skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Confirming your second point, Indeed's job trends suggest that groovy has more jobs, and that it's growing faster: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=groovy%2Cscala%2Cclojure&#...

Caveat: some of these jobs might be talking about how groovy they are. On the first two pages of http://www.indeed.com/q-groovy-jobs.html there were 19 groovy-lang jobs and one false positive.
I'm really pleased to read this blog post. I went to JavaOne this year (free ticket, I wouldn't have paid or asked my employer to pay), and it was kind of depressing. I hadn't been there since the early 2000s, and there just wasn't much spirit in the room. I'm sure the down economy and Oracle takeover had people down a bit, but I also think "Java programmers" (meaning folks who do a lot of work in Java) no longer feel excited about the future. It's starting to feel like you're at a conference for legacy systems.

I got out of my funk by attending absolutely ever session on Scala I could find, and it really did lift my spirits (I swear I didn't intend the pun). I've been learning Ruby (and I'll stay on that path for a while), but the Scala talks gave me what I ultimately go to conferences for - the opportunity to get excited about the future again.
Or getting rid of assignment altogether?
Generally, the discussions are at least an order of magnitude more interesting than the articles themselves

dito!

I must admit that I've never used the RSS feed (that's partly because I'm not the big RSS reader type). I always get my daily portion of Hacker News directly from the homepage :)
The idea that Groovy attracts more people who are currently working in Java seems to mesh with my experience. Coming from very little experience with Java, I have a hard time choosing Groovy over something like Scala (or Clojure).

I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with Groovy. I don't personally care for it; but as far as I'm concerned the more languages the better when it comes to the JVM.
As someone whose business primarily consists of Flash-based web sites and development, I was initially disappointed by the initial lack of Flash support and subsequent delays.

Now, I couldn't care less. In fact, I'd probably prefer the iPhone didn't have Flash support. For what we do at least, rendering Flash on the iPