skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to take what is probably an extremely unpopular position here and bring up .net (C# in paticular). I say this for two reasons...

1. Visual Studio is still one of the if not the most powerful programming enviornment out there. It's ability to predict what you are about to type and fill in the blanks for you makes a lot of programming tasks fly by. I know there are a lot of places where I could get by with less code if I was using a language like Python but autocomplete more than makes up for it.

2. If you're building a serious, business application that will have to serve thousands of users than a technology like ASP.NET probably isn't for you. But if you're building a smaller app the abstraction that ASP.NET Webforms provide is a real time saver. You can literally just draw your interface and then fill in the events. Again, it comes with a performance penalty for sure, but if you're looking for joy there's nothing cooler than being able to whip up an app in under an hour.
Yes, in my personal opinion NOLOH (http://www.noloh.com) is quite a joy to develop with.
> The only way to then exit is Ctrl-D

Nope.

>>> __builtins__.exit()
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Agree. It's almost impossible to determine the correlation, if it exists at all.

On your later point, ironically if everyone now decided to save more, this would not have a positive effect on the economy.
One vote for Erlang - sending messages between processes on separate machines after only a few hours reading Programming Erlang truly had that magical "whoa" factor I remember from days or yore.
This is from a year and a half ago, and the company itself was founded 2 years ago. If they really are the next Google search challenger, they're doing an awful good job at keeping it quiet...
Congrats dylanz, RightSignature on TC
I've never programmed in C# with Visual Studio but I have no trouble believing that what you are saying is absolutely true.

For the last two years I've been programming exclusively in Java inside Eclipse and the experience is far better than any other language/tool combination I've worked with before.

Auto-completion and inline documentation is great, but the IDE features that really have me sold are powerful navigation, painless refactoring, incremental compilation, and adding imports with a single keystroke.

I don't have nearly as many complaints about Java as the rest of the world, but I do admit that I've been getting pretty excited about Scala lately.
All I can think when reading this is: can the test suite for MySQL possibly be this good? I've read the various results found in a search for "mysql test suite", but I don't get the same feeling that I do when reading SQLite's description.
I thought XNA was more a gaming library than a language...
Only because twitter has less upkeep (your twitter profile is never 68% complete) and because twitter lets you get the word out without having to correspond with N people 1:1.

Twitter is a megaphone, LinkedIn is an interview booth.
Gmail is for hacker
LinkedIn is for professional
Facebook is for personal
Hotmail is for ... my mother-in-law?

Hi there, you've been using hotmail for at least 463 days (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=120843), isn't it time to make some change?

Yours,
Mr. Cynical
Terabyte laptop hard drives?
Been looking around Newegg and Tom's Hardware, but I can't seem to find any terabyte laptop hard drives. Any got some info?
works great on my mac too - no crashing

it's probably Windows 7, which isn't really fair to use since it's not even officially released yet
Seconded the error messages. I am used to restarts, M-., 'v', and other stuff that has been jumping between backtrace and source code.

Clojure's error messages reminded of Microsoft C: "syntax error".
I'm getting into scheme for a project I'm working on. Sometimes I'm really impressed by how much can be done with some tight coding. I've done some Arc coding as well, and I think that it could have the edge if it matures and gets some library support.
A must-read on the subject - "Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage"
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html
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well, a small group of rifle men with winchester rifles can overwhelm a group of swordsmen or archers of 10 times of size.
But I don't think the same group of rifle men with muskets would have overwhelming advantage.

At the other hand, Napolenic wars are fought between groups of similar size. Of course Napoleon was very good at defeating enemies with larger army. By concentrating on weak point of enemy one at the moment, Napoleon exerted overwhelming power to defeat his enemy piece by piece.

I did not express my idea well. I don't think the answer to question "why Damascus sword discontinued at 18th" is "widespread and improvement of European gunsmith". Guns in 18th century Europe were still like the replacement of bows and arrows.
Most of guns in 18th century are muskets. They are lighter than crossbows and can penetrate armors. Muskets suffered from wet weather and bad black powders. Musket lacks of precision and relies on rotation firing squads in platoon to provide constant firepower. Most battles were still decided by outcome of close combat. And in close combat, a sword like Damascus sword really overwhelmed its opponents.
>> Then when you are told about it, you’d make up excuses trying to explain
>> why it is totally normal.
> That's a pretty incredible rhetorical device. "If you
> disagree, you're fundamentally incapable of reasoned
> thought."

No, that's not what Zed's saying at all. He's saying that people often respond to valid criticism of things they know well by justifying the behavior being criticised.

