skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now that's just fucking horrifying. D:

I have a translation of "Design of the Unix Operating System" in Chinese, and take great comfort in the fact that I can still get the gist of all the source code listings--even despite the comments in Chinese.

I admire the simplicity of the grammar in Chinese (from the year I took of it in college), but honestly I find logographic languages are kind of gross.

EDIT:

Fine, fine, I admit it: a language with millenia of cruft is totally reasonable to use as the way of persisting the cruftiest programming language in the world.

Indeed, the same years of hard study that are required to write and read Chinese literately should be added onto the same years of study required to write and read C++ reliably.

This is such a comically bad and obtuse idea I think we should propose it as the next draft standard.

EDIT2:

Look, explain your downvotes (in the language of your choice!). My opinion is simply that alphabetic languages (here exemplified by English) are superior to logographic languages--mostly because they require knowing fewer characters.

I may be grossly misunderstanding Chinese here; as claimed, my schooling in it is limited.
That depends. What does the title say, if it's intended to convey facts?
Poor stat, cs and math look like a dark void without zooming-in; quite expected though, the arXiv coverage of publications in those areas is still pretty low.
It is my observation that most hackers aren't fans of FTSE 100 DJA 30 HR directors, and they don't want to live in that world.
esac anyone? :P
It refers to the ergonomic problem inherent to the "minority report" style interface used for any extended period of time[1], though to be fair to the creators of this project, this is very clearly presented as a casual, alternative interface, not one to replace mouse and keyboard.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla_arm#.22Gorilla_arm.22
I believe the evidence indicates you're wrong. The incredible growth of JavaScript usage makes it virtually inevitable...it is, simply, the fastest growing language in the history of programming languages. There are more machines with JavaScript available and more programmers with JavaScript experience, than any other single language. That will result in more rapid library and tool support development in the near future (right now, there are languages with better tool support and bigger libraries of existing functionality...but, in a couple years that lead will evaporate).

Other dynamic languages have had a large impact on enterprise systems: Perl, Python, Ruby. JavaScript just happens to have the killer feature of being everywhere...including on the most important platform (the web).

Your premise about the incompetence of programmers is a false dichotomy. You've provided no evidence that statically typed languages make inexperienced programmers more productive. There's some evidence in favor of some esoteric languages, like Haskell and Erlang, being more productive for some classes of problem. But, dynamic languages tend to do well in the studies I've seen.

You're also assuming that even if statically typed languages were more effective for inexperienced programmers that that would be the only factor in enterprises selecting a language. There are many factors, and popularity is a huge one.

The trend in languages has been toward less boilerplate code. Even Haskell (arguably among the most strongly and insistently typed and "safe" languages) is vastly more concise than, for example, Java. One could possibly argue that Haskell (or similar functional languages, like Scala) would be "better" for the enterprise...I think it would be hard to argue that it's realistic to expect any of them to become as prevalent in the enterprise as JavaScript already is.

I think it's pretty obvious that Java (and C++) will continue to lose enterprise market share, and, to me, it's obvious that the language that will pick up most of that share will be JavaScript. Other languages will also be in the picture; Scala, for example. But, it won't put a dent in JavaScript's massive growth.
Try http://Matchist.com. Also, is there no service that allows you to hire a project recruiter type person?
Definitely finding new clients is my main pain point.
There's ECDH and ECDSA.
In the heyday of the automotive industry, the best
auto worker in the world produced about the same
output as the average auto worker

Agree. Also, there's a strong trade union theme to the history of autoworkers which doesn't really map to the developer experience. Something related though - what about the toolsmiths who built the factory processes and machines? I'd guess that with those guys there'd have been a big gap in productivity, and there'd have been a strong collaboration/teamwork angle and theme of iteration. They would have been scarce - maybe they still are.
I think what you're attesting to is that the Surface Pro is not a bad or uncompetitive device, as I've heard elsewhere, and e.g. Wikipedia reports that Bloomberg reports that as of March 2013, total Surface sales were 1.5 million, with the Pro accounting for 1.1 million of them.

