skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that paypal's automated communication is bunk, but I don't know if monthly statements are artifacts of the paper world.

Anything where I have a regular bill due every month, I'm going to appreciate a monthly statement -- probably an electronic one of some kind. Right?

You know my favorite monthly statement? Every month I get an SMS message from AT&T "A $XX.yy bill is due. Reply with '1' to pay from credit card ending NNNN." WOOT! THAT's a monthly statement for the modern world.

But really, any business I have an ongoing relationship with them where i periodically need to pay them, I'm going to appreciate a monthly update on what I owe them, sometimes over email. (I'm not going to appreciate a poorly done marketting brochure for things I don't want disguised as a monthly statement)
Seems like this would make for a great model for long endurance UAVs
I believe they will work in most of the EU for carriers like Vodafone, but you may have to pay roaming. You can also get roaming packages from some of the carriers such as Alditalk
http://www.alditalk.de/web/internet-prepaid-tarif/eu_interne...
It wasn't great, but it's not like there were many good alternatives in 1998...
Right-o. The trick is to "read" it like pseudocode, or like English-ish.

Log the inspected value.

Save the model, then
Update the UI with the attributes.

Scale the rectangle by (the height times the factor).

The big syntactic difference still being the "model.save" vs "save the model" ordering of dot-notation. But them's the breaks.
The zine archive is excellent, thanks. I may have a few to contribute after I spend some time digging through my files.

This site is somehow affiliated with ANUS? It doesn't seem to bear their characteristic writing style or ideological bent.
According to last sentence of [1], $90 went to CGI.

[1] http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/10/09/3-million-obamacare-w...
I like C#, and I think that it's an objectively well-designed language given its designers' priorities. But if you have different priorities, there's plenty to dislike. If you want a scripting language, or a really expressive type system, or raw-metal performance, then C#'s not going to scratch your itch.
And honestly, VB6 and VB.Net both get a bad rap. VB6 excelled at what it was designed to do, it was an easy-to-use language that was the fastest way to get a GUI up onto the screen and throw together a simple program. I learned on VB4 and it was great. It was the whole COM thing and the serious enterprise perversions of it that ruined the language.

VBA and VBScript, on the other hand, are abominations - the lack of an exception system is excruciating.

VB.Net is basically a few #Defines away from C# and has most of the nice functional features of C# they added in .NET 4.0. It's easy to read and powerful. Plus, the "Handles" keyword makes coding event-driven OOP objects quite pleasant.

My only problems with VB are the non-short-circuiting Boolean operators (so you have to write AndAlso and OrElse for short-circuit instead of And and Or), the bizarre +1 array sizing (but you should be using lists instead of arrays anyways so it doesn't matter) and the anachronistic Dim keyword. Even the option-strict thing makes sense because there are some cases where static typing is excruciating if you're just hacking something out - "oh crap, I have to use this terrible .net 1.1 library that predates generics, either I have to write a zillion typecasts or I can just go with dynamic typing".
The point is that the opinion of someone who has used a language and platform is of inherently more value when judging said platform than the opinion of someone who is coming from a position of total ignorance. In this sense your statement is a logical fallacy.
Can you share any insight into what went wrong?
Efficient communication is key to this. I think that time is precious especially when you're doing a startup (e.g. me).

The less distractions and more streamlined your process are, the more time you save to be able to do other work.
The USERNAME rules are even weirder (and the site's not working correctly now so I can't copy them, but here's a photo: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151690783318733&se...)
"Assembly"? For what platform? I could care less about AT&T, I've learned to live with Intel, and I'm interested in ARM. It's rosy to think that I like 6502 but it's not the best. What does it even mean to, "like," one of these, "languages?"

I've only learned various assemblers by way of necessity writing compiler backends (usually in my spare time for fun... I don't even know these platforms well enough to write a serious production-grade backend with optimizations). Some I find easier to work with than others... but how can you, "like," one over another? I find assembly to be rather devoid of any characteristic that I find interesting or emotionally endearing.

It's easier to attach an emotional context to a programming language these days by proxy; I think most programmers simply associate with the culture that develops around a language. But there was an era when a programming language was just a manual and all you had was a compiler. There wasn't anything particularly interesting about using one over another beyond perhaps what they were capable of from a technical perspective.

So what does it mean to, "like," a language? Do you find it technically superior relative to all others? Is there some socially accepted criterion I am unaware of by which we measure how we feel about a language?

People are strange.
Yep, that's why I submitted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6526487 as soon as I saw it, I didn't see that one. It is Ladar Levison himself saying that GoDaddy did the revokation, not him.
I actually wrote an essay about this few months ago, Android was indeed one of my major points: https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/da3b2c180e9c (Why Java Is Still Relevant)
Intersting.