Ie, people mold their way of thinking to suit their existing tools. Since they're familiar with how things are, they have problems seeing what could be.

It's not an ad-hominem attack at all. Think of the academic who has no idea of how to teach because he knows his subject so well he can no longer see it from the perspective of an outsider.
As an environment, I loved CMUCL, PC-FORTH, Self, and VGA programming with Turbo C; none of them are "easy" for most beginners.

For the "woah" factor: Mozart/OZ, Prolog, Scheme and J. The first two days you discover prolog I don't think you will be able to function socially; you might need to miss a few phones calls. J will have you asking "WTF?" a lot.

Most enjoyable? if I said Perl I am afraid I will be chased out of this place :-P
You are right. But I think the small pox brought by him helped a lot?
The publication date on that paper is 1998, with an update in 2002: Don't you think the economic climate has changed since? (admittedly in support of your argument; but still, we might be due for another research.)
The key is "rarely" vs. "never"
And in my experience, the only people who say that are developers whose skill levels aren't quite what they perceive them to be.
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Lisp + Emacs + Slime felt like a total joy to me. Python with its REPL and a "batteries included" approach was a distant second, with Perl (with emacs' cperl-mode integrated with perl's debugger as well as the extensive and easy to use CPAN library) being a closed third.

I might also get branded heretic for saying this on HN, but lately I've been also able to enjoy Java development: with git for revision control, maven for project lifecycle management/pulling dependencies in an almost CPAN-esque manner, IntelliJ for an IDE (which, I've been told comes close to the capabilities that the Lisp machines had as far being an IDE goes) and jetty (invoked through maven) for a servlet container (a breath of fresh air compared to Apache as well as tomcat).
I think that $5K of stuff is nothing compared to what public schools spend to fail to teach math :)

(Per student, but over the course of several years, and taking into account that he was buying stuff just for himself, whereas at a school each video could be shown to 30+ people.)
Poll: Were/Are you a cheater?
We had a conversation today in #startups about cheating in school in general and whether cheating in school correlates strongly with workers who would not address bugs and not test code properly because of laziness.

I thought it'd be interesting to ask if any of you cheated throughout your schooling. I put two sets of questions to ask about what your opinion on cheating is and if you did cheat.
Cheating in general isn't that bad.
Cheating is bad.
Yes, on homework and exams.
Yes, but only on homework.
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I guess I'm the first person to say that yes, I did cheat, and no, I don't feel guilty.

What matters is getting the right answer. If you stop before you get the right answer, then you're responsible for that. If you take a shortcut to get the right answer, then it's not a bad thing until you get to a situation where you refuse to do what it takes to get the right answer.

Given a choice between wasting my time on meaningless schoolwork and cheating and keeping the time to myself, I'll take cheating, and if I went back I'd cheat again.
U.S. should just grant talented people green cards without employer sponsorship. The problem for current immigration law is for a talented person (of course, what is the legal standard for "being talented" is another discussion) who wants to work in U.S., unless he/she has an employer, or she/he has more than 1 million dollars to invest. He/She can only get a green card by marriage.

And legally, a people who has no green card can not start any S-corp/LLC to hire her/himself. So a talented person without U.S. spouse and 1 million dollars and employer in U.S. has no way to get a green card, even he is fully capable of starting a start up with less than 1 million dollars by him/herself and grow it up to hire more Americans in 5 years.

And H-1B is not the solution to attract talented people by asking them to work as "indenture servants" in face of possible layoff and ask to leave the country in 10 days after layoff.
It's funny to read this article, considering the teaching children to argue article at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=632518

Logos: What's that compared to 9 per cent unemployment on a total labour force of 100 million?

Ethos: Obama "is too sensible to pass it. He's too mature"

Pathos: you'll generate a trade war with countries such as India, among others...

The arguments from Premji are heavy on the pathos and light on the logos...

Cui Bono?
But how does "exit" by itself print that pretty little message telling you that, although it's obvious you wanted to exit, it's not going to let you? It's not just a function reference if it shows up that way.
Indeed, I'm very curious to see that, too. Didn't know they could make e-ink displays suitable for video playback already?

This sounds almost too good to be true.
That seems very interesting. I need to get myself over there and see it. If you have time would you mind posting about this on the book's home page: http://www.geekatlas.com/forum/topics/i-cant-believe-xyz-isn...
> a dictatorship is often more productive than a democracy!

"The only thing democracy has ever really been good for is making sure that things people don't like get vetoed. Democracy is no way to plan; it is merely a way to restrict one's choices, possibly to none at all."
"What matters is getting the right answer."

