skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In what deranged world-view does being "the explicit purpose" of something make it right?

That is like being shocked and horrified that animal control puts down stray dogs. People don't like to talk about it, a small number of people might be upset by it, but it is a necessary part of civilized society.

We give them our tax dollars for this explicit reason. Please go spy on other countries so that we know what is going on in the world. Congress has been approving their budget every year to continue doing it for the last 62 years.

Call it childish all you want, but every other country in the world has an intelligence service. The EU itself has INTCEN, the UN has UNIT, heck even the Vatican has SRS, that all have the same basic functions as our CIA and NSA.
I'm not sure what your site is, but some things to consider...

Safari is the primary client of choice for iPhone, iPad and most Mac users. Discontinuing support for them basically cuts off the majority of the Apple ecosystem.

As far as IE goes, There are a few things to consider. Are you spending more time in IE development then you feel you should? When you look at your IE breakdown, could you shave hours of development time by dropping support for IE 6, 7?

There are some limits you should be aware of, if a lot of your OS traffic is still on Windows XP, those users can't upgrade to IE 9. Chances are, they are less likely to switch if they are -still- on Windows XP.

Really, if you are developing standards based HTML, supporting Safari and IE shouldn't drastically increase your development time (provided your not supporting IE 6/7). So you stand a chance to lose 12% of traffic... for what really?

As far as, your second question. You could track outbound links to the download page for Chrome, and you could store the User Agent for registered users and do a check, however it's not very clear why you want to do this in the first place.

I think, if you go forward with this, you will find that most of that 12% won't switch and will either keep using the site as is, or just stop visiting.

Lastly, Chrome 28 switches to the Blink rendering engine. This means you wouldn't be checking your site against: Gecko, Trident or Webkit? Do you really feel that is the best solution?
DNSMan.ly - User-friendly DNS Management
Keep in mind that unemployment in France, Belgium and Holland (I'm not very well informed on Germany, only saying here what I've seen directly), unemployment is determined by social status.

In the lower social classes (the equivalent of trailor park in the US I guess), unemployment is somewhere between accepted and encouraged (because it means these people can help eachother out). Amongst the educated, unemployment is a stigma, with possible exceptions for people who are content to beg a life together as "artists" or hermits (these guys are what holds up the science department in universities though). Getting a job and raising a family is what everybody else in the middle and higher classes do.

The problems are threefold.
First, the lower classes don't shrink. Well they shrink by birthrate, but not fast enough.
Second, people are getting forced into the lower classes (the biggest effects are car manufacturer closings, which destroy tens of thousands of jobs in one go). Far more go into them than ever come out. You can bet though, that the government will find a way to not count these people in the joblessness figures. In Belgium, over 10000 ex-Opel employees got to go on pension, some as young as 38. Real unemployment in France and Belgium is just shy of double the official figures, coming up to almost 25%.
Third is immigration. This is not a problem anywhere except the huge cities, but there the problem is endemic. The vast majority of immigrants in Western Europe join the low end of the lower class, where it's almost a crime to hold a job (it'll get you mugged regularly, for one thing).

I don't know what is happening in Germany, but this is what's happening in most of Western Europe, and it won't end well, that's for sure.
I will click on any article titled "<publications, tricks, advice> that <people in the software industry> should <grok, read, consume>"
Keep up the work. I have to say though that you're missing Basecamp's killer feature, which is that it's really fast so people actually use it.
Rubbish. There is a massive lack of jobs, just like everywhere else in Europe.

There may be a lack of high-paying, low-stress jobs, the kind that spoiled, study-a-random-field-till-30 university graduates generally feel entitled to, but that's not the same thing.
Perhaps its time to heed the advice of the illustrious Christine Lagarde:

“Il faut cesser de penser et se retrousser les manches.”

(Roughly translated: "We must stop thinking and roll up our sleeves.")

In proposing a tax-cut law last week, Finance Minister Christine
Lagarde bluntly advised the French people to abandon their
“old national habit.”

“France is a country that thinks,” she told the National Assembly.
“There is hardly an ideology that we haven’t turned into a theory.
We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to
come. This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking,
already. Roll up your sleeves.”

Source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/world/europe/22france.html...
Interesting. Yeah, you know, I think efficiently finding answers on your own is actually a skill, as is knowing when you're stuck and just need a nudge.

Probably like most here, I have on both sides. I've been that new, inexperienced guy, dropped in a new environment. I've also been senior guy that others devs depended on.

But, I was always very, very conscious of asking others for help. And, you know, with dev you can get into this "almost there" or "one more thing" cycle where you just keep going at it. In that mode, you can easily lose a full day or more.

So, it's definitely a thin line.

