and I think /be wanted to) but they steered away from that and seem to think that mixing syntaxes and thus concepts is the right move. I would imagine this article series will talk that eventually, though, kind of hard not to.
We just landed "image/webp" in Accept header in Chrome, behind a flag.. Opera already advertises WebP support in their Accept header. So, with that in place, it should make things a lot simpler (although it doesn't solve the Save As case).
someone suggest the opposite[1]:

If you sleep set hours, you’ll sometimes go to bed
when you aren’t sleepy enough. If it’s taking you
more than five minutes to fall asleep each night,
you aren’t sleepy enough. You’re wasting time lying
in bed awake and not being asleep. Another problem
is that you’re assuming you need the same number of
hours of sleep every night, which is a false
assumption. Your sleep needs vary from day to day.

...

The solution was to go to bed when I’m sleepy
(and only when I’m sleepy) and get up with
an alarm clock at a fixed time (7 days per week).

I've done this tips and have good sleep each night (and also become an early riser as side effect).

[1]: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-ea...
Weekly Traction Tracker: Who Is Hottest Among 1,100 Startups?
Unfortunately though, it's poor practice to let a user change their email address without first sending a confirmation email. If you don't confirm the action before making the change then bad people can lock out the true owner of an account simply by being logged-in.
As far as I know, Heroku was using Amazon ELBs.

Given that ELB does not support arbitrary methods, does this mean they've stopped using it?
Get Maid now lets you book on-demand or schedule appointments in advance
EDIT: I realize you said "near" and "closer" to production ready, but I think it's worth mentioning --

No FUD intended, but I don't consider ZFS on Linux production ready. Wanting to use ZFS, I recently started regularly reading their GitHub issues.

There are deadlocks and un-importable pools in certain situations (hard-links being one: think rsync). I would not want production boxes in the same predicaments experienced by several bug reporters. Moreover, applying debug and hot-fix (hopefully) kernel patches and the associated downtime in production is a no-go for me.

Mind you, the project leads are very responsive and it's making great strides.

In addition, I believe the Linux implementation currently lacks the L2ARC (which can make ZFS really fly, caching to SSDs).

However, I would absolutely run ZFS on Illumos or Solaris; for the stability and article-mentioned compression benefits.
Austerity was a big thing in Europe, and they mostly came to that decision before R+R's paper came out in 2010.
This is slightly orthogonal, but still worth mentioning: there is WebP codec available for Windows, which adds WebP support in explorer and all the other common tools. Download page: https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/download
Looks like we may start needing cloud services to backup cloud services. That'd be an interesting service, particularly if it worked seamlessly in the background.
Your analysis is not fully accurate, if I understand the paper correctly; I believe you do not maximize the actual8 entropy of the system. You maximize the potential* future entropy of the system. That's something entirely different.

There is actually a line of research where channel capacity of the actuation/perception channel is being used to model that (it's also named "empowerment", in analogy to the social science term, but it is measured in terms of information theoretical quantities). Here, one does not only model the entropy of the future, but in fact that amount of entropy about the future that the agent can systematically control. Or, more precisely, how well the agent is able to systematically control its future (which allows it maximal future entropy - but only entropy it can actually itself generate!)

See e.g. Klyubin et al. 2005, 2008, Capdepuy et al. 2007 and later, Jung et al. 2011, Salge et al. 2012. Indeed, maximizing the control over potential futures (empowerment) seems to work well for a range of scenarios, including the discovery of points of high centrality in mazes and graphs, as well as pole-balancing, acrobot balancing, bicycle balancing examples, in short, survival scenarios; also for discovering new object manipulation modes, driving sensor evolution models, self-organizing multiagent collective behaviour and a few other cases. It does not work well for systems with prespecified goals, systems with funnels/bottleneck transitions, in short, for cases where you have to relinquish potential futures to commit to a decision. This needs to be treated with a different principle.

The information-theoretic treatment takes into account action routes with controllable dynamics, it will avoid state space regions with more noise and thus less controllability. Importantly: it is the "potential" to do something, it does not enforce to actually carry out the option. Having the option is all that counts. Like in chess, the "threat" is more effective than the "carrying out".

Disclaimer: I am one of the authors of the empowerment work.
I'm really curious as to how successful this will be in areas that don't have a big startup community of early adopters to get the service off the ground and convince their non-early adopter neighbors/friends to try it out as well.
That's not what's being said. What Cook is saying is just that their numbers are not easy to guess from maker-of-subcomponent-A's numbers. Finding Apple untrustworthy doesn't somehow make gossip suddenly trustworthy.
There's more than just source code contributions that help an open source project.

Being the lead dev of a fairly well used open source project I can say for certain that too many people I've had interactions with that want a bug fixed or a new feature added do so with entitlement. As if by not doing it they're being told to fuck off.

I may have dramatized it a bit but there's something about software that people feel entitled to get value at no cost.
Actually: https://chromiumcodereview.appspot.com/13814024 :-)
The only time I fall asleep in less than 5 minutes is if I am completely exhausted. I have to go through a mental winding down period while I lay in bed. Usually through reading or just closing my eyes and thinking about something pleasant. This usually takes me about a half-hour on average. Anyway, from my point of view, I never understand how someone can just lay down and be asleep in a few minutes.
Ditto ... it could be so awesome. I can do most of my dev work on a low-spec ARM box, given a decent keyboard and display. Bluetooth keyboard, some sort of projector ... I'm excited.
I have to plug Io: http://iolanguage.org/
The MiFi4620LE is actually from the Novatel 4620L family and looks similar from what I can discern to the Novatel 3352 that I have.

Novatel are horrible to deal with. They close their platform, don't release any firmware updates whatsoever and ship broken kit based almost entirely on open source software while never releasing the source they're legally obliged to provide. You need to avoid these guys if possible.

The double NATing might be the 4G network. It's not uncommon to go from RFC1918 (you to device) to P2P device - mobile infrastructure to RFC1918 to boundary and onto the Internet.

If you take the case apart you should find a set of 5 blobs or holes usually in a row that might indicate a JTAG interface, and with a bit of kit you should be able to get your serial port. I've not looked at my 3352 yet because the case doesn't come apart easily and I've mainly been playing with a much more hackable TP-Link device (the WR-703N).

If it's like the 3352 it'll run a custom 'MifiOS' that has a ton of useless little api calls to feed javascript widgets on the web interface for things like geolocation and other pointless things.
That has all the disadvantages of using POST for everything, with the added disadvantage of requiring developers to read more documentation. Are there any advantages?
And now that employee is paying the price with an embarrassing hacker news article?
Android is not becoming a monopoly...

Android's market share is larger than the iPhone, but iPhone's market share is still growing(!), and it is still quite significant.

I think a lot of the negative sentiment comes from the fact that people think that the iPhone (as a platform) was number one at one point, and is now number two in market share. At the same time people think Android is one phone. Neither of these statements are true.

The best selling phones are still iPhones.

Android is not a single device or company but a highly competitive market by itself. It is really really hard to compete on that market, because you need something to stand out of the crowd. It is also really really hard to be innovative, because everyone has access to the latest version of Android OS, and in today's market, pretty much everybody has access to the underlying hardware. The only thing that matters is if you can squeeze your supply chain enough to get a large enough profit. This is where both Samsung and Apple have reputations of being very strong -- For different reasons.

In reality, most customers don't really care that much about megapixel count, number of CPU cores, memory, etc.

So as an Android phone-maker, the only place to really distinguish yourself is by custom "home-screens" and exterior design. Exterior design is difficult.

A couple of months ago Samsung was the only company profiting from Android phones. Apple still takes the majority (more than half) of the smartphone profit. I don't know if either of that has changed in the last quarter (we'll see).

But Android is not a monopoly it is a lot of different manufacturers fighting over around 50-70% of the market share with very similar products. Samsung has the majority of that market.

The currently only major alternative to Android, iPhone, on the other hand is made by one company.
You said:"The market wants to know: what is Apple going to really do about competing with Android / Samsung / Kindle Fire / very low cost, high value smart phones and tablets."

Somehow, the answer is obvious to me. Continue making superior products. Apple creates expensive better desktops and laptops than Win/Linux/Lenovo/Samsung that do it at very low cost. That's how it won that market. That's how it's going to win smartphones/tablets. I switched from iPhone4s to Galaxt S3. Can't wait to switch back. If I can compare the experience to anything it would have to be akin to switching from Mac OS X back to Windows Vista/7/8/whatever. After 4 years of using iPhone I wanted a change. Now I just want a smartphone that doesn't suck. And it's not only me. People will keep buying BMWs even though there are cheap/better alternatives like Toyota. Once you got spoiled by BMW handling or iPhone user interface, you won't simply go back. Unless you're tired of buying product from the same brand all the time, so you will switch, get disappointed (like me!) and then switch back again. Look at S4 sales and reviews. People just wanted the change and Samsung did a great job with marketing S3 and got lucky with timing too. At that point last year people were just tired of iPhone, they wanted something new. They got it. They discovered it sucks. And big news for you - they will go back to Apple. There is now way in the world I'm going to purchase an Android device in the near future. And there is no way I'm going back to Toyota.
I use CloudPull from http://goldenhillsoftware.com and it's fantastic.

It supports Gmail, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, Google Drive (formerly Docs), and Google Reader. By default, the app backs up your accounts every hour and maintains old point-in-time snapshots of your accounts for 90 days. All the data is available in standard file formats.
Very interesting russell. let me know if you can dig up the write up on that!
>The slogan is used right now to say the SPD is very weak on all their positions and a fan of half hearted compromises.

Funny how pervasive the "progressive* party leadership has the will but doesn't know the way" trope is across progressives of all stripes and nations (e.g., Mr Obama's perceived capitulation on the so-called Public Option for healthcare). One could probably write a doctoral thesis analyzing the reasons for the ubiquity of the sentiment!

*Word chosen over 'leftist' or 'democratic' to avoid differences in meaning from country to country