Which echoes what you say about what was in competition for your dollars, not iPads but real, not locked down with lots of software available laptops. E.g. the Pro is a niche product like Apple's OS X ones are now. The real trouble for Microsoft is how badly they executed on the Surface RT, and how many 10s billions of dollars they're letting their competitors snap up.
I pretty much agree with all of the points in this article. I do wonder, though, why Bustle.com (the example used) is an Ember.js app and why it displays nothing but a blank page if Javascript is turned off. Skylight makes perfect sense as a full JS app. But Bustle, a content site, seems to be more of an "interactive document" (as he mentions).
Can't wait for the public to realize that renewable machines looks like, well us.
Exactly, any language that lets you program at the same time in an imperative, functional and OO fashion is anything but easy to pick up, let alone master. Personally I still have to get around and learn it, it just seems an extremely daunting undertaking.
You're just cherry-picking. Pick another sport: basketball. Here you'll find a collection of players way above average height. In fact, players who are average height are the extreme outliers in basketball.
Yeah, I agree with you -- the part I was saying the Luddites were right about is that at some point, technology obviates the need for everyone to be employed. I think that's a great thing, and I welcome it despite the enormously painful process it'll be to transition the economy.
Quote: "Virtually everything that WZOR talked about cannot be proven, but ..."

Translation: "Virtually nothing that WZOR talked about can be proven, but ..."

Interpretation: pure speculation, no facts or evidence.
Yeah, okay:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_%28programming_language%29
There is also the basho fork of LevelDB (https://github.com/basho/leveldb) which adds a few nice things.

If you're interested in the internals of LevelDB, I strongly recommend watching this talk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo88IdglU_8 (slides here https://speakerdeck.com/basho/optimizing-leveldb-for-perform...)
I think the point that's overlooked here is that the offenders aren't the clever apps that would be impossible to write without javascript. Go ahead and write those. I'm happy for you, really.

The problem is pages that require javascript to display static content. There are very few good reasons for an article, or an image gallery, or a homepage that could have been displayed just fine a decade ago to now need javascript so it can do some stupid flashy thing that breaks the expected interface behaviour. And frankly, that's most of what I'm seeing in "Sigh, Javascript."
With most languages you can already use localised identifiers, even nowadays with UTF-8 for languages with non latin alphabet. And for the keywords, you can most often use cpp or another preprocessor to substitute them.

But the summum is reached with perligata.
Thankfully you're not actually allowed to pick pronunciation arbitrarily in new words. Especially if they violate common or semi-common patterns.
Zelda too http://youtu.be/9mHw5g55oC4
It does not penalize the article, as even before this concept was given a name it was already clear. The only people it "penalizes" are the people who have to see the comment every single time an article, no matter what the quality level of the content, happens to have such a question-marked title. Think about it this way: the article got voted to some place, and maybe is even on the front page; do you think yelling "Bettridge's law of headlines says 'no'" is changing that vote?

Do you think people reading the comments are going "ah, that is something I had yet to consider about this article; I had previously been curious to know the answer to this deep and burning question, but now that I read this comment, it is clear time that not only am I a fool, but I should down vote this article, all articles like it, and start my own crusade to scream the name of this wonderful law of headlines every time I see such an article".

The best you are getting is "oh, I didn't realize someone had assigned this a funny 'law'... that will be a great trivia item I can being up to demonstrate my epic knowledge of jargon". The result is then just another person in the article comments adding noise. It is nothing more than a way to add mild justification to the seemingly-dying practice of yelling "first": you just need to know, for each article, what bingo terms happen to apply, and then be he first to lay claim to them.
Callbacks are possibly not the best way to solve concurrency issues. Node.js does it that way, but there's no inherent reason JavaScript should only solve concurrency problems with callbacks. It would be possible to implement a wide variety of concurrency models in JavaScript, and I'm sure people have and will. Node.js happens to be the early winner in that space.