One thing I think that contributes to the challenge is the rise of open-source. On one end, it's been an undeniably awesome (almost unbelievable) movement in terms of what it enables. But, many projects are notorious for being poorly documented and, sometimes, in need of fixes. So, you can get into this mode of hunting sparse documentation, forums, etc. for answers. Likewise, we're probably all more likely to be using a variety of tools and technologies that inter-operate on any given project. Many times, things can get lost in the glue and may be difficult to track down. So, it can be like, "where do I go for help with this particular config?"
1) Because it seems easy enough to make one.

2) Plus, there is a huge influx of users up for grabs. Even if you grab 0.5% of the Google Reader users, that's noticeable.

3) Everyone has their own opinion of exactly what "clean" means.
You think this fits within the bounds of legitimacy?
STELLA - Lisp-style Programming with Delivery in Common-Lisp, C++, and Java
"This article has been taken down pending an investigation."

WHAT?

In any case, here's the google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.gua...
I moved to TT-RSS immediately upon the GReader shutdown news. I'm perfectly happy with it.
earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5962494
Come on, no Pragmatic programmer? Well, it is a book, and it might contain a lot of "obvious" stuff. But I really recommend it.
>But after reading this kind of article the only thing I want to do is fight for my country, I wouldn't say I'm patriot, far from it, I consider myself European first.

What does "European first" even mean, though? To be friendly with other European nations/cultures is one thing.

But there's no such thing as an entity called Europe that cares for all the people's in it -- E.U, for one, isn't it. The larger countries, and especially Germany, control the whole game. And the law making, representation, etc, of individual countries (and people) in E.U is opaque and authoritarian, more bureaucratic than democratic. Nothing like the US in unity, for a thing (except for the bad parts: corporations and private interests controlling legislation and such).

So, I'd say, fighting for democracy and social justice in YOUR country (France in your case) is more important, in the political sense, than any general feeling of "Europeanes".

And, sure, people can always immigrate somewhere else, especially within EU. But if that immigration is not because of personal (e.g cultural) choice, but to avoid hardships and fighting, then it's an easy cop-out -- those people are not fighters and not give a damn for their community, only for their personal well-being. And they would just as easily abandon their new host country too. Remember that in order to there be countries to immigrate to --in the first place--, there must have been people willing to stand for them and improve them.
I don't know why "what every computer scientist should know about floating-point arithmetic" is not in here. Ruby or the last framework are just fads, but IEEE754 is here to stay and nobody know how to use it (and I never remember the details myself, I'm always struggling).
As soon as you develop it to a proper level, please let me know. It would be my pleasure to review it.
Pretty cool, thanks! Jump started on iOS 7 eh? :-)
This highlights the importance of game mechanics. I was hooked for about six or seven hours on gameplay alone, even without graphics or sound.
Those two end up amounting to the same thing, in practice. The learned helplessness of the populace is what allows abuse of power to persist.
Every programmer should know Ruby and CSS3? What?
Thats mean! I was merely saying the opening needs to first 'earn' the right for my attention. I am surprised that you can get down-voted for suggestions.
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We're looking to bring on a Director-level person for full stack engineering. We work mostly with PHP, Javascript, CSS and HTML.

Why you should seriously consider LE TOTE:

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- You will play a critical role in determining the company's success - The position reports directly to the CEO

- You have an opportunity to really create a big impact on our future.

- We're early but we have some money and an excellent roster of investors including YC, Andreesen Horowitz and several other notable angels in the valley.

You should be able write simple, elegant code. We have back-end data needs, front end products to build, and potentially mobile app in 6-9 months. There's lots to do!

We're offering: - Competitive salary + significant equity - Flexible schedule: Work out of our SF office and have the ability to work from home 1-2 days a week

We are based in San Francisco. We're flexible if you want to work from home 1-2 days a week. Should be able to start soon!

Email: rakesh@letote.com
That's not how nation-states work. The US would spy even if no one else spied, just like the US invades other countries despite no serious risk of being invaded and overthrown itself. (Such an invasion would be suicidal; the invader's nation would be vaporized within minutes.)

We could go on: the US incarcerates its populace far more than other nations, even though its populace isn't more genetically predisposed to criminality.

Nation-states are artificial institutions which make war and control their subjects. They're remarkably similar to the mafia model. "Defending its populace" is akin to a protection racket. (For example, the US's actions clearly have the effect of increasing risks, not reducing them.) Dispute resolution (courts, etc) and top-down "democratic" forms are the result of needing to demonstrate some legitimacy lest they be overthrown by their subjects. Even in a rich country like the US, most people still have little ability to participate meaningfully in the legal/political/economic systems; and in presidential elections, very few votes actually count (due to the electoral system).

Since the US is the most powerful nation-state, it's the most violent; that's a correlation that runs through history. In particular, its capacity for violence (military) has no competitors. (It also has the most advanced economy, but it's no longer so advanced in this dimension as it was after WWII.)
Hey folks. I have an idea. It's not particularly novel, but this article triggered the thought. Let's try an experiment. For the next month, July, let us post and promote articles that speak well of a country's systems. In every country there is something admirable and awesome about the people/culture/systems. How about we spend just a month educating ourselves about what is good in different parts of the world in the present. Just as an exercise in trying to learn from the good as well as the bad. I'll start.

France gives generous paternal benefits:

http://riviera.angloinfo.com/information/healthcare/pregnanc...
Indeed, it's a very good advice and I totally agree with her statement and no doubt it must be true. But I can tell you, people I know are really too busy living their life and for instance I'm myself too busy coding or doing other stuffs to really have time to over-think about our expected downfall.
Late reply, sorry. I went with reprepro to maintain my apt repo.

It's nice, but has one major drawback which may be a showstopper, depending on your use case. It can only keep one version of a package at a time in each distribution.
> the fact remains that it [Maven] exists and most developers will have to interact with it at some point or another. That's simply not the case in many other systems.

Are you saying that when developing in Node, you don't have to interact with npm or other build & deployment utilities? End-users of packaged Java applications don't have to interact with Maven any more than end users of packaged C applications have to interact with Make.
Sounds like a serious problem with his initial direction more than a problem with the programmers, especially if they're all 'try[ing] to figure out things for themselves'.

Perhaps one of those PMs that never gives you all the facts or gets hazy when you ask about completely obvious future roadblock to your work (with the inevitable, 'I'll think about that and email it to you', which of course never comes) so that you constantly have to ask them questions so they feel indispensable when in fact the're just terrible at communication.

And of course they're too busy to explain it all to you because everyone needs their questions answered and if they don't run off now the whole project will fall apart without their wise guidance.

You might want to sugar coat that for your mate, but he's probably just a shit PM. People don't want to constantly be asking what they should do next, it's incredibly annoying and embarrassingly immature for professionals to be having to hang on to a PM's meagre titbits like a baby on a teat just so he can feel indispensable.

OTOH, that could all just be quite obvious transference from a terrible PM I once knew...
I used purely anecdotal evidence of my own circle of friends and interviews from directors about the future of cinema. Even the poor students I know who don't have huge flatscreens mainly use TV/Movie on demand piracy or hulu and netflix like services, and they only go to the theater for a special event.

I envision HBO releasing far more popular and original movies than Hollywood, and incorporating some form of social TV, so you can interact with other viewers. I already do this but in pirate channels showing re-runs of Star Trek and purely for the lulz, because it's comedy gold whenever 1st officer Beard hits on an ensign or Cmdr Vreenek declares it's a faaaake.

Quentin Tarantino has been giving a lot of interviews lately stating he'd rather work with HBO than film purely to avoid the arbitrary censorship of the ratings board and the studio who keeps demanding cuts to make the film more commercial. He'd rather write a 6hr series, so would most other writers to fully flesh out a good script. More and more Hollywood actors are showing up in cable movies, not because they need money but because they like the script and normally they get handed damsel in distress superhero love interest parts.

I think kids movies and comic book films or wacky James Cameron billion dollar spectacles will always do well in theater, but for the most part the average viewer would rather watch it on demand from the comfort of their own place and only show up for a monumental spectacle or a horror film to take a date to. Not like theaters are using film anymore anyways, they just push a button and play a digital print might as well watch that in your own place. FX are great, but it's the story that sucks you in.
May have changed, the max percentage, and the rules might be getting more strict, but in the surf region of France, you might say it's a sport working around the system.

When I ask people who have lost their jobs working for Billabong, RipCurl, etc., well, what are you going to do, will you be OK? Nobody is worried in that case as it's 2 years sans travail if you're so inclined.

The system will have to change, but I doubt there will be a radical shift as the French are the striking kings -- no people resist (and succeed in so doing) change like the French; they take to the streets en masse forcing policy makers to relent. In the States we're met with water cannons.
> The first responsibility for a nation is to the security of its people.

[citation needed]

The first responsibility of a democratic government is to reflect the will of the people. If the people decide that security inherently trumps all other values, that is their right. But I don't think much of a society that is not willing to endure any amount of risk for their lives, in order to safeguard their values and quality of life. (I'm an American, and the level of the cowardice in the majority of the public is downright sickening.)

