skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Often method calls are 4 - 6 layers deep, which in itself makes is very difficult to remember or even implement even if you read the documentation well.

I think that's a symptom of bad design than a problem with the language. The language doesn't force you to create abstractions on top of abstractions and it is not necessary. Having method calls like that is a bad code-smell.

Java does have a verbosity problem and some of it being addressed in Java 8 with lambdas.

> The resulting code is massive walls of text. 90% of that is machine generated through eclipse. This is an indication that the language idioms are unable to support the current complexities in application programming trends. And you have to interplay with them heavily to squeeze out usable programming logic.

I have never had to autogenerate code. I use IntelliJ and it doesn't generate walls of text. It does autogenerate some stuff if you want it to, but those are usually just stubs.

> That doesn't end there. Perl is older than Java, yet despite that I see Perl can support a lot of idioms far far better than Java can with its bulky frameworks.

Well, Perl is strongly typed and has a rich (and ambiguous) grammar. I don't think it's a fair comparison with Java. Furthermore, Perl has a bunch of other issues. I love Perl, but I wouldn't really think about writing a huge application in Perl; it's usually a maintenance nightmare if you don't have a shop of disciplined Perl-coders.

> The only reason to use Java these days is basically availability of super low cost devs, Legacy code, tooling etc. Basically for reasons as with any tool that has an advantage with age.

Not really. You can build lots of full-featured webapps with Java and there are a lot of new applications that use Java.

What I think is happening more and more though, is that the JVM is turning into a platform and there are numerous languages that run on it. What Java has going for it is its rich ecosystem via core APIs and numerous third-party libraries. You have access to all of this if your language runs on the JVM. For example, Nashorn (the replacement for Rhino) has access to the standard API, as do languages like Jython and JRuby which also run on the JVM.
I think the thing that has always held me back from finally pulling the trigger on A chromebook pixel is the fact that you have to dismiss the "developer mode" popup everytime you boot. I guess that is a bit of a nitpick though and it otherwise seems like a solid machine.
> Any idiot can write something that occasionally works with some limited simple input and doesn't need to scale or do much error handling or recovery or cooperate with the OPS guys and their designs in any way.

You'd like to think so, but what I'm saying is that isn't the case.

> Give em a fizzbuzz with pathological parenthesis which mess it up, or half a fizzbuzz and ask them to finish it.

I ask them to write regular FizzBuzz and they can't. :(
While I agree with the sentiment, the statistics quoted don't support the author's thesis.

> The average age of a successful entrepreneur in high-growth industries such as computers, health care, and aerospace is 40.

> Twice as many successful entrepreneurs are over 50 as under 25.

> The highest rate of entrepreneurship in America has shifted to the 55–64 age group, with people over 55 almost twice as likely to found successful companies than those between 20 and 34 – in fact, the 20-34 age bracket has the lowest rate of entrepreneurial activity.

If ten times as many people over 50 than people under 25 try to start businesses, then the statistics strongly favor the under-25's. These statistics don't mean anything unless you know the number of people in each age group who start businesses.

> 75% have more than six years of industry experience and 50% have more than 10 years when they create their startup.

What does this even mean? Years worked is not the same as having useful experience.

The article would be much stronger if it showed evidence that older workers were more productive, more likely to succeed at starting a business, or were in some other way undervalued by the current job market.
Ruby’s 20. Just FWIW.
Can someone please tell me how this is different from Jekyll? They both work based on the same concept if I'm correct?

Also, how about support for category pages? I mean, show a page full of posts from one particular category only? Possible??
I can see my phrasing was a bit imprecise - when I said "How long will people even care?", I meant how long will people bother protesting when they can just buy good, fully functioning games from other publishers? For me, EA just seems to be among the most boring, mediocre and un-user-friendly forces in gaming. With the wealth of great games out there, I wonder if they'll see a Zynga/Nintendo style reversal of fortunes in the near term.
90% to whatever GiveWell -- http://givewell.org -- currently thinks is best (GiveDirectly, Against Malaria Foundation), 10% to charities I have a soft spot for that I suspect are less efficient (e.g. EFF, Wikimedia, public radio).
Server-Side Google Analytics Client
Careful, it would probably cause a rather nasty cut as there's nothing to stop it once it starts slicing.
Java isn't a bad language, but the point is that it doesn't offer much what other languages don't. It's unique selling point is that it is there, and that it's widespread.