We are still pretty early in the JavaScript story on the server side.
> but I've sacrificed an incalculable amount of positive social interaction sitting in front of these damned screens

Sorry to call you out on that, but that is a tiny sacrifice to make compared to the past (which involved sweat, blood, immigration, exploitation to name a few). Even calling it a sacrifice is kind of sacrilege. Plus, you most probably did a lot of social interaction on your IM.
Test console for easy testing - https://www.mashape.com/community/random-user-generator#!doc...
"Friendly reminder that "people with JS disabled" includes those on high-latency networks, bad firewalls, and browsers you don't support." - @jcoglan

https://twitter.com/jcoglan/status/370173041193406464
Even if multiverse exists, I doubt it would ever influence your day-to-day life, much less history.

It's too low level. It's all about quantum states, and we're like ten levels above them.

Low level processes tend to either go unnoticed by high level ones (think radio waves) or be harmful to them (think radiation) by messing with their high-level organization.

So please forget about hiding a knife in a parallel universe.
How do you consider that spam? I posted it on my Google+ account, that was the purpose of the HN circle.

Suddenly I come from another planet. I don't get it. I don't consider my twitter timeline to be spam, for example.

I receive a lot emails from HN related stuff. I think that's fair. If I think it isn't useful for me I just delete it, I don't flag anybody we are here to share things.
The websites as applications is correct. I see grumblings from some old time grumpy folk about why does this site need JavaScript. Because it's a runtime now. The web has evolved, and aren't you glad it did because flash is dying.
> I love every time an article like this appears. Everyone is immediately on the fence, bashing JavaScript furiously. Yet momentum doesn't appear to be declining?

All it will take a different scripting runtime (with equivalent performance, which isn't a hard problem) in a major browser and javascript will literally disappear in a half-decade.
> It is not the war on drugs that is destroying the U.S's lower class, it's the ridiculous prison sentences.

I don't see these two things as separable.

> But then you have the issue of regulating or even organizing the legal (private) distribution of drugs. I don't see that ending well at all.

Perhaps you are right, but it is my opinion that it is the very illegality of drug abuse that makes it so difficult to treat, especially for the harder drugs. If you read the Portugal study you find that addicts that are not threatened with jail time or other criminal sanction are more likely to seek and pursue treatment. And Portugal has a small fraction of the funds for treatment available as the US would have if it repurposed it's "Drug War" budgets for treatment, so you could imagine that such policies would be more effective here.

One key additional concept from Greenwald's report is that individuals who choose to avoid hard drugs are not dissuaded by their illegality just as they are not dissuaded by the harm that these drugs cause. Furthermore, individuals who would otherwise choose not to do drugs don't change their minds because the criminal sanction disappears. Choosing to do hard drugs involves a decision-making process that requires a person to disregard signifiant harm to their person. This insensitivity towards risk on the part of the addict means that criminal sanction simply does not have the deterrent effect one would expect; inversely, non-drug users are deterred primarily by the ill effects to their health and wellbeing, so drug's illegality barely enters into the equation.
Unit Testing for the Non-TDDer
Seattle, USA. Hired at 110k w/ two years freelance experience.
"And most importantly: Don’t be ashamed to build 100% JavaScript applications. You may get some incensed priests vituperating you in their blogs. But there will be an army of users (like me) who will fall in love with using your app."

This statement needs a huge, HUGE caveat that you should only be building 100% JavaScript apps in situations where doing so makes sense. For example, I find the new Blogger "web app" infuriating. I shouldn't have to stare at a loading screen to read a half-dozen paragraphs of text, that's just stupid. Just serve the HTML. No one is going to "fall in love" with your app if your app shouldn't exist in the first place because the old-school solution provided a superior experience.
I don't really understand what you mean with "real English text". I can't separate keywords from their true meaning, and it's much easier for me to understand the purpose of a keyword if its purpose matches its name.