The entire purpose of a Constitution is to put a difficult-to-change upper bound on government power, even if the people want "more nines" of safety.
Certainly not. To understand what's possible with Java (the language), you should look over the extensive API available for use as well. This is what you get for free with Java.

http://download.java.net/jdk8/docs/api/
If all of humanity thought this way we'd still living in log cabins, hewn by hand, or worse
Watch that $20/week become $14/week, then $10/week, then $7/week in the span of a month. Still a good investment then?
Prototype Cortex 3D-printed Cast
People are trying to replace something they spent hours with each day, and everybody who used it had some idiosyncracy he's now built into his muscle memory and just must have in a replacement. So you have a swarm of people scratching that itch, and a larger swarm of people looking to see if somebody might have built something that scratches their own little highly specific itch.
> it is a necessary part of civilized society

I haven't spent enough time thinking about the complex global dynamics of intelligence and counter-intelligence to judge the truthfulness of this statement, but I'm also not sure the necessity of spying is something we should blindly accept without carefully considering the rationale and consequences.

And by the way, it's actually important for people to be shocked and horrified that animal control puts down stray dogs, because there are ways that society can lessen the frequency of such acts (neutering pets, etc.), and knowing about the consequences provides motivation to take preventative steps.
>Taxpayers. And that, people, is socialism.

No. It's just what the civilised West (namely, Europe) calls "welfare state".

And it's very successful, when it's not fucked up by right wing politicians.

"Socialism" was what the old Eastern European countries had.

>That's the cycle ---> rich country with strong middle class --> right-wing politicians get less and less popular/elected --> socialists/communists come --> poor country --> right-wing politicians are elected again

Nope. The cycle is:

rich country with strong middle class --> social left politicians get less popular/elected neoliberals and right-wingers come --> poor country/fucked up middle class --> social left politicians are elected again.

The same way Reagan and Thatcher fucked up the American/UK economy and middle class, and the same way the economy did better under Clinton that under the republicans.
Isn't clear whether you want to be an expert in your trade or the small graphic design app biz you started. First question is, is there demand for an expert in the area? Second question is, is the trade area affected much by locality? For example, if I need a jquery expert, I might not care if he/she is in Warsaw, chennai, SF, or London. Most people seek out experts in a field because they have a difficult problem in that space, and often come across them in social engagements like hackerspaces, conferences, and probably more often by word of mouth referrals. Experts build notoriety by solving those problems, and making well known that they solve those problems (publications, blogs, presentations at conferences/etc).
IPO Nears; Twitter CEO: “We Think Of Revenue Like Oxygen”
Why the startup Wibbitz could wipe out some publishers’ video businesses
Are there instances you've found where bang search isn't covered by Chrome's built in site search?
SunTimes/DarkTimes
I can see that this sort of thing used to be true. Before StackOverflow, before Google, before the widespread use of the internet... yeah you could pretty easily get stuck on something for hours or days. If you were lucky enough to have usenet you could post on the relevant newsgroups and maybe get some help after a while.

Today? I rarely encounter a problem that I can't solve, or at least get good direction on solving, with a few web searches. Figuring things out for yourself just really isn't that time consuming anymore... why ask your co-workers when you can ask the whole world and instantly find the best answers.

Edit: maybe this "mom and pop" shop is using an arcane homegrown framework for their web projects? OK then I could see that it makes more sense to ask the people who understand it. Or it might make even more sense to use one of the standard frameworks.
If you are an "expert" on the subject, find a venue to give a talk on that subject. If the audience hear and feel your confidence on the subject then your on your way to become the goto expert.
I was probably not clear. 'It' refers quite specifically to pom.xml, not Maven as a whole.

Thus :

> the fact remains that it [pom.xml] exists and most developers will have to interact with it at some point or another. That's simply not the case in many other systems.

Again, I would like to highlight that this entire discussion should be viewed through the lens of friction vs. frictionless tools, and what that means for community adoption.
I've used Node and JavaScript on a lot of serious projects. Its working great. I prefer CoffeeScript though.

I have worked on a large Scala/Java project that was converted to JavaScript/CoffeeScript and the complexity, availability of modules, and especially resource usage is hugely in Node's favor.
I agree, though Java is far from going into decline (I think the salary average may be a large contributing factor), these kind of posts always feel like an indicator of things to come.
After coding in spring, and android (after having coded in other languages before), i pretty much agree that java is a quite good language. But the ecosystem is daunting.

Every single component (think ORM, build management, web stack, web server/container, serialization libs, and even IDEs) have a least 3 different technologies, which have existed for 4 to 5 years at the minimum and are up to version 10.

The Java world needs to officially DROP things. Drop librairies, deprecate frameworks, stop maintaining things. That's completely the opposite of what the enterprise world needs, but i really feel that would be really beneficial to the global perception for that language.