skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most of the time, it's easy to ignore programming languages that you aren't familiar with. In day to day programming life, you're not going to be running into many examples of Eiffel, or Dylan, or D or E, in the wild. So you're not going to feel very strongly about them, either pro or con.

For better or for worse (I think for the better), CoffeeScript is fully interoperable with JavaScript. The runtime characteristics and the lowest-common-denominator ES3 support are such that you can use it just about anywhere you might want to use JS. That, and a modicum of success, means that JS programmers sometimes stumble across it in unexpected places, only after popping the hood. e.g. "I thought I was just using a simple library -- Eauggh! What is that stuff down there!" This makes it very hard to ignore...

As a JavaScript programmer, you're forced to ask yourself the question, "Why haven't I given CoffeeScript a real try yet?" Not all, but a large part of the dislike comes from folks rationalizing their response to that question to themselves.

tl;dr, CoffeeScript is almost perfectly situated to inspire fear and loathing in JavaScript programmers with closed minds.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/canadian-firm-hired-to-build-t...

Based on that article, the OP is wrong, the six hundred million is across all contracts, the ACA site which most people are aghast at is just under 60 million of that.
20/20 here. Several of my favourite bands in that list (Watain in particular).
Are they not also a Canadian company?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CGI_Group

Why we'd be committing to using non-US companies to develop US systems... I guess it must happen sometimes, but on something this ... public?
Some colleagues of mine work on a C# windows app - I thought I couldn't help them out, as I use Linux. Maybe I can though, based on what you're saying.

Can I take a C# project targeting Windows, develop compile and developer-test on Linux, then second test and deploy to Windows?
It's not like you can't port it over to your own infrastructure if AWS starts getting too costly.
The Definitive Guide to How to Blog
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The previous post on the blog actually talked about WHY we picked Haxe to do client/server development so we didn't have to write a ton of duplicate code. As a bonus, it's just a great language with a good community and active developers.
All of them. The companies have people that are ostensibly part of the same system. These are the guys I have seen recommend a Silverlight app... in 2013.
At least good to know CGI Federal is an American breed company!

</sarcasm>
Very interesting that people are saying things like "significant whitespace" and "too similar to python" - I personally love Python and I like that coffeescript bears some resemblance to it. I voted "Coffeescript - Like" because it removes many of the mundane aspects of JS programming.

Definitely doesn't solve many of JS's problems, but it certainly makes things easier when writing client side apps. We use it a lot for Backbone development.
Hi, I actually work for CGI Federal on a closely related website to healthcare.gov. There's some inaccurate speculation going on in this thread that I want to correct. Employees at CGI Federal are not payed hourly. Also, a lot of people have mentioned cronyism, which I think is baseless. CGI Federal already had contracts for Medicare.gov and CMS.gov, so when CMS had to build healthcare.gov, CGI was an obvious choice.

edit: Also, the projects I work on are Agile and I get to use other technologies besides .Net framework (e.g. node.js and backbone.js)
It lacks some of the syntactic niceties and metaprogramming you get with languages like Python.

Otherwise it's quite good for what it is, and my frustration with C# is entirely down to the ongoing failure of Unity Technologies to upgrade the version of Mono included with their game engine. It means I'm stuck with an old version of C# (notably without the dynamic type), watching as quite a few third-party libraries drop support for it.
I think history should be rewritten. The great leaders of the past like Napoleon or Columbus (http://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day) should be portrayed for what they were, blood thirsty psychopaths. Emphasis in history lessons should be on science and art, not war and conquest.
The ‘shiny things’ disease
PHP's only real strength is it's ubiquity.
Yes, that was sloppy of me.

