skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of the language, not the libraries or tooling.

A language is much more than just syntax.

With mono, one ends up writing C# code similar to C and C++, with #ifdefs, or having to search for .NET libraries that are cross platform.
Stack ranking sounds a lot worse than other people doubting you.
I agree about Java and .NET, but I haven't seen a Delphi job advertised in ages.

Also, I wonder if you are being a bit harsh about us being "extremely slow" to adapt to new trends, but that's just personal experience -maybe I've been lucky.

I've worked with vendors and clients from Europe and UK, and we seem to be able to keep up fine with them. I also know SA programmers who are doing fine in Australia. There's a lot of legacy crap that needs looking after, but that's a problem all over the world.
Being discussed for Java 9 and already available on IBM J9 JVM.

http://www.slideshare.net/mmitran/ibm-java-packed-objects-mm...
There are some excellent books by Harry Lorayne that are still available. I got my fix in this department some 30+ years ago in high school. Great stuff.
There's nothing fundamentally simple when you realize that the POS system is just one of the many front-ends for the store's inventory management, sales and cost reporting, barcoding and label printing, purchasing and tax accounting software. If you ever have a chance to help open a new retail store and actually see all the moving parts, you might want to take it, as you'll learn why POS software isn't as simple as it looks, and why the affordable ones are limited to small single-store establishments in specific industries.

Just handling taxes in a piece of software meant to be used in multiple locations can be hideously complex, and that's just 1% of what the system is responsible for. Remember that not only do the tax rates differ from one half of a town to the next, but what items are taxable do too.
They should have known or been monitoring the situation, especially after Apple's findings/blight. Ignorance on how your multi-billion dollar flagship home entertainment product is produced sounds like someone who should be out of a job.
Amazon’s search powered by a Italian restaurant?
Isn't that the same as random? i.e. no real preference?
So what would you trust your life to? If you are a dissident, what products and procedures would security professionals suggest?

They'd be hard pressed to recommend any off-the-shelf products or practices right now? Because PKI is in shreds, nobody trusts trucrpyt, and TOR users have been rooted left right and centre recently.
I love named arguments. I wish my programming language of choice had them.
And bad developers using those libraries.
The author says roughly "I helped many kids raise their IQ"; there is nothing novel about that, it is well established that intervention has large effects on IQ in children, but most of those effects have disappeared by the time they are 18.
I can attest to the after school thing. It was basically impossible for me to do any after school clubs or activities because my parents couldn't afford a house in walking distance to the high school, and they had to work and couldn't come home before 7 PM.

It's rigged, but only in the short term.
More like a collection of footpaths that become more accessible with use.
Remember what it was like back in the 80s before there were chairs?
Do you really think that professors want to send their students to work?

Same stuff happens in Uzbekistan (only with Cotton). If teachers and professors don't send their students to work during semester, the professors will lose their jobs.

Note that this unlawful child labor happens on the local level. The central government fights it but the minute the Capital turns a blind eye, the local government starts sending directions to local schools and universities.

Teachers and professors make way more money by tutoring. Wasting time in the factory or on the fields hits them financially but teachers have to comply if they value their jobs.
like Mike Daisey when pretended his stuff was fact?
Why forums are a bad tool for customer support
I don't believe in aid or charity in the "give away something in return for a tingly sensation of benevolence" sense. That accomplishes nothing, it increases corruption and lets the donor off with the impression that they've accomplished something that they haven't.

That said, there're some who make it work. The names escape me (it was long ago) but I've always been impressed with the work of some of the missionaries in the region - they're actually on the ground effecting change and helping people. From what I've seen they tend to avoid unilateral donation/collections, but go in for the specifics. For instance, the school I installed the 30 desks at, they donated virtually all the classroom equipment and props along with an instructor to help local teachers integrate the new material into their classes. As I understand it the financing for all that came from donations through collections in their churches. Now whilst I'm an atheist, that impressed me. The peacecorps too, I've met a lot of them and their hearts are definitely in the right place.
The other problem is what I call greppability.

If I can't grep the header files/source code for a function call I will want to hurt you badly. Especially if a function call is hidden behind 6 - 7 different macro indirections!

/me glares over at OpenSSL...
As someone with depression, lack of sleep is pretty much a symptom.
I've heard that attitude echoed by a few small business owners. Especially coffee shops.
Snowden's father arrives in Russia
Find a good set of audio tracks (I like bodhipaksa, but there are many) and set aside some time.

Even if it doesn't seem to have much effect on the first try, keep going, it takes time to learn.