Oh, so it was your principled commitment to "what matters" that caused you to cheat, eh?
I'm not sure why you say I'm off base when I say that "not just last century blue collar jobs will be lost". You go on to essentially support the point I was making only in much more detail.

However, I disagree about the suppliers problem. It's absurd to assume that the world's auto industry would basically cease to exist if GM was liquidated. At the end of the day the strongest manufacturers would survive, maybe by bailing out their own suppliers. Auto makers are not systemically important in the same way that banks are.

It's funny that you mention the 1979 bailout of Chrysler. Is that the success you're hoping for? Bailing out an auto maker only to bail them out again 30 years later? I think that's a very good example showing why no auto maker should ever be bailed out. It just keeps a rotten corporate culture alive.

I do _not_ think that the auto industry or manufacturing in general is obsolete, quite the contrary. There are huge technological challenges coming up, the most important one being energy/fuel efficiency. This is a high tech sector that nobody should want to see fail. There are many related services that are also at stake, which do not fall into the unskilled labour category either.

But bailing out rotten companies is no way to achieve anything. Don't forget that the troubles at GM and Chrysler were not caused by the current financial crisis. They have been ailing for a long time.

I agree that auto startups are unlikely. But a little more creative thinking on the part of the US government wouldn't hurt. Are wholesale bailouts of rotten behemoths really the only way to rebuild the US auto industry? I can't believe that.
I did until high school. Then I realized it's too much effort for something I care too little about(my grade).

I'm curious why you'd think cheating would correlate with laziness. I think you underestimate the work involved in cheating.

I've passed on cheating on multiple occasions in middle and high school years purely out of laziness. It would usually involve some laborious homework assignment. A friend would have done it. He would loan me the notebook. And it would just sit in my bag without me ever spending time to copy it.

In middle school we had to take an Accelerated Reader test on the computer each week. I was not prepared one day. So I went to two of the three computers and deleted the shortcut to the program. With only one computer operating, my turn to take the exam never came:) They'd to call the IT people from downtown to fix the shortcuts on the two computers. Silly middle school days:)

Now days I am almost guilty of being too honest. ie. I will skip an assignment because I thought it was a waste of time, tell the professor exactly what I thought and receive biased grading for rest of the semester. (At the end of the semester, though, the professors respect you a whole lot more.)
I just want to clarify:

You are saying that a device other than the kindle, would service a market other than the one that the kindle does?
It does not matter if you're huge or tiny. The ability to quickly anticipate and react to unstoppable change is the key to success.

Microsoft is a giant but when threatened by tiny Netscape they moved mountains to get their internet tech out there.
I cheated a lot in high school, a couple times in college. I don't feel guilty, but now I know the only person I cheated was myself.
I don't think that, others in #startups do. Interestingly, those who were significantly older were making the connection between cheaters and lazy workers who would cheat out of their work.
That's a bullshit way of phrasing it. Let's stick to how I said it.

What matters is that you end up with the right thing. If you can easily get the right thing by copying somebody else, then do that. That doesn't excuse your not learning how to do it on your own, but there's no nobility to finding out the answer yourself, beyond what personal satisfaction it brings you.

I code using other people's languages and other people's plug-ins. I take visual ideas from other people's graphic designs. Then I bend them to fit my own purposes. When somebody else has solved part of the problem I want to fix, there is no honor in my repeating their work.
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There is one overlooked problem: people who leave there own countries - they do not contribute to the development of their motherlands. Even if they send money back to relativies, the do not engage in social life. There hundreds of social poblems in India, dalits fo example the need a lot of social momentum to solve them. Smart people leave nobody would fight.
Second - c'mon, are you going to beleive Indian sources when the are talking about H1B...It's like beleiving Fox news.
Never cared enough about marks to cheat. Still don't.

From a moral perspective, cheating is bad in that it devalues the marks earned by students who didn't. This is only true if you believe that the marks are worth anything to begin with. That, and it's downright rude.
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Joy is a your own product, at least for a half. It comes from combination of state of the mind, which you can cultivate, along with your current mood which is based on what you think.

For example, if you can think about vi editor not the way that it is a mess of one-letter commands and beeps, but that it is very rare almost 40 years old masterpiece of smart design, efficiency and minimalism this approach might work. Think that it was created for text-typing pros, who types very fast without even looking on keyboard, and so on. If you prepare yourself for the way of discovering its wonders and ideas, and do realize that it is the best tools for storming throught dozens of files in /etc, and the sequences like '/^debug[Enter]I#[Esc]ZZ' are beautiful you will probably feel a joy.