You have to be precise when talking about the effects of biological evolution on our brains. We know our brains were initially created entirely by biological evolution; what's not clear is how direct or indirect the influence of evolution has been on our psychology. That is, does evolution hardwire relatively complex behaviour (as it does in many animals) or does it merely specify high-level learning algorithms? This appears to be the case with humans - we don't have many instinctual behaviours compared with other animals, but we do have an instinctual ability to learn new things. It's interesting to speculate how this ability might have arisen; the ability to learn new things and to spot patterns must have been useful to our distant ancestors, as they're such fundamental traits of human cognition.

This is also why the "nature vs nurture"/"biology vs culture" debate is a false dichotomy: the foundation of human culture is our ability to learn, which is itself a genetic adaptation.
I think it's very interesting to see some changes in the Hacker News community. For example, CoffeeScript's like/dislike ratio seems to be much lower now that 18 months ago. I bet some articles had an important impact in its popularity. Same would happen with MongoDB for example. It'd be nice to run this kind of poll every month, and try to correlate with specific articles that changed the mindset of the community.
Practice in front of friends, repeatedly.
Ceylon is missing :)

I've recently had a closer look at it and I believe that it's the best-designed general purpose statically typed language out there. I'm genuienly impressed by it. It's far from being production ready though.
My deapest, deapest sympathies. Up until a few years back I was doing the same. It was the most unproductive years of my life.
Machine Learning is Just Math
> [...] how often people who want nothing in the world to do with CoffeeScript,
> people like me, end up having to deal with it for some reason. Like I
> don't like ada, and I never have to look at it. ada never ends up in
> my editor or on a github page I'm looking at, but frequently someone
> puts CoffeeScript somewhere where someone was expecting JavaScript,
> like a StackOverflow answer, or a package for Meteor, or something.
> If CoffeeScript stayed out of my life, and I out of it, I would probably
> hate it a lot less.

As the creator of CoffeeScript — I think your answer here is right on the money. It's a pretty perfect answer to joeblau's question.
My brain isn't plastic enough to make this switch. :( For me, those code examples are uncomfortable to look at. backwards read to trying like It's
This is an absurd comparison. NYSE is a private exchange. The US government doesn't run it and doesn't own it. Private health exchanges already exist.
P2.js - JavaScript 2D physics library
The obvious counter point is that most people who hate PHP quite like C. But C more closely fits your description of "freedom to create some really bad/stupid code" than PHP does. People hate it because it makes it more difficult to do things well, not because it makes it easy to do things poorly.
Print Your 3D Twin
I liked F#. Even build a web request handler using it :)

However I kind of don't trust Microsoft to keep supporting this side project... Remember FoxPro?
Actually, my dislike of PHP is entirely based on using it. If I hadn't had to "build projects" in it, I wouldn't care one way or the other.
I'm not really sure it's fair to say that people hate PHP because of its flexibility. Many other languages are very "flexible", and much more so than PHP for some things (you're less likely to do dumb threading or malloc mistakes in PHP, for example).

I think it's because PHP has a much larger surface area of questionable decisions to attack. When your core language is very, very small (e.g. Scheme), you have less to criticize, but when PHP has everything and the kitchen sink, plus a lack of an overarching philosophy or standard, plus a broken core developers community, it simply generates many more hatable things.
It's not quite that similar. The 400 richest Americans control $2 trillion, or about 3-4% of total U.S. wealth. That means wealth in the U.S. is a lot less concentrated at the top than in Russia. To match Russia (accounting for population), the 200 richest Americans would have to own $19 trillion in assets, the average wealth would have to be about $100 billion and you'd see some trillionaires.

Looking at the net worth of the bottom 40% of the American population doesn't tell you much about the level of oligarchy in American society. You would expect a big chunk of the population to not have much in the way of assets, simply because the trajectory of peoples' lives is to build up assets as they age over time. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_in_the_United_States#Sta.... Indeed, things that are ostensibly good, say more people getting higher education or more job mobility, can push out the time when people settle down, buy a house, and start saving, thus increasing the number of people who don't have substantial assets.

The median family net worth of a household headed by someone under 35 is $10k, while it's over $230k for a household headed by someone aged 55-65. The "bottom 40%" category is also heavily skewed by education, with households headed by non-high school graduates having a median net worth of $30k versus $250k for households headed by college graduates.

The statistics indicate that the "bottom 40%" starts around $40k. How many people under 30 do you know that have a net $40k? With student loans and sky-high rents, I bet lots of silicon valley engineers are in that "bottom 40%" for reasons that have nothing to do with oligarchy.
> I'm too lazy to look for the actual references, but in one form or another climate-related arguments for the "superiority" of Europeans were made in the late 1700s and in the 1800s (and towards the end of the 1800s a more racist undertone emerged, but that's another story). Something like "one can only be productive in a temperate climate", while those poor souls that have to live at the Tropics will never become industrious peoples.

To be fair, the GGS arguments are about explaining the origins of different rates of development, and not giving a rationalization for continued supremacy. For instance, one of his major arguments was that the New World had few domesticated draught animals. That ceases to be of any relevance with modern transportation, or indeed modern industry. He is talking about why some countries got a headstart, not trying to establish some firmly rooted 'natural order'.
Gold's mining cost is directly correlated with its sale price - different precious metal or gem mines have different extraction costs. So the "mining cost" of an ounce of gold varies with which mines are open, which varies with how much the gold sells for.
This is a great tool. I've used it before and it's easy to implement. Quick and solves a lot of the issues which I had for the project.
> more wealth than the bottom 40% of the American population combined.

Sounds like a statistic designed to rile people who don't understand the difference between wealth and income. You can be living quite comfortably but with no wealth accumulation (no savings or property). If you're also in debt, your wealth is negative. That bottom 40% probably includes a good number of people making over $100K per year.
30%, not 40%, according to your article. In the same year (2007), I had just finished my Ph.D. and finished grad school. My income went from about $18k to $50k.

In that year, I had more wealth than the bottom 25% of the American population combined. You probably did too.

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/12/13/how-alice-w...
PHP Weekly just out. Articles, news and jobs
It's not so much a personal insult as the common tendency most people have to base decisions on best rather than average performance. This essentially devolves to the Deming/TQM/Toyota/etc. school of management where you focus on making the system tolerate human error rather than hoping your humans consistently perform well.

That said, I do disagree that this is easily detected – I would bet that a significant percentage of C developers would not notice this if it wasn't mentioned in the context of a security problem. Linux kernel developers are [hopefully] well above average but … there's a reason why so many style guidelines feature this one prominently and it's not because few people have made this mistake.
I like PHP. I've coded in it (and other languages) for more than 10 years. I love the ease of use and the flexibility it offers.

I must however add that, like a sibling comment, I think modern frameworks like Symfony 2 is the way forward for the language in a modern web stack.
It works now. It was an oversight with their SSL registration. The link given to the feds was www. Which worked. They just omitted the www.
Prolog, thus a whole paradigm is missing in the poll.
Polls like this are the equivalent of asking a builder if he likes wood, metal, concrete, plywood, slate, etc. Or if he likes a saw more than a hammer.

Which only a complete moron would do.
Sounds like a Stockholm syndrome. :-) No worries, I have that with Haskell.
Brooklyn Maker Space 3rd Ward Shuts Down
I wonder if you just opened the circuit, wouldn't the motor then turn at pretty much no resistance?
Edited to add a citation.

At many universities (certainly my undergrad) the mean and median students in the Education department are weaker than students in other departments. Taking the weakest to bring out the best in our students seems very odd. There is some research that suggests teacher certification can actually be counterproductive. [1] If we were in the situation of Finland (teachers are in the top 10% of their class) then we would not need this type of intervention.

An increasing amount of research shows that TFA recruits perform at best no better, and often worse, than their trained and certified counterparts. I do not believe this to be conclusive. TFA teachers are being tossed into failing schools and systems and meeting or exceeding their supposedly more well trained peers.