Said politely, Java is “conservative” to include new features. Take for example lambdas, which make writing async code, inversion of control, and yes, functional programming much more easy. All modern competitors to Java have lambdas: C++11 and C# (LINQ! need I say more?), plus basically everything except C. Java 8 has still to ship. A more flexible object system, e.g. using traits, would not be impossible to implement, but I doubt this will show up before C++ has them ;-)

Ecosystem? Well, that is a good argument, but other languages have ecosystems as well.
I find it odd when start-ups talk about the top recent grad vs the average older worker. The best experienced workers code circles around EVERYBODY else end of story. The only real issue for most startups is convincing them to actually work for you when they have seen enough BS that there harder to convince than most VS's.
Looks interesting, I come from a Qt background so cross-platform toolkits always have a bit of interest for me. It does seem like it's definitely for people building highly customised interfaces, rather than looking for OS-based look and feel but there's some nice bits. I think I'll give it a whirl when I've got time for a side project.
Well, it very much depends what you're doing. Obviously, if you are doing something CPU-bound, code speed is pretty important. Not sure what blocking IO has to do with it one way or the other. Are you thinking specifically of webapps, maybe?
> The thing is, no matter how much we complain about them being loud, they still pay their bills on time, so my landlord has been at a loss as to how to remove them. He would love to kick them out and renovate the apartment and charge many times as much as is currently being paid, but he can't.

If they are rent-controlled, even if they are paying their rent, he can evict them with no problem.

The relevant government agencies have a moderate amount of information line, but I'd recommend calling them instead. I've done this before; they're very friendly and helpful if you call them on the phone. I'd recommend giving them a call and asking for advice on the eviction process:

http://www.nyshcr.org/rent/
http://www.housingnyc.com/html/about/about.html
I can see your point about the teeth government regulation has over 3rd party regulation, but you do have to concede that for many benign products and services (that don't involve danger to life and limb) 3rd party rating services work quite well. The debate should be about whether or not the consumer has any teeth when it comes to rejecting unsafe or inferior products and services, and if those teeth are as sharp as the Government's.
In all fairness, how are they supposed to combat that without moving their server location?
Split's wireless earphones ditch cables for clocks
Progressive enhancement. It is a web development best practice.

You will find that "dynamic loading of content" doesn't automatically mean "no content served by HTML under any circumstances". This is an error perpetuated by these JavaScript-only frameworks.

For example, bustle.com - there is absolutely no customer experience reason for the website not to have the content loaded at the HTML layer and then progressively enhanced with the customer experience additions. The content here isn't tied exclusively to the behaviour layer.
Search Google, Bing, and Yahoo without being tracked
looks great! definitely will have to try this out.

it's a little discouraging, however, that the issue queue has so many pull requests, comments, etc. without comment.

i love the concept of simplicity and i'm sure the maintainers have a roadmap in mind. it'd be nice if that was communicated a bit so i can know how simple they plan to keep it.
Some applications can be pathological, in which case you are better off setting lower-level flags. For example, Lucene both churns through tons of short-lived strings and tries to maintain caches of large arrays. The memory/gc optimizer handles this very poorly.

Between modern Java tending to move caches to unmanaged memory-mapped regions as libraries mature, and the potential of G1 as a concurrent compacting collector, we're on the cusp of not having to worry about any of this anymore.
I wonder if ageism is really that much of a problem. I'm 51 and still working as a software developer but all of my contemporaries have moved on from development to something else.