Same thing, if you will think about emacs (in console mode, without gtk gui) that it was designed to work via hardware terminals, like this lovely DEC's vt-i-didn't-remember-the-numbers boxes, with green letters and that wonderful hardware scrolling, you will probably understand, why there are so many of those Ctrl-x Crtl-x commands in it, and how smartly these commands was arranged.

The power and beauty of 'screen' utility is a common knowledge.

As for programming languages, just think about ideas behind them. Think that C is a great engineering masterpeice, that Perl is a most beautiful way to create a completely mess that works, that Ruby was developed by truly eastern mind, and lisp.. you know.

I can't tell something about PHP except that it is an swiss-knife stuffed with low quality blades, and Java is the biggest buzzword ever (anyone can run some once-written spring-hibernate-jsf-with-all-depencies mess everywhere? on ARM?

We are what we think. =)
Someone might argue that part of schoolwork is proving that you can do boring routine work. In this respect you only have the long-term incentive of graduating and there is no immediate reward.
So far I have never found an instance in life where doing boring routine work was at all something I wanted to do. The boring routine work I do have to do I constantly try and figure out ways around.
How can things be non-mutally orthoganal?
I had too much of an ego in my abilities to believe someone else had a better answer than me. So no.
I have a similar background, apple II and then amiga programming when I was young. There are few (no?) programming environments as simple and "fun". That said, I really enjoy iPhone programming. If only because the hardware, UI and "form factor" let you do fun things that simply aren't possible on a desktop or laptop computer. Software like the Smule Ocarina is only possible with a device like the iphone. The simulator leaves much to be desired but am having a lot of tun testing on the phone.
Great article. Thanks. Applicable to many other domains as much as to the one of the article.
Who is going to take the burden of verifying who is talented and who is not?
"Look at women, and see if they have a pair of round wobbly things on their chests."

That kind of thing always made me wonder a bit: can genes really encode for "like round wobbly things on chests"? There would have to be a complete image recognizer implemented in the genes?

Not that I am saying it is impossible, but maybe it also works together with breast-feeding for a bit (as infants we get exposed to a lot of breast, so that would be an opportunity to learn to like them). And people do develop different and weird things to be attracted to.

Just saying maybe the genes don't encode "like breasts" directly, maybe they encode "like that stuff you are exposed to as a baby" (more specific than that, of course, not everything we are exposed to as infants becomes sexy).
Why bother going to school if this is how you view it?

I think the problem with cheating is that it's fundamentally dishonest. It's not that you're using someone else's work to accomplish something, as we all do this every day in our jobs, it's that you're lying and presenting that work as your own.
What are you really saying? People who don't share your opinions about software testing probably cheated in school? Cuz that's how I'm reading your intro to this poll.
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Cool!

Plus - if you get it bound @ Kinko's, you can get spiral bound. And spiral bound is vastly superior for reference books. :)
What is your proposed way of doing things then, just never think about anything at all? What about those people who wondered if the earth is flat? Doesn't it always start with a theory, that people then try to disprove or validate?

Also I don't understand why you think there is no empirical evidence? There is a lot of empirical evidence, namely, there are billions of people to observe, as well as lots and lots of animals.

So people create models that they think explain things - then they can compare those models to reality. That they are not perfect does not make them 100% wrong (is Newtonian physics wrong? Kind of, but would you say it is stupid? At least it lead the way in the right direction).

OK, trying agin: "We have absolutely no way of ever empirically confirming what the real picture on the box is, yet we continue to find and force only the pieces that fit our conjectured "picture on the box"."

What do you mean by that? If you have an observation that contradicts the theory exposed in the article, then publish it, and the theory will have to be amended/discarded/whatever. Before you chuckle, present the observation/evidence.
I'm a little appalled by the number of people who apparently think cheating is fine. Is integrity so uncommon?

As I stated another comment, the problem I have with cheating is that it's dishonest, as you're passing someone else's work off as your own. It demonstrates a lack of respect for the person who did the work, the person you're doing the work for, every student who worked hard enough to do the work themselves, and yourself.
What do you find weak about the reasoning, specifically?

The differene to the "god created it" theory is that one can be falsified, the other can't. "God made it" is a useless statement with no practical value whatsoever.
I did try to cheat. However, it's much more common thing in Poland than USA (or so I heard).

I noticed however, that whenever I've selected material for cheating and then put it on those little sheets of paper I actually learned this material in the end. So cheating was a great way to learn something! Than, by simple logic taking what I prepared wasn't beneficial, as I could be caught.
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