Would a biology professor write a recommendation to medical school for an English major who’s never taken any core science courses? That would be strange. It would be even stranger if the professor knew the English major was just going into medicine for a few years, as a way to boost his resume, before ultimately going on to a career in public relations.

This is the one true, and serious complaint. TFA has turned into a place for smart high achievers to spend two years before going to grad school. Ideally many stay involved in education, but not all of them. But... It still does more for society than sending another couple percent of our best and brightest into banking and consulting.

[1] http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/dobbie_fryer_re...
Bottom of page 2, top of page 3.
1) Two minutes isn't a good sample size

2) Try to actually sign up for a healthcare plan
Real world php PaaS supporting file system ftp & git
You could even include some people who do have wealth since it will get canceled out by those who have negative wealth.
22 Things I’ve Learned as a Digital Nomad
Saddened to see a high number of ColdFusion dislike votes. As a CFML developer who routinely bears the brunt of gleeful derision, allow me to point out what you're missing out on.

Yes, ColdFusion was a bit awful in its early days, but to be fair, it was pretty much the first of its breed, predating PHP, JSP, and ASP.

Modern CFML is a JVM-native language and framework that runs in a Java servlet engine. There are three first-class from-scratch implementations, two of which are fully open source. To cut a long story short, the best one is called Railo, and yes, it's one of the open source ones.

Modern CFML running on Railo is an awesome environment to work in: PHP-like hackability, native JVM performance, first-class java library integration, all on a 100% pure open source software stack. Think of it as JSP for genuinely rapid development.

I swear if Railo wasn't associated with the stigma of ColdFusion, it would be up there in the pantheon of fashionable web languages. It's Groovy with batteries included. It's Ruby On Rails for people who wish their code ran faster and realise that ORMs are inherently stupid. (Or there's Hibernate integration for those who haven't realised this yet.)
None of the ideas in YYY are new. It's a mundane and vulgar rehash of things we already had in the ZZZ in 80s but done badly. OK, so the world's largest sites run YYY -- that's pure luck, not science. Or the fault corporate HR drones that don't know better asking for YYY skills. Or a massive conspiracy. Or maybe programmers just are dumber now than 10 years ago.

How can YYY even be taken seriously when not supporting homobubonic retroviral proto-smurfs? In fact, I've just written a nice tutorial on smurfs in ZZZ and how smurfs are just like smurfs -- once you are past that, writing a complex application like a "20 questions" game should not be a problem.

Don't get me started on dynamic versus static smurfing!
It cost 55.7 to launch the site, the six hundred million dollar number is the total of all their contracts.
If you have $100K in debt, you have "more" than 20 people with $10K each in debt combined.
Valve Confirms Official AMD-Powered Steam Machines For 2014
dragged drop about 100 images. killed it.
Forgive my ignorance, but I inherited a wad of xslt fairly recently, and it seems frustrating and verbose to me.

What do you like about it? Can you point me to some examples of good code?
The problem, in your own words, is your present psychological state.

Irrespective of whether you give the speech, you should see a psychologist or a psychiatrist as soon as possible. There is no substitute for having an experienced, rational, objective and trusted person working with you to resolve your concerns.

The thought of confiding in an expert like that may be a source of discomfort for you. It is reasonable and natural for you to want to try to resolve your concerns on your own. But you say that you were unable to leave your house for a period of some five months. On any rational view, the time for self-help remedies is long past. You need to have this resolved if you are to get on with your life. Don't question it: just do it.

If you do it soon, you may find that you are in the same position that many other first-time public speakers have found themselves in, with the result that there are plenty of well-worn strategies available to you to tackle the speech you've been asked to give.