I've definitely experienced ageism but I suspect that it is rarely institutionalized. Instead I think that people like me are relatively rare. I have no real interest in management or another career--I like being a developer. That means when I show up for a job interview, I don't exactly fit in since it is likely that few of the candidates are my age or older. Sometimes I can overcome this and other times I'm not really given a chance.

I mostly work as a contractor so I have frequent job changes and I haven't found it to be that much of a problem. It is just another hurdle that has to be overcome. The group I'm working in now, I'm the oldest developer by at least 10 years.
Or maybe we're all STILL PAYING OFF our 2008 debts... You know 35% effective APR and our houses all having negative equity 5 years latter will do that.

The people writing this stuff live in a fantasy land where the rich took a 25% fall one year,but jumped right back on 10% gains the very next year... so why isn't EVERYBODY making plenty of money? They have absolutely no clue that WE took a 25% hit..but regular folk are lucky to have an aggressive 401k hit 7% in a year...

Not to mention that the rich just RAISED THE PRICE of everything to get their money back faster.
Here's a good article[1] on why US oil consumption has declined in recent years.

Basically: Improved vehicle MPG, flat/decreasing VMT [2], decreasing non-highway use of distillate [3], improved industrial efficiency, and a shrinking industrial sector.

[1] - http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9811

[2] - Vehicle Miles Traveled

[3] - http://www.eia.gov/oog/info/twip/twiparch/2013/130227/twippr...
Getting MEAN With MongoDB and AngularJS
Why wouldn't pragmatism produce the results needed? Moving over to Nuclear Power would, without a doubt, solve the climate crisis. Granted, it would introduce other challenges, but we're talking about the lesser of two evils here.
Personally, I think ageism in the industry is great. Let my competitors ignore the large pool of experienced engineers out there, and hire some young kid who is "cheaper". While he's fixing his design for the tenth time, I'll pay that expense old dinosaur to do something boring, like get it right the first time.
"We've also discussed how homogeneity is valuable to an early startup. Having everyone be culturally similar may allow faster pivoting and interpersonal comprehension."

Homogeneity is also the natural state for human beings and not necessarily a sinister plot. If you solve our natural tendency to surround ourselves with people who look and act like us, you'll probably have solved racism, sexism, ageism and just about every other -ism. I' not saying we shouldn't challenge this instinct, but I also don't think we should be surprised that white, 25-year-old, male founders have a tendency to hire other white males in their mid-twenties.
Source? I keep hearing this - but only see a small sampling of papers from the large scientific community.
> I really want type inference, lightweight objects, properties (vs JavaBean accessor convention), switch for 'instanceof', etc.

I believe you're asking for Scala. For example, switching on types:

trait Foo
class Bar extends Foo
class Baz extends Foo

val thing = // could be either bar or baz, don't know

thing match {
case f: Foo => println("Got foo")
case b: Bar => println("Got bar")
}
The Problem with Social Media ROI and the PR Agency's Dilemma
Show HN: MongoSoup, first German MongoDB-as-a-Service solution
It's not the rights of the minority, in this case. In the jurisdiction in question, there is no legal right to rent your apartment to short-term guests. Nor do I perceive a moral right to do so.

It would be more accurate to say: The broad economic interests of property owners in general outweigh the narrower economic interests of people who would like to offer short-term accommodations.
Dolly.js - a jQuery widget that adds excel-like cloning to your tables
Anybody have any idea on when we'll be able to use elliptic curve encryption with GPG?

According to tptacek, that's in the works, but seems like that didn't make it into this release.
Also helpful: http://www.slideshare.net/aszegedi/everything-i-ever-learned...
Scala: sharp and gets things cut
Structs + interfaces in Go are a re-interpretation of Java interfaces (albeit a major one). It's a different path, but the same philosophy (dynamic dispatch over receiver type + mutable state).

Exceptions vs. multiple return values are two different local decisions made by Go's designers: multiple return values and lack of exceptions. Multiple return values are handy (might find their way to Java one day), but I would call that a feature, not a different approach. As for exceptions, it is my understanding that Go's designers haven't made a final ruling on the subject.