But to be picky, let's note that "manually initiated the lazy load" -- there's nothing "lazy" about that load, heh. The "lazy" part specifically means "on-demand, as asked for, automatically."

In ActiveRecord, you can quite easily set 'eager loading', which is setting certain loads to batch for efficiency, like you're talking about -- and this can apply to lazy loads (when you lazy load X, ALSO load y and z together, in as few SQL statements as possible), OR to manual loads (right NOW, load x, y, and z together in as few loads as possible). But AR doesn't let you turn off lazy loads, ha.
In that case you could use flapping certificates as a dead man's switch.
Ben Krasnow, a Valve mechanical/electrical engineer. He has some amazing side projects and he documents every step of the process.

YT: http://www.youtube.com/user/bkraz333 | Blog: http://benkrasnow.blogspot.ca/
Java has some similarities to every programming language including COBOL but it's also totally different.

Java is used by a lot of extremely productive programmers and some brilliant apps are written in it.
ActionScript is a terrible language with its pseudo static typing.
I like and dislike them all pretty equally. They all have their ups and downs, some more than others, but I've never completed liked one or not with no strings attached.
The issue is just a larger-scale version of a common social problem I constantly see on blog discussions:

Critics demand encyclopedic thoroughness for what is little more than brief casual conversation.

Someone writes a pithy & insightful blog post (a la HN). It fits a convenient size suitable for the medium (1-10 paragraphs). Rather than responding to the substantive point of the post, critics nit-pick some obscure point which the author glossed over precisely because more detail runs at odds to the medium. To wit: the criticism amounts to demands for peer-reviewed scientific process with rock-solid presentation & references, when said critic would in no way actually read such material.

Gladwell's (and many other writers', ex.: 1491 and A History Of The World In Six Glasses) works are like this. The books are not weighty tomes, they are not peer-reviewed, they are not scientific papers with rigorous analysis of the material. They are lightweight overviews of interesting insights, appealing to many people (enough so that some expend energy loudly criticizing the works), and providing launching points for those so motivated to further pursue the subject (such as the would-be pro golfer testing the "10,000 hours" theory by actually doing it). If Gladwell et al wrote books the way critics demand, critics (and pretty much everyone else) would never bother reading them.

"the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so." - Ratatouille
Do you fill out time cards with hourly sort of precision? Do you have to fill in exactly 40 hours, no matter what? (Yes, I've worked for federal contractors before in the dozen years I spent Inside the Beltway.)

As for cronyism, who's to say you got those other site honestly?

Not saying you didn't, just that you're not citing any evidence. I can: I'm disabled and therefore on Medicare since 2007, and use medicare.gov to both handle Part D annual prescription plan selection and signup, and to check Part B claims. Aside from companies sometimes lying through their teeth about the costs for various drugs (well, it looks like that), I have no complaints besides the site being a little clunky. It gets the job done and has never shown any signs of buckling under load.
I was actually expecting the HN crowd to hate Java more than PHP. But it was close!

143 dislikes for COBOL? Call me cynical but I'll bet most of those votes came from people who have never been near a green screen.
Québécois here. CGI are experts at complying on governmental project requirements and then obscenely inflating costs. I am not surprised they succeed in the US too.
The problem is that sometimes what you write in CS results in surprising and/or incorrect JS.

This can be caused by an unnoticed block of whitespace, corner case of CS language itself, or me simply screwing something up.

About 5-10% of the time I hit a WTF in CS, which is, for now, an acceptable trade off vs. using pure boilerplate ridden JS.

If there was a concise TypeScript a la Scala for Java, I'd be all over it.
Curious about all the Go dislikes. From the kind of things that get posted here I'd have assumed it to be almost universally liked. Anybody can provide reasons?
It is them. See the link in my response to crb above.
Based on the numbers that I see, JavaScript is disliked more than ActionScript. When you take into account people's general dislike for anything flash related and how few people know anything about the language I think it did ok. What would be interesting would be to see a poll of the different versions of ECMAScript proposals and see what the public thinks of the real language differences between each. Classes are coming and structs are proposed and many of the things that ActionScript has had for a while are also leaking into JavaScript like rest arguments, and proxy objects. Overall I think ES6 is clearer and more flexible and I'm cool with omitting types unless you are doing things like types arrays and so on. ActionScript will go away over time and over time JavaScript environments will catch up even if they are still way behind in many respects today.
What it's like receiving the Nobel Prize phone call
>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.

You may be correct, but arguing that "because we generally get these contracts, we were an obvious choice" does little to defuse assertions of cronyism.
Funny, I'd say I like functional programming... and yet I disliked all the functional and/or lisp-like languages that are the bees knees these days... Scala, Scheme, Clojure, Haskell, F#, ... All of them have neat sides, but I'm not really productive in any of them.