The key is that you're learning a new skill, like running, catching a ball, or riding a bike. When you learn those sorts of things you create a mostly sub-conscious mental association between certain triggers and the response to them. When you learn to meditate you create an association between some sort of trigger and a state of relaxation. The trigger can be anything, often people use a combination of posture and some sort of chant to help. For myself it tends to be some combo of breathing out and relaxing my shoulders.

You can use the same technique to tap into other mental states but it may be more difficult.
I got into developing POS / retail management solutions in 2004 and founded GoFrugal Technologies. When I started, it did seem like a low hanging fruit, ripe and just waiting to be consumed

Close to 10 years and after engaging with 200,000+ retailers across India and with 20,000+ customers in about 20 different types of retail businesses - I have started appreciating the complexities of retail

The simple reasons why POS solutions are struggling to catch up fast with the times are
1. All retailers have the freedom to innovate at the front-end & there are many others who push down innovation at the front-end to the retailers : either because their customers are demanding or because the banks, technology vendors, government and competitors are constantly pushing the retailers to introduce change at the front end
2. Retailers want to service demand - come what may. The manufacturers continue to innovate on packaging, pricing, promotions etc. and no one waits for the retailer's system to be ready to handle these changes
3. Retailers have to keep the cost per transaction as low as possible to earn a profit. This, combined with the fact that retail is different every 100 miles, makes it hard to build a universal retail solution

I hope this explains why POS in most cases continues to be pain point for both retailers and consumers
I can't view the page. Is it inspired by this:
http://xkcd.com/1133/
>> I type "cmd-J, fori, return."

There's no need for Cmd-J, just write a few characters and press TAB. Try "sout"<TAB>, "psvm"<TAB>, "iter"<TAB>, "itli"<TAB>, and so on.
What's worse than working for Microsoft is ... being a shill for Microsoft.

In a weird way, minus the "but really we're great" part, it must be hell to spend your life touting Microsoft when they are so hated. Because in these networked days, a PR person can't go home and tell their friends "they suck, I just work there" because things get around much more quickly.
So in other words, they make chairs, despite being forced to use awful, expensive software? I, too, thought this.

Actually, this puts a whole new perspective on the "Microsoft tax". Everything we do in life has been "taxed" by Microsoft. The argument is specious: you could be sitting on a chair that was sold for less money. You might be working in a more spacious building if better software was in use. You'd probably be paid more money if the costs for IT weren't so high.

Note I don't actually believe any of those things, but they could be valid counter arguments, depending on your own perspective.

The reasoning used in the article is pretty badly flawed. If Microsoft employees are disheartened by the general public's view of their company, that's probably something their management should fix.
> If the gov't didn't have its hand in this space for so long, there would be no massive AT&T

I didn't expect to see revisionism in here, let alone of such magnitude.

Without government intervention, there would be no AT&T, nor would there be alternate carriers. There would only be Ma Bell.

And don't bullshitting about Ma Bell's regulated monopoly, the regulation was put in place because Bell was already a monopoly by the time 1934 rolled around.
The people you mention came before the theory of evolution. I doubt any of them would be believers if they had that info.
Some Ruby specific tips:

Go through the last 2 years of Railscasts videos. (purchase a subscription to get all of them; not sure it's taking new signups right now though)

Sign up for RubyTapas. Five minute videos, 3 times a week, but most of them are ninja tips.

CodeSchool - some of the advanced Ruby courses are challenging, and get into some of the minutiae that you don't see in basic Rails apps.

Build stuff! Not fake apps, but apps that do things. Maybe an app to scrape HN and hit you up on SMS when your favorite authors post. An app to schedule volunteer hours for your church or other favorite organization. Etc. The act of building real apps will force you to learn some of the finer points of the language.

Make those apps open source, then connect them up to Code Climate. (free for OSS) Going through the process of increasing your code's GPA will help you improve.

Read Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz.
The cold reality is that some people do "get it" faster. Programming is a prime example of activities that reward highly intelligent people.

But I think programming is fair. It's fair in a sense that if you work hard, there will be a notable return of becoming a better programmer. Read more code and write more code. You will get better.
> The JVM compiler compiles for the JVM, which is written in C

This is absurd.

First of all, there isn't one JVM. There are dozens to chose from, many of them certified. Each implemented in whatever language their designers have chosen.

Some JVMs are meta-circular, meaning they are also written in Java. For example, Squawk, Maxime, Jikes RVM.

Second, even if you mean Oracle's JVM, the embedded version is not the same as the desktop/server one, one uses C the other C++.

Not to mention that after Java 8's release, Hotspot might be replaced by Graal, the new JIT compiler written in Java as well.

Currently being developed and already in use by AMD for their Java/GPGPU work.
Great game. I'm always excited to see polished <canvas> games.
I think you're forgetting that when the software systems powering manufacturing, ambulances, etc. was first being deployed MS was the best solution out there. The problem was that corporations didn't upgrade their tools and MS was forced to support aging, obsolete, and insecure technology. They didn't innovate for several years, and we're now seeing the market correct itself as businesses turn towards Linux powered solutions which seem to reside in the cloud.

As far as MS lying about Bing, if you read the author's other post defending the Bing it on Challenge, he rebukes Ayres point-by-point.
"I haven't read the book"

But hey lets get some pageviews anyway right?
I run our Bing for Schools program. It gets hardware in the hands of kids, teaches them digital literacy skills, and creates a safe environment for them to practice in

Yeah, all altruistic no doubt.
Are they sure it's a planet.
Could be a large spaceship
isn't "we" in the title a bit US-centric? (realize it's the original page's title, but probably deserves an edit when submitted to an external site like HN)

edit: original title of submission was "Who we owe"
Between writing less code with a text editor and writing loads of verbose code with a powerfull IDE i'd chose the former. How much text processing would you write in Java vs Python/Ruby ? This is a no brainer for me. Dynamic languages have their advantages,though i find Scala to be a good compromise.
I have been using IDEs since the mid-90's, that is my feeling every time I see anyone coding as if UNIX System V was the latest version available.
Spoiler Alert: They ain't "cheap" or "the cheapest"
Although not a close up, it's actually visible in the rider's hand on the article's 4th photo.
You mean like brightpod.com :)
Interesting side note is Jack made the game for the js13kGames competition (and won). The entire codebase is less than 13kb compressed.

He won last year with http://spacepi.clay.io
That’s right. The worst part of working
at Microsoft has nothing to do with our
internal culture (that’s not quite true;
more on that in a bit). It isn’t stack
ranking or ship cycles or trying to get
things done. It is working at a company
that people don’t believe in, despite
the immense importance it plays in
their daily life.

Uh, no. It's the politics, and the stack ranking, and the interminably long ship cycles, and the typical unwillingness to even consider a market unless someone else has proven that it's a billion dollar business. And especially the politics and the stack ranking. They're absolutely toxic.

n.b. I haven't worked there in six years (and in fact the ten year anniversary of my FTE interview was this week!), but my feelings on the matter have been confirmed in every conversation I've ever had with an ex-MSFT FTE. Call it survivorship bias if you want, but this has been consistent in every conversation I've had, regardless if the person left a year ago or five.

edit: and the in-fighting. and the backbiting... but I guess those are just politics by another name.
Welcome to the OpenEEG project
Let me guess: you consider yourself a highly intelligent person.
Madre Australiana saca a su hijos del colegio cuando instalan el sistema wifi
How to create your first iphone App
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There are a bunch of books that will help with all programming:
- Code Complete (Steve McConnell)
- Pragmatic Programmer
- Software Craftsmanship by Robert Martin
- Test-driven design by Kent Beck

But the way I have always learned most is working alongside people who were smarter than I am, with more experience, and enough patience to explain stuff that wasn't obvious. If that's not easy in the real world, try contributing to an open source project.
Meetup Surpasses 100,000,000 RSVPs…and Climbing Fast
I Can Read C++ and Java But I Can’t Read Smalltalk
> When you hear something bad about company X - especially when it smacks of "dirt", as this does - do you then go and perform analysis on other similar companies, in an effort to re-balance your perspectives?

Well maybe some people don't have such a naive view of the world where they assume nobody is corrupt until it's slapped in their face (And even then). Some people can look at stories at this and not think "Hey fuck the PS4 for using forced labor, Ima buy a Xbox One instead".

> If all the dirt on political party A was laid bare in the public, but B managed to cover theirs up, it could swing an election. Do you care about that?

So you would argue in that case it would be better to see party A's actions covered up so that there would be a fairer playing field between the two?

> Availability of information is extremely important in the public discourse and closing your eyes to factors affecting it

But he isn't closing his eyes, he's got them wide open. He's just saying that he doesn't care who bringing him his info as long as it's factual.
Source citation please?
Did he at least see the cover, in order to judge it?
Good luck doing manual memory management in whatever language (C, Pascal, C++, ...) with distributed teams, using developers of disparate skill levels.

Hunting for memory leaks and pointers gone berserk will become someone's full time job.

I like C++, but don't miss using it in enterprise projects.
i pay 30$ for unlimited data and 100 min. damn good if u ask me, although a lot of dead zones (aka Edge only) in SF
That's exactly what it says. It's favicon is also an xkcd drawing.
That doesn't seem like a good fit. It wasn't a compiler problem, it wasn't dead code, and the problem wasn't skipping zeroing, it was too much zeroing!
I forgot the even more important thing I do on Reddit: I hang out on the LGBT section and comment supportively on people's coming out stories and pleas for advice and support.

The absolute best email I ever got, and one I will treasure is from a guy who read something I'd written on Reddit's LGBT section, clicked through and saw that I also am a programmer and big old nerdy nerd and was encouraged to come out to his parents. He told me that all the advice he'd seen online didn't speak to him precisely because it didn't come from people who were like him.
Foxconn is the company which manufactures iPhones, etc. If they're using forced labor for Sony products, they're probably using forced labor for Apple products as well.
"Once your phone has fastboot enabled, you will then be able to build and install new Firefox OS/B2G builds on it [...]".

Please, make ZTE to push updates or at least provide a binary build to download and install.
I'm a member- They are taking new signups, just billing for the first month and allowing the other months to be for free until he figures out if he is retiring or not. I will begin codeschool tomorrow. Thank you.
Yes of course I did a research :-) This is not an ad! I wanted to find the cheapest place possible that offered .io Ones I did, I thought HR users would like to know too ^_^
"You said you wanted to live in a world without Microsoft, Jimmy. Well, now your car has no battery!"
The ambulance that picks you up? Microsoft.

What a larf. Why did Forbes print this? No, man, Alcoa picked me up. And US Steel. And Con-Ed. And Exxon. And Starbucks! Oh, wait, the driver had Dunkin' Donuts. Whatever.
They didn't, the startup Android Inc was already using it.
C'mon, I left Slashdot to escape this sort of "Someone mentioned a moon, so I must make a Death Star joke" default.
I am not saying one should use it or not, or how it is strictly better than something else, just saying I can easily see _in theory_ how a jit compiler written in C can be faster than plain C.
sorry, the "/Apple" was because other comments mention Foxconn and Apple, and then it turns into a generalised rant about Apple because people love to hate them. My point was that what hooks us into the story is Sony and PS4, but the reality is that Sony are probably well removed from what's happening, and the real story is corruption between a university, foxconn and some local government.
It's an interesting idea, certainly. But reading the descriptions I can't help but feel that these ideas could be more easily explained using a less restricted vocabulary and still be accessible.

Jargon can make an explanation more eloquent as it does not have to be filled with contrived collections of less suitable words. If the jargon is explained before it is used it still can be readily understood.
Yeah, I'm a Railscasts member too, and know he extended existing members, but was too lazy to look up what that meant for new subs :-)
Not anymore ;-).
As everyone that has worked with any government knows taking money out of them is hard and slow and full of paper process. I think he was using it as a delay tactic, not as a personal enrichment scheme.

The color of the hat of the guy is unimportant - he could be wearing Walter White's fedora for all I care.

He shattered his business instead of betraying his own customers. At any point he could have just complied.

If you read between the lines - he obviously is trying to make money out of his business. He is not a freedom fighter or crypto anarchist. But he put his customers first.
Given the cnn.com domain name, I think it's pretty clear who "we" refers to.
Do you know any better ? In that case please share. This one is $39/year the cheapest I could find after doing research for a few days.
Malcolm Gladwell : non-fiction journalism :: Fox News : television journalism

It's entertaining fluff. If we become a society of fluffheads, that's okay, these things have a habit of correcting themselves.
I wonder what the chances are for orphan planets to wander into a solar system. I suppose that could wreak quite some havoc.
In the debian fiasco it's mostly a case of "manual code elimination" [1].

However there are plenty of examples of compilers aggressively removing code that causes undefined behaviour. Basically, when the compiler encounters UB, it can do whatever it wants to code that triggers the UB, which means possibly removing it. Compilers exploit this fact a lot because UBs happen a lot in "normal code". See here [2] for examples and explanations; I also can't help but mention John Regehr's blog [3] if you're interested in compilers, security, testing, safety.

[1] http://research.swtch.com/openssl

[2] http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-...

[3] http://blog.regehr.org/archives/213 is a great article for example.
What is the worst thing about working at Microsoft? My first guess is being forced to spend at least 8 hours a day developing on a windows machine.
In C99 it's possible to use compound literals to implement something like named parameters. You create a struct with all of your parameters, and only include the ones you want to set in the compound literal. Anything not explicitly specified in the compound literal gets set to 0, so the caveat is that 0 can't be a valid value for your parameters.
I wish the German T-Mobile mothership were as customer-friendly as the US operation.
When CRM Meets Pebble Watch
Ted Turner?