Static vs. dynamic linking are properties of the runtime (native vs. VM) rather than the language. In principle, both Go and Java could support either without any language changes.

Go is most certainly not like C, because C's philosophy is letting the programmer work at the same level as the CPU. Go, if anything, is further removed from the hardware than Java (no explicit control over threads or scheduling, no access to memory fences).
Notes that are only visible to people looking at a certain address on a certain website, nowhere else. I truly do not think this it at all newsworthy.

"Public notes" are a construction of blockchain.info—despite the confusing name—they are most certainly not part of the actual Bitcoin blockchain.
In issues like this, it's important to interpret statistics correctly. For instance, the article cites this:

>“Eight of the companies, the study said, had median employee age of 30 or younger.” In comparison, the Times reported, the median age of the American worker was 42.3 years old.

Ageism is not the only explanation for this discrepancy. The software industry has exploded in growth in the last twenty years. Most other industries have not seen the same rate of growth. When a labor pool for an industry is strained, it sends a signal to young people to pursue a career in that field. As a result, the labor pool is filled by proportionally more young people.

Eventually the growth of an industry will cease. Then less young people will pursue it as a career path, and the median age of laborers in that field will rise.
Now you're talking about consequences and penalties, which has nothing to do with the original statement relating purely to assurances and validation and authentication of claims.

You can argue on top of that a paramilitary organisation must exist so that such findings have any real world impact. Once again though that was not in the content of the original statement, and you might awkwardly find yourself supporting people trying to give teeth to what they believe to be extremely important things in various other ways you may not immediately see the parity with, but nonetheless spring from the exact same premise of implicitly desirable violent deterrence.

For example, engaging the services of a professional killer to prevent a large number of customers who have trusted you and your business from being kidnapped and held in rape cages for an extended period of time.
Disney Research Develops Tactile Rendering of 3D Features on Touch Surfaces
Site seems to be down due to HN. But seems like a cool idea.
It is the human equivalent of "right tool for the job" I would think..

Your point about homogeneity is an important one as well. In small organizations, cultural fit - opinions about that culture notwithstanding - is much more important than in larger ones, for the reasons you listed and more.

That said, a wise co-worker once said "you can't have juniors without seniors". While younger workers can be a boon to startups from a price/performance point of view, it is important to also have experienced, if more expensive, employees who can provide guidance and direction to those juniors.

Otherwise, you can find yourself a few years down the road to growth with massive technical debt and a naive technical platform that was built with good intentions but is now full of problems that are extremely hard to correct.

Yup, I'm speaking from experience here. ;-)
this. lisp is 50+ and still the most syntactically awesome thing eva.
Just a note: Chrome 24 on Ubuntu and the videos aren't autoplaying. I have to right click + play. Would be nice to show some controls :)
You are talking rubbish.

> Younger people will often be willing to work more...

Younger people have to work more, because they don't have enough experience to work efficiently, yet.

> Young people have a greater percent of their experience on the most modern platforms

So, 1 year of "shiny new tech" > 1 year of "shiny new tech" + 20 years of other relevant experience? Riiiight.

> homogeneity is valuable to an early startup

Wow. Homogeneity is a killer for any team. The whole point of building a team is to find people who can work together, and become more than the sum of their parts. For that, you need people whose strengths cover for their team-mates' weaknesses... the very opposite of homogeneity.

OK, it's not all rubbish. I agree with this...

> Very young employees can sometimes be too aggressive about "what is this legacy garbage? we should rewrite it all in RoR and JS
I've always been confused by this. I use Jetbrains (IDEA, Rubymine and PyCharm) products almost exclusively and I have no idea why a developer would "refuse" to use an IDE.

I admit that if I just need to review a single file or knock an R script together I will launch Sublime. This is almost exclusively as a result of launch time ... nothing more. Good IDEs tend to get out of your way - whilst offering you advanced visualisation, debugging and reporting for when you, ... you know ... have to work with other people.
The Value of Participating in Google Plus Communities
I wonder when we will be able to use some GOST ciphers with it, just for fun and diversification from NIST ciphers.

Does anyone know what the Chinese equivalent of NIST is? What does China use?
If you're using the new G1 collector which ships in JDK 7, the only configuration parameters you really need to care about are the minimum and maximum heap sizes (-Xms and -Xmx) and perhaps the latency target (-XX:MaxGCPauseMillis).

So it's not all bad.
I've been using a Chromebook as a development laptop for a few months after leaving my real laptop on a train (it was possibly the stupidest thing I've done due to caffeine withdrawal).

Yes, it can function as an SSH Client, but its up there with the worst SSH clients you've encountered. Its slow, and its ugly. You'll also have problems when it comes to more advanced things.

Like copying a CSV you generated with a script on the real computer you're SSHed into so that you can email it to someone.

I did briefly run a full Ubuntu install in a chroot, which made things a little nicer, but I swapped one set of problems for a whole new set, such as multiple displays not working.

Having said all that, if you're not a developer Chromebooks are lovely things.
>> The issue at question is a tiny (% wise) hotel tax. In my view AirBnB is not resisting this tax for its own sake, but rather because it risks classifying hosts as hotel operators.

A small quibble: The various taxes on hotel charges in New York add up to almost 15%. If AirBnB has 15,000 people renting rooms, we could easily be talking about millions of dollars here.
I would make the comparison to "Upstate New York" [0]. I like this Wikipedia article more than the one for Northern California because it admits that "there is no clear or official boundary between Upstate New York and Downstate New York".

The same is true for Northern and Southern California. There's no official distinction. Calling the Bay Area part of Northern California places too much emphasis on the Los Angeles area. By analogy, saying that "North" begins at the Transverse Ranges is like saying that "Upstate" begins at Yonkers. Ridiculous.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upstate_New_York
Life as an Entrepreneur
> Its next impossible to deal with any large Java project without an IDE

True, but I don't see it as a problem (for me).

> The verbosity of the code is mind boggling.

I don't find Java that verbose (especially with lambda functions in Java 8).

> method calls are 4 - 6 layers deep

I don't understand, do you mean nested method calls?

> 90% of that is machine generated through eclipse.

Definitely not 90% and lot of the generated code would have to be written manually in languages like Python.

> The only reason to use Java these days is ...

Libraries, tools, speed, multiplatformity. Also, Java is a pretty good language by itself. It lacks in many ways, but for a LOT of projects, it's a great choice. What language would you suggest as a Java alternative?

> super low cost devs

Java devs are among the most expensive.
Young people have a greater percent of their experience on the most modern platforms and are unlikely to "write FORTRAN in any language" (JS, Ruby, etc).

They are also more likely to be dumber and lacking in versatility. Older people just have more experience, more knowledge, just by the fact that they have more time to accumulate more knowledge, so they may often may be more productive than 2 or 3 youngsters combined and still have time for family and other hobbies. Of course, that's only true if the older technical folks don't coast and continue to learn since when they were young.

(Yes I am a 22 years old who uses modern frameworks like ruby on rails and meteor. The exact profile that software firms want to hire.)
Why Don’t More Men Pursue Female-Dominated Professions?
I meant Klamath.
You cant beat the system, unless you have good friends or a lot of money to lobby the government.

But dont make it about liberty and freedom , that's totally relative.There is no such thing as absolute "liberty" or "freedom" ,some places are just more free than others and trust me you are lucky enough to live where you live.

This is not subversion ,this is how the system works. And you'll go with the flow eventually.
I don't think a rapid wholesale move to nuclear power is any more pragmatic than a rapid move to cut average per capita energy consumption in half.
Maybe it's just because is Monday but, besides of the Julian Assange's example and the time capsule, I can't think of another use case of a Time-lock crypto puzzle, anyone?