There are things like too-clever type systems that get into your way, instead of catching errors. Constness can be silly in C++ if you are not careful, but that's nothing against the situation in e.g. Haskell.

Then there is type inference, which really scares me. When I write (in pseudocode):

fun add(a, b) { return a + b; }

the meaning can change depending on how this is called at a different place in my code (e.g. with strings or ints as arguments). On the one hand, this confuses me - if there is a conflict, it can be incredibly hard to debug. On the other hand, the compiler can get confused. If I call add(get_number(x), get_number(y)), I know that a and b are going to be ints, but the compiler might be unable to infer this, depending on how complex get_number is. Type inference is magic, and IMHO often not worth the saved keystrokes. I'd rather have my language use a Variant type when no type is specified (and sure, when it can infer the type, use it as an optimization).
There needs to be some way to differentiate people that hate a language for some external reason (anti-MS, anti-Apple, anti-Flash) or those who hate it from having used it. I suspect Java has more dislikes from actual users, where Actionscript and Perl get their dislikes from people who have never gone full time in either language.
This map of death metal bands per capita surely helps explain the similarity:
http://i.imgur.com/P5Yfz.png
VBA and VBScript (iirc) have only On Error Resume Next, while VB6 has On Error Goto. This is a tremendous difference in how you structure your program's error handling.
Like afandian, I'm a little fuzzy on the particulars of my gut reaction. But it's something along the lines of this: that BDD, or TDD, or test-oriented-development-practice-X didn't emerge from the ecosystems of dynamically-typed languages by accident. Those languages lack an entire class of verification that statically typed languages have by default, and which is actually important. So their practitioners abide tools, idioms, and practices to make up for that deficiency.

Those things aren't all bad, and _some_ of their lessons can be successfully "ported" to languages and ecosystems that don't suffer the same fundamental shortcomings as e.g. Ruby or Python. But when I see developers take e.g. the BDD ethos as axiomatic and just run with it, it makes me feel like they don't really understand what BDD is designed to address. Likewise with hyper-expressive testing DSLs, or the concept of "mocking" as it's normally used.

Forgive the loaded language, but bringing BDD et. al. to languages like Go feels, to me, like cargo-cult development.
"You need static typing to have Java-like tools"

This is a widely repeated myth. Static typing does enable a few additional autocomplete capabilities, but most of the other things you probably think of as fancy IDE features are completely possible for dynamic languages.

For example, using Common Lisp with emacs and SLIME, I have:

Function/method name completion, Variable name completion, Jump to definition, Show callers, Rename (heuristic, but usually better than static analysis), Extract method, All sorts of interactive debugging capabilities, Documentation lookup, and Numerous compile-time static analysis checks including type errors!
Hospital death rates are 45% higher in English hospitals than US hospitals.

http://www.nhs.uk/news/2013/09September/Pages/death-risk-muc...
Wealth statistics are tricky. As a thought experiment, I have always wondered what the numbers would be if everyone in the country had identical incomes of $50k/year. I have a feeling that 25% would accumulate debts and have zero total wealth. Even with perfectly identical incomes, the "wealthiest" person would have more wealth than the bottom 25% combined.
I was clear enough in my opinion. I don't think it's an issue related to the programming language but how the community works. As ern said there are people in the .NET following this approach with stuff like the entity framework.

For further information you can read: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PatternAbuse
I don't think you should mix "substantial change in personality from high school" with "living on campus". There are probably millions of college students who live on campus for four years and make very little change from high school. And there are millions of commuters who do. And there are many people who don't attend college at all who change. Etc. There is not one path toward personal growth.

I'd say more than anything else, focus on making real friends, and hit that hard. It doesn't matter what the manner is that you encounter them; one of my best friends from one era of my life I met because he got food at the job I worked at. Others were from classes. Reach out to people whenever you can, and see if you can take a genuine interest in them.
I'll email you if I want. Just don't reply.
Well, now that the certificate has been revoked, it's too late for the FBI to do anything: either users saw that the certificate has been revoked, or they didn't yet but if a new certificate is installed they will see that it's a new one with a different fingerprint (at least their browser should warn them of that).
All true, but the image of being hit by something is oh-so much more arresting than that of gradual, inevitable change ending life as we know it. Decades of dire warnings have done nothing to capture the public's mind on this important issue. If cooking up a sensational metric does the trick then why not?
The Tim Ferriss Blog Method | JaysonFeltner.com
combined?
As a Canadian, I don't have any affection for CGI. But I would point out that this goes both ways: Just yesterday a peace activist in Canada was acquitted for not participating in the Census because she objected to the use of back-end systems from Lockheed Martin. (Never mind that the Census is no longer mandatory...)