Every statement has a meaning, and every block is a story. If it wasn't readable we could just as well use BANCstar [1].

(Btw, I absolutely hate that Microsoft translates Excel formulas (and so on) in localized versions. I simply cannot program in my native language: I basically translate back to English mentally.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6311717
Hi everyone, sorry it went down for a few minutes. I was hosting it on Dropbox but turns out that's not a good idea for HN traffic, so I switched to using a copy of it. Thanks for reading :)
the internet is full of every one censorship,from government,politics and economic sanction. when do you think will the internet world be totally free for everyone?
And people using NoScript.
Check out meteor.js for why JavaScript would be needed for "static only content". Real time updates. That's why. Everything is an app.
Interesting. I spoke about this concept at Speakerconf Munich in 2012. I'm happy someone is working on it and at the same time surprised that someone was bold enough to try. :-)
Not bad. First design revision looks like back when css round corners and opacity became usable. Next one looks like the usual "I'm a designer" design. The grey one reminds me of Yahoo's early days when grey backgrounds were popular. The the last one is minimal and clean, so rather modern. Not a big fan of this particular green though.

I think it's great when people work with the feedback they get and decide to act on it.

I have to admit though I was a little surprised this post was about simple frontend design/HTML/CSS, I was expecting something more... techy.
"Bahnhof falsely claims that the server being auctioned was 'WikiLeaks primary web server'. It was not." - @wikileaks

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/374608602796785664
He's talking about wrappers. Wrappers are dist specific. Some people like to use UFW and so on. It's their choice. But real men call iptables directly.
Or they need to reinvent it the way they reinvented the DS, from an ugly blobby joke to a money printing machine.
) The problem I see with the browser is that:
1) It takes up hotkeys. (mouse and keyboards)
2) It can look different for different browsers
3) You have extra UI.
It doesn't seem that height has everything to do with genetics, if we observe the average heights of taller countries in the past. Things like diet and perhaps healthcare are also factors. When it comes to the Dutch, they didn't always use to be the tallest:

- http://suite101.com/article/why-are-the-dutch-so-tall-a55753
Thanks! I could find little information on HCL, but based on this blog post [0] it seems that it is a cylindrical version of CIE LUV. This is the color space that HUSL is based on. What HUSL does is it replaces the chroma component with a saturation component that is defined as a percentage ranging from 0 to the maximum chroma for the given hue and lightness. To put it in another way, it stretches the chroma component to make it fit into a nice rectangle. This makes all components bounded and lets us pick color without stepping outside of the gamut.

UPLab looks cool, thanks for sharing.

[0] http://cscheid.net/blog/hcl_color_space_blues
Why would it do that? Once the visa runs out, you're out, and the employer can't really help with that.

If you're on a H1B visa, you really need to figure out a plan to a Green Card ASAP, unless you're not planning to stay long term.
When you have observed a similar number of founding teams close up, your impressions will have similar credibility.

Until then, on the empirical issue – what has actually been a predictive indicator during the YC programs – real experience, not theory and hope, matters.
<plug> If you use Chef, check out AFW. https://github.com/jvehent/AFW </plug>
I'm sorry, but I think validation of an idea is probably one of the worst reasons to get a co-founder I've heard.
To give some evidence to the parent, look at a chart of STEM graduates vs liberal arts, comparing 1985 to 2009 [1]. Across the board we've pushed a wider range of people into college. Nevertheless, in absolute terms the number of graduates has dropped in CS, Math, and sciences, while it has skyrocketed for arts, communications, and psychology. What we've found is that there just aren't very many scientists and engineers on the margin. In other words, there appear to be relatively few "potential" engineers that just need a nudge towards engineering. This seems especially true when you consider that across this time period (1985 - 2009), the career prospects for STEM graduates have been very good. Even this incentive doesn't seem to push any marginal college students towards these fields.