But you need to divide and conquer: solve the other problem first.
If that is your point, than you really failed to support it. Obviously you can do stuff in PHP. You could have done all that stuff in any scripting language. The closest thing to a benefit you listed was "we already had PHP installed on a server". If that is your best sales pitch, you should stop trying to sell it and let others take on that role.
Global warming gives the impression that you will have warming everywhere all the time. In humanly understandable terms it is better to talk about climate change, as global warming give a number of other effects. Such as wider variability of weather (stronger storms, longer dry spells, more precipitation etc). So climate change is a better description of what people can expect to see around them.
Do you have more concrete examples of "pattern oriented solutions" that exist in Java and not in C#? Are you trying to say that C# is so expressive that it doesn't need, for instance, factories?
Google App Engine simplifies iOS backend development
> There was a warrant, but he wanted to charge $3.5k for the effort. I don't know how I feel about that.

How would you feel if the police/FBI came to you with a warrant that requested all video footage from outside your home so they could spy on your neighbor's comings and goings. Oh, and by the way, you don't have a security camera system, and they aren't going to reimburse you to install one. If you do not produce video evidence, you are then disobeying the warrant and are in contempt of court.

Lavabit's system was not designed to listen in to one persons communications. It would cost money to implement that system. He requested he be compensated for his effort ($3500 is a piddly amount of money anyways), and they came back and said that was too much effort, so they'll take the entire thing. Back to the analogy, should the cops/FBI be able to possess your home in order to spy on your neighbor because you don't have a security system installed?
I never realised this was their marketing tools. I was wondering why they were normally sent at totally random times.

Time to unsubscribe / put to spam folder methinks.
A Macbook Air running GNU/Linux isn't a hackintosh.

Why defend it? I made the film.
> So, Gladwell promises that our alleged misunderstanding has “consequences for everything from the way we educate our children to the way we fight crime and disorder”. Consequences for everything! That is the hard sell, the first free rock of intellectual crack.

> The examples of “everything” include basketball coaching, policing, university science, Martin Luther King, and the Impressionists. (The waft of luxury art-history tourism in the Impressionists sequence is only the most obvious example of how Gladwell is now the non-fiction equivalent of Dan Brown.) The promise that such heterogeneous matter can be governed by one or two big ideas and understood through them constitutes the main attraction of the Gladwellian literary genre. Armed with these “ideas”, you won’t have to think for yourself ever again.

Ouch.
I was going to disagree due to the Tmobile-MetroPCS merger, but it looks like Tmobile was just looking to pick up the spectrum and are phasing out CDMA within it. http://bgr.com/2013/06/17/t-mobile-metropcs-merger-cdma-migr...
I'd love to see Objective-Smalltalk become reality: http://objective.st/
Extra fun side notes:

While holding a technical discussion about current tasking with a coworker in a "hallway meeting" our boss's boss and the gov-manager-who-signed-the-contract walked by. I was later reprimanded for chit chatting too much instead of working.

Another issue, due to some contract specifics and my life situation I was able to decline healthcare coverage from my employer and I received that in salary compensation instead (had coverage through my wife). I was up for a raise/promotion due to 'time served' but that title meant they needed me on a different project/contract, so the healthcare compensation the government was paying my employer changed and trickle down effect meant I didn't get that anymore. I got a $10k/year 'raise' but lost my [substantial] healthcare compensation. I lost money per paycheck by getting a promotion. When I showed my boss he was like "oh, sorry about that but we can't do anything about it", I turned in my two weeks notice on the spot, thus concluding my life as a government contractor.
> its CFML, NOT ColdFusion

And this isn't some academic or semantic point -- the best implementation of CFML isn't even ColdFusion.
Like hmmm... Java and Javascript?
Amazon collects sales tax here in Texas and it hasn't changed my buying habits at all as far as I can tell.
A table saw doesn't try to disguise its blade as the stop button...

My favorite bug to date? Uninitialized variables being interpreted as strings. That's the one I get to debug for clients on a regular basis. "Why can't I make this DB connection?" "Because you forgot to initialize the variable containing the database name."
Used WPF a couple of times, not that bad at all? What exactly do you think can be improved? Are there alternatives to it?