Our nations do have a free trade agreement in place, which on the whole I would say has benefited both sides. Patriotism aside, 'buy American' policies do not help with these partnerships.
It reminded me of this history of the Congo, particularly the more recent stuff like the 100 Million dollar palace in the remote Jungle with a runway built specifically for Concorde, which was used for shopping trips to Paris:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24396390
Right now one of my side projects involves F# on Mono.

I write in Visual Studio, which I own, I deploy to Mono, which is free, and I have access to all the MS libraries over in linux, which are also free.

What's there to support? Do I really need version 7.0 of F# with the neuro-cranial implants? Or do I need just to write solutions for people?

F# is a great transition language from OOP/Imperative-land. You can write code the old way, the new way, purely functional, or in a hybrid fashion. I don't think we require much MS support for it to continue to fulfill that role.

Now if you're deploying to windows, that could be another kettle of fish. But I don't do that anymore.
Thought it was uuencode or yenc.
I have like 5 things from Ikea... and this is done of them. Damn.
Right - because inefficiency in government programs is a purely American thing.

We have affordable, universal health care because we've eliminated all forms of waste & corruption from our governments, and are left with a stream-lined, Indy 500 car pit type system.

I don't think so.

Get off it already - America doesn't have a decent health care system because insurance companies pay off corrupt congressmen to make sure you don't have one.
My fault. It was a rhetorical question. I completely agree. Respect all involved.
> then I looked up examples on Wikipedia. Good God.

The examples on Wikipedia don't do it justice. Modern CFML is written largely in C-style script form, much like JavaScript in feel.

The examples you see on Wikipedia is programming within the old language form now (mostly) reserved for templating.
I would assume the NSA has a variety of backdoors they do not share with other law enforcement agencies.

It was actually surprising to me that they shared ANY of them.

This is how intelligence agencies work -- they want to keep it a secret what they can crack, so the adversary will keep on using it, and they can keep on cracking it. For intelligence purposes.

Intelligence is different from law enforcement. Or at least, it used to be. In the US, theoretically the constitution means you can't use secret evidence against someone in court. But of course you can use secretly gathered intelligence for polticial/military/geopolitical purposes. The merging of intelligence and law enforcement is not unrelated to the push to keep more and more legal proceedings secret -- a significant threat to the constitution.
Thankfully the compiler is open source and there's a thriving community outside of Microsoft (see http://fsharp.org), so this shouldn't be a big worry. And Microsoft hasn't shown a lack of commitment thus far (in fact, with the Visual Studio 2013 release F# gets new features but C# doesn't, as I recall).
As someone who has only associated cold fusion with people laughing, thanks. I'll be sure to look into as an option before I start my next side project.
Wow. This ruined some of my ambitions, but thank you for the warning and stories.
It's also probably why we read sites like HN, so we can feel like we know something others don't... or know something before others.
Don't use F# but up voted it nonetheless, for TypeProviders alone (waiting for it in Scala...for @2 years now)
Apparently yes, the police have commandeered a home to spy on the neighbors. https://www.courthousenews.com/2013/07/03/59061.htm
I actually hate it because it's not flexible enough. I did a few years of PHP dev and maintenance after learning and using Perl first. There's enough superficial similarities that it really makes the warts stand out. Every time I wanted to simply use a map, grep, anonymous function, or multiple items returned from a function, I was reminded of how much better it could have been if a bit more forethought was put into it.
GoDaddy gets a lot of nerd hate (for good reason). However, they also market a lot which = mainstream dollars. They're the number one domain registrar with 32% of the market. The second largest is Enom with 8%. Source: http://www.webhosting.info/registrars/top-registrars/global/
Pff this is total bs. Most people who dislike PHP actually started doing webdev using php.
Creating Tinder like animations with CSS
I consider $10 with a $10 discount (applied before payment) "free". I ordered straight through T-Mobile's web site. Yes, I may have actually paid some amount under a dollar, and no, I didn't pay more than a dollar. I'm still willing to call it "free".
SICP has a great chapter with an example of how to modularize an entangled code:

Chapter 2.2.3: Sequences as Conventional Interfaces,

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-15.html...

"The value of expressing programs as sequence operations is that this helps us make program designs that are modular, that is, designs that are constructed by combining relatively independent pieces."
Not 3G, EDGE.
Robots Should Play Football - Not Humans
My opinion is that it ended up causing more problems than it fixed. In theory is nice and beautiful, but once you start using for large projects you notice that it kills readability and introduces some other small problems.
You're half-right. The label was changed because AGW (Anthropogenic global warming) is going to have more effects in more places than just a rising of temperature by a few degrees. Some places it's going to cool, some places it's going to screw with the weather.

Where you go completely into tinfoil hat idiocy is when you call revising a label to fit data "public manipulation". It's just good science.