skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure if that's what you're saying, but keep in mind that targetting the unemployed for self-employment is usually not an effective strategy. Mass unemployment is a macro problem and not the individual fault of the unemployed, but despite that, the people who end up unemployed do tend to be on the lower end of the skill range. This means they are not the best candidates for self-employment to begin with.

It's better to make it safe for those who are employed to give up their employment to create new businesses and thus create more jobs.

Though in the end, it always comes down to aggregate demand. Even encouraging startups does not boost aggregate demand.
In my opinion, the "best" programming language is the best tool for the job at hand.

Maybe you're writing high-performance backend software, in which speed is everything. Sure, a functional or, hell, low-level language like assembly is the "right" choice. In this case, it is the 'better' language.

Or, maybe, you're trying to write an easy-to-maintain script to manage log files on your server. Who cares if it's costing you some CPU cycles to interpret? Run Python or Ruby, or, hell, just write a shell script. That would be the 'better' language.

I wholeheartedly agree with what I believe to be pg's intent in this writeup: that good design should be timeless. I don't agree, however, that good design, especially for a programming language, always has to be skill- or performance-oriented.

Quick edit for clarity: Although the example I used for backend software did equate "performance" to "speed," it's important to note that pg addressed this by saying:

> Performance doesn't mean speed; that's taking the metaphor too literally. Speed counts, but a programming language is first of all a tool for thinking in.

My point is that clear thinking can be equally applied to easy-to-read code working at a high level as it can be to any functional language designed to induce algorithmic thought.
Hi, thanks for your comment.

For reference, here's what we're showing on tosdr.org:

> Google can share your personal information with other parties

> Google will share your personal information with other parties. For sensitive information (medical, racial, ethnic, political, religious or sexuality) Google requires “opt-in”. Google can also share or publish aggregated data that does not identify a person

Now, what I am writing in the "discussion" forum is not on tosdr.org exactly because it is all difficult to interpret. My conclusion, is what is on tosdr.org -- if you think the current statement written there is wrong, please submit a patch :)

Now about what I wrote under "discussion" (which is as it suggests, all here to be discussed:) Yes, it does not sound legal in the EU. That's actually the whole problem and why Google is currently under scrutiny by European Data protection agencies. http://www.cnil.fr/english/news-and-events/news/article/goog...

I'm welcoming your opinion (and anybody's) about this in reply to what I wrote https://groups.google.com/d/msg/tosdr/QZgR8faRWDU/PatkxP2G-B... :)

About the EFF, we're working with them on ToSback (http://github.com/tosdr/tosback2 and http://github.com/tosdr/tosback3). I actually also believe that ToS;DR should have more resources and more contributions from orgs like the EFF ;)

Edit: fixed the github links
Move to a place where there's a good load of startup culture around, so you can network a bit. Bangalore, for starters.
Chew on this:
http://1-ps.googleusercontent.com/h/www.searchenginejournal....

http://www.fuzzone.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/credi...

http://www.localseoguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Goog...
I agree.

>[The 911 is] so obviously superior to the Cadillac that a child could tell it's better.

My first thought was that the Cadillac looked better even though the internals of the 911 were certainly higher quality. Does that mean I have worse design sense than a child? :(

>The Cadillac was carefully designed to appeal to the average driver. The 911 was designed for performance. Which one is better design?

It all depends on how you evaluate quality: there are so many ways to determine the "best" that questions like this are almost meaningless.

Regardless of the car metaphor, I think PG's point makes a lot of sense.
"The United States Patent and Trademark Office admitted that, yes, based on the facts, they had awarded the trademark in error, but they could not disqualify the trademark without Ali taking the guy to court"

I feel this neatly summarises everything that is wrong with current patent / trademark law.
you a stalker now? But here's the answer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5654301
We don't consider their opaque deletion policy transparent. We only consider that they are transparent about some of their security (compared to most equivalents i'd say). See the whole thing (click "Expand"):

> + Transparent security practices Discussion

> GitHub gives a detailed overview of their own security practices and their service providers' practices and obligations.