My takeaway is that there isn't a huge pool of potential programmers that just need a nudge towards programming. If offering huge salaries and making higher education a social requirement doesn't increase the number of people who chose the engineering career path, what does?

[1] http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/11/col...
There's no reasons sites like tumblr shouldn't work without javascript. Period. And while there are some things on the web that are genuine applications (trello, dashboards, etc.), the vast majority of things are content driven, which should never require js.
Whats your rate per hour for iOS?
I got in contact with my tutors through livelingua.com. The first tutor was excellent, the second one was reasonable. I can't say that I really recommend the site (as the quality is somewhat inconsistent), but it did work for me.

The first lesson is free, so one can always give it a try.
I have now created a very simple benchmark suite to give you some rough performance numbers, and updated the README to include some sample numbers for one specific machine.
I think it's an awful idea. Let's take Cyrillic languages, Ukrainian/Russian as an example.

* Alphabet has 33+ letters, so there is no space left for programmer's favorite symbols on layout: @#$^&{}[]|~`<>. Yep.

* In Math variables' names traditionally are Latin/Greek letters, Cyrillic is used only when teaching kids. Again: switching layout all the time? No, thanks.

* Words are simply much longer. And I mean much. In English even short words tend to become shorter (variable -> var). In Russian there is simply no such pattern exists. `var-set` -> `установить-переменную`. `var-get` - `получить-переменную`.

* Words are stable in English morphologically. e.g. `last-msg-delivered` - `last-msgS-delivered` -> `последнЕЕ-сообщениЕ-доставленО` - `последнИЕ-сообщениЯ-доставленЫ` - if you change gender or from singular to plural etc you should change few words in a row.

Seriously, it seems to me like trying to make things more complicated.
Bustle actually uses PhantomJS to create static versions of the site, for serving to search spiders.

The advantage of using Ember.js for Bustle is that it's really, really, ridiculously fast. Seriously, try it. Go to bustle.com and click around.

They could make it work without JavaScript, but they're a new company with a long list of technical challenges to solve. They ran the numbers and the percentage of users with JS disabled is so microscopic it just doesn't make sense to spend time on it.
What I’ve found, counter-intuitively, is that apps that embrace JavaScript actually end up having less JavaScript. Yeah, I know, it’s some Zen koan shit. But the numbers speak for themselves.

The author does very little to support his claims. The Boston Globe page also has lot of scripts to support advertising and the advertising itself. As well, entirely different engineering teams and probably cultures. There's not even any research into The Boston Globe's use of progressive JS; it makes ZERO sense why the two homepages could not have the same JS footprint, with The Boston Globe continuing to work and Bustle continuing to not work, while JS is disabled.

I'm all for not supporting progressive JS; Bustle is certainly within their right to not work without JS; the author is just caught in a confirmation-bias bubble. His conclusions don't make sense; our intuitions are right; it doesn't take [much] more JS to progressively enhance a site.
Javascript is great for making more efficient sites. Here's why:

1) Static resources can be cached on a CDN and composited on the client instead of an overloaded app server

2) You can load data instead of heavy and repetitive HTML over the wire

3) You can cache the data in the client and re-use it later, making for snappier interfaces

That said, you have to watch out for URLs. Just because you can write everything with javascript doesn't mean you should break URLs. And of course, crawlers other than google's crawler will probably not be able to execute your JS.
It's not down, it errors.
What, exactly, is the issue with writing a simple content site that requires JS? If you aren't pulling in half a MB of JS, but it does require scripting to function, I don't see the problem. Just because I could spend the effort to be progressive doesn't constrain me to have to do it. It doesn't make me a lazy programmer either: just pragmatic.

99.99% of the people visiting my site have JS enabled and I'm happy to support them just fine without worrying about the really long tail.
err, no. Sports are not fun. You cannot read or program while running after a ball or even while cycling.