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/tosdr/2vIh4l7sTnk/discussi...
So, Clojure then?
I assumed the same. Then when I scrolled up to see who the author was I was pleasantly surprised that it's a woman who writes about this. (You usually only get to read meta-social-stuff posts from women.)

The bigger surprise was that she was self taught. (The surprise would be just as big if the author was a man.)
I'd say switch the sources.list to 'stable' or 'wheezy' for a few weeks. After that, switch back to 'testing' and run "apt-get dist-upgrade --assume-no" and see what Debian is going to upgrade.

There is no real proper way to do this, other than testing in a VM, or a chroot.
So in other words, the 911 was amazing design. I dunno about you, but to me a car that practically drives itself sounds awesome.
Big data video - the dangers of big data
I very much disagree with this: “Look what happened with the 911. It's so obviously superior to the Cadillac that a child could tell it's better.”

I performed an experiment when I read this article, comparing the two cars based on just the pictures. I had read the paragraph after the pictures, about telling good design from bad design, but not the paragraph before, saying that what each model of car was designed for. And I tried to compare the design of the cars based on just the pictures, seriously. At first, I thought that the 911 might be better because it is more aerodynamic, a criterion that it is objectively better at. But then I noticed that the Cadillac has more headlights in the front, which possibly might provide better light. And I saw that the Cadillac seemed to be a convertible, which is more a matter of taste and your goals for a car. I concluded that both cars seemed pretty decent in their own way. Thus, I was surprised to read the claim that the 911 has obviously superior design to the Cadillac.

Perhaps Paul Graharm is right about language design, but this failure of his claim to withstand an experiment lessens my confidence that he has examined the evidence before making his conclusion. Though as I am, in my opinion, a “good programmer”, I certainly hope he that is right, and that languages aimed at good programmers are the ones whose ideas will become popular in time.
Individual Driven Economy
Wantcy.com Launched Finally
I can't believe it's finally here! So much awesomeness.
They have definitely been struggling and they will likely see the same churn they've had in the past. If you look at their app charts on App Annie or a similar service you can see it.
They are going at night? :)
Pretty, fast client-side markdown is really easy
With great open-source libraries of course.
i'm willing to accept the downvotes that will come along with saying both are pretty magnificent vehicles.
I am not sure what you mean by " Therefore group attacks, and group retaliation are a necessity, and they will exist regardless...", so I'm curious why you are singling out Islam, when group violence has been inevitable across all races, religions and cultures.

The part of [1] that triggered hostilities between Hindus and Muslims was the demolition of Babri Mosque by Hindu fundamentalists. Demolition of that makes about as much sense as the destruction of some university building that the British built when they were here.

[4] was not about drunks beating up girls. It was about some religious activists (who were not drunk, but drugged on religion) entering a pub and beating up girls. Some of them had to be hospitalized. But you know, this fits the definition of terrorism! Also read the justification offered by their leader. Nothing has stopped Hindu terrorists from killing[5]. Hindu terrorists can kill for communal reasons too, not just for religious ones[6].

> in most muslim countries, those girls would have been slowly stoned to death

I am not a fan of Islam. I have openly said that their book is not just stupid, but insane. I would be stoned to death too. My only point was that there is no reason to claim that Hindus and Christians are immune from becoming terrorists.

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Staines

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_October_2008_All-India_Railw...
Generating C is much simpler than LLVM IR (and you can do structured code generation for C: generate and serialize C AST); it's infinitely easier to read and debug; it allows switching compiler; it provides C stdlib to piggyback on with very little overhead.

It's a fine strategy to start with, there are more important things than fucking around with LLVM IR at this point, they can switch to LLVM or a native generator if they get the thing effective and off-the ground.
Using release code names ("wheezy") is generally safer, because that way you don't accidentally upgrade.

Note that if you have pinning rules, then there you must also change "testing" to "wheezy".
thanks pranavrc
/usr/local is meant to replicate /usr in the way that binaries go into /usr/local/bin, libraries into /usr/local/lib etc., but for software that isn’t managed by the package manager – at least that’s what it is used for nowadays. So a well-behaving software would happily go into /usr/local, whereas the ugly software things that want their own folder somewhere better go into /opt.
Whew, glad we're past downvoting based on trivial programming language choices.
pg on Java: http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html
People trust anonymous systems, voting being one of them.
Haters gonna hate. Larry Page obviously didn't hire him and let him take up Google's resources for his "rigorous hand-waving".

How does this one-liner contribute to the conversation at all? Your negativity is unenlightening and obnoxious.
I agree with the sentiment, but there are people who feel equally satisfied and happy contributing money and resources to noble causes whilst keeping their time to themselves.
That white people are less sane ?
Java Enterprise Edition 7: WebSockets but no cloud support
The 911s pre-1989 were really hard to drive. They didn't start adding electronics into them until a lot of people had died in 911 accidents.

I don't actually think the 911 is a good design at all. There's good engineering to make a bad design work, but it's pretty much inferior to a genuinely well designed car which doesn't require quality engineering.

The AK-47 is a better assault rifle than the AR-15, in that an illiterate dude with a stamping machine can turn out a reliable AK-47 which can be operated by children, whereas the AR-15 requires pretty high tech materials to work well (the right lubricants, the right barrel linings, etc.), and while it's easy to shoot, does require some maintenance which illiterate children aren't going to give it.

Now, the older MX-5 Miata, that's a good design. Simple, cheap, drives well.
I think he's referring more to the visual aesthetic. The 911 is literally timeless, because the broad strokes of the shape have been nearly unchanged in the past 40 years, and it's still one of the most beautiful and lusted after cars on the road. The Cadillac looks ugly.
That's the modern 911's though. The 70's ones had severe problems with understeer because the front is so light, but once you got that under control there was massive oversteer due to the sheer weight of the back.

Turns out putting your engine behind the rear axis is not a very naturally stable design. Needs computers to keep it drivable.

Of course you likely won't notice any of this driving to the supermarket ... but then you're abusing this car and should feel bad.
Please watch this talk (by a woman) on such issues: http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=3dwLzB0kFxI&desktop_uri=%...

Tl;dw: feminism and sexism has bad effects on society and it is a very big deal.
Umzug wien  
Umzug , umzug wien
Ganz gleich ob Sie einen Umzug in Wien, einen Umzug von Wien in einer anderen Stadt, einen Umzug innerhalb der Europäischen Gemeinde oder einen Umzug nach Übersee planen! Gestalten Sie Ihr Umzug in Wien mühelos per Mausklick, oder rufen Sie einfach bei Favoriten Umzug, den besten Partner in allen Bereichen eines Umzuges in Wien, an und lassen Sie sich bestens in allen Bereichen eines Umzuges in Wien beraten.
My mum is quite happy with Debian stable on her desktop, and I don’t plan to switch from Wheezy to Jessie on my laptop for a while either. What’s wrong with stable on desktops?
So now we're complaining that our security vulnerabilities aren't cross-platform enough?
Glad to see Wheezy finally become Stable.

I used to run Debian on a PowerPC Mac as my main desktop system and today I still use a "portable server" Palm Pre Plus running Squeeze chroot on a regular basis. In my experience Debian is really great on non-x86 hardware. Too bad the old webOS kernel means I won't be able to upgrade it to Wheezy, at least not easily.

That said, I wish Debian would compete with Ubuntu LTS on longer support for OldStable. (Ubuntu LTS releases are now supported for five years [1] while a Debian Stable release is expected to get three years of support [2].)

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS

[2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases
The "only eap fixed bugs" are already in the community edition (7.2.Final), but JBoss cleverly called it EAP-alpha/beta this time. So hordes of people don't download it, being scared off by the alpha/beta label.
Indeed, and when they get back, they will be going to live on a farm in the country with lots of other friendly people, water, food, etc., where they can run free... but no, you can't visit them :)
If the Debian maintainer has any idea what he’s doing, then this is likely to be more stable than upgrading to a new release that introduces new features and possibly incompatibilities. Fortunately, most Debian maintainers have a very good idea of what they’re doing.
And why is that distinction important? It seems a fairly arbitrary rule to me. What's the problem with dropping stuff in /usr/local/foo?
I know perfectly well, which is why I think the dowry system is terrible as a whole and should be banned. It might have been a sort of incentive not to kill your own daughters (which is what used to happen in China, for example), but it's 2013 and even rural Indians now know women have their own unique strengths and will benefit their own family. Dowries are a terrible tradition that have no beneficial effect whatsoever for economy and society, and the sooner they are stopped, the better.
That really depends on your desktop. For my daily life, I use Firefox (iceweasel), Google Chrome, a terminal, some ruby or python.

All of these have a channel for installing the latest version of their software without having to dist-upgrade.

XFCE hasn't had a notable UI change in years (at least not discernable to me). KDE and GNOME have only mucked things up over the last decade.
Ah. Well, I can scroll down. But it does reminds me of complaints about the shades of yellow used. It is #FFF8E7 BTW. On some laptop computers, it does look more whitish the more you tilt the screen to the front. As for why, read Douglas Bowman's infamous post about why he quit Google for clues.
More like two founders spending a lot of money to get into YC.
Yeah, I also prefer the Cadillac visually. (although I'd drop either for a BMW 2002) And for 90% of what you do with the car, the Cadillac was probably more practical. Particularly if you lived in any parts of the US except maybe LA/SF/NY in 1973.
Looking for a really good UX designer
Are you a rockstar UX designer? If so I am looking for you for my next project. Deadline is extremely flexible and you can be located anywhere. Shoot me an email.
I'm in love with this idea, but I'm concerned that it wouldn't work on a grander scale. If everyone in the country had the same basic income, wouldn't the cost of goods and services naturally rise just high enough that the basic income becomes negligible? If I were a land lord, my first thought would be, "Okay, so since everyone is now making $300 rupees/month more, I'm just going to raise the rent by $300 rupees." I feel like it only works in the experiments because the BI group still interacts with the non-BI group.
Technically this is not an article, it's a "Design Philosophy" page from the Arc section of pg's site.
I'm unable to determine if you mean upstart to be a Good Thing, or a Bad Thing, or anything in between.

To me, switching back from Ubuntu to Debian was a blessing. And I simply cannot understand this need to decrease boottimes. My laptop boots into Debian under 12 seconds. That is pretty fast. Under Ubuntu, I timed it at 10 seconds.

2 seconds boottime? Is that what this upstart/systemd hastle is all about? I just do not get that.
Mh, both cars really had totally different philosophies and characteristics, appealed to people with different priorities and tastes and were not in the same price league.
So just saying that the Porsche is obviously better designed doesnt hold much value.

Asethetically ? Probably, but thats more a matter of taste, just like with programming languages.
That's interesting; Apple's Objective-C runtime has a fast vtable for its most common methods and uses a more expensive lookup for the rest. Doing a static analysis to find other commonly-used methods is like the next step up from there.
10 miles in 3 hours is roughly walking speed.
Or people did not know, and were indifferent to, her gender and used the male pronoun because that is the correct grammatical structure when the gender is unknown.

I certainly never pay the slightest bit of attention to the gender of people I read. Does it make any difference?
> with no central design

Any supporting evidence to that? If you look into it, you may be surprised.

Here's a hint, Perl doesn't necessarily optimize for the same things other languages optimize for.
> DRM is the future

Why?

It seems entirely reasonable to me to have an equilibrium where there's some nonzero market niche of people who oppose DRM for practical and/or ideological reasons, and some nonzero number of developers that realize they can get access to that market by forgoing DRM on their products.

Case in point: Just yesterday I saw Torchlight 2 was on sale on Gamersgate. I was totally ready to buy it on the spot. Then I saw that it was Steam-only. And I didn't buy it for that reason, and that reason alone.

Those dollars from my entertainment budget are now ready to be captured by non-DRM products. If there are enough people like me, we can push back DRM, or at least keep it out of some corner of the market.

If you don't like DRM, vote with your wallet.
This is so true, but it's more than just cpu speed vs programmer speed. There are philosophies that are built in to the language and you can see them in decisions made about the language, the kinds of patterns baked in, the libraries and the greater community.

Say you need high reliability. Erlang has fault tolerance model & hot code reloading, it was built for telephone systems. Say you need tons of statistical features: R. Infinite Recursion: Stackless Python. Mixins Galore: _why's potion. Run a bunch of commands with little/no logic: Tcl. html generation: php. Manipulate a flash canvas: Actionscript. Manipulate html dom: javascript.

Be honest, your language isn't going to stick around forever. I say make a language for a purpose with a specific problem space in mind, read papers and implement surrounding philosophies that nail down that problem well. Then it will become popular and overused to the point where it's used for things it wasn't meant for.
What about Gamersgate, Desura, or plain old self-publishing?
The JavaScriptCore they are compiling is without the JIT.

You still can't have memory pages marked write+execute, which is what you need for a JIT.
This is a sadly shallow article; where I think it fails is in recognising (and responding to) the core of the criticism levelled at Arc. Instead there is some pithy comparison to 70s cars.

The 911 is timeless for a number of reasons: Porsche have spent years keeping the brand and style consistent. It was expensive and exclusive, which made it desirable.

But that care was very hard to drive. If you don't know what you're doing then you will not get anything like the true performance it can give.

It was also very expensive, so only those with the adequate resources could afford one. These were not always people who could get the true performance out of the car.

The Cad, on the other hand, is a fantastic car in its own right. Widely available, easy to get its maximum performance, perfect for almost any job. OK, so it doesn't look as sexy, and for seriously hardcore tasks it doesn't perform as well as the Porsche. But if I had to pick a car that was most likely to be reliable today then the Cad is an obvious choice.

Even more damning; Caddillac, like Porsche and the 911, were still making that brand of car up till ~2006. You wouldn't recognise it though because the shape and performance has evolved to meet modern needs.

It's sad to see his list of languages; whilst I would agree C is a ridiculously good language, smalltalk and lisp? They've always struck me as pretty specialist. Conversely a lot of production code still uses Cobol and Pascal. And what about Fortran? Or Delphi (wasn't Skype written in Delphi originally?).

I know we're hackers, and so it's hip to drive Prosche's. But it is sometimes sad to see how we forget about a massive section of our industry who also do cool things, but tend not to have blogs...
RJS is not only Ruby-to-JS, it is evaling response.
If I was looking for people to build the first human colony on Mars I'd want the most mentally stable, non-egotistical, discerning people on planet Earth. Precisely the last people who'd make videos of themselves and apply to be on a reality TV program.
Regardless of the car metaphor, I think PG's point makes a lot of sense.

Does it?

From the article: C, Smalltalk, Lisp. The languages that were consciously designed for "average" programmers (Cobol, Pascal, Ada) have tended to be evolutionary dead ends.

COBOL and Pascal (via Delphi) are probably used more than Smalltalk and Lisp in the real world. Also, Java and C#, designed for the 'average' programmer, are immensely popular outside our little bubble. Java has been around for twenty years and will probably be for at least two more decades.

I like tinkering with new and 'revolutionary' languages - I wrote a fair share of Prolog and Haskell, but I have come to the realisation that that I like to solve interesting problems (mostly in NLP and machine learning) far more. And when you focus on solving an interesting problem it can be good that the language and ecosystem are boring and predictable (Java, C, C++), so that you can focus at the problem at hand. For example, in Java you can easily add a library to a project via Maven and its usage will often be completely predictable, you don't have to deal with the fact that the library writer was in an existential typing, GADT, or arrows phase and fight with its API.

BTW. I still love Prolog and Haskell ;).
Never mind that most of the current big data tools are written in java: hdfs, hbase, kafka, flume, etc, etc, Netflix, LinkedIn and many other recent highly successful companies run their high performance empire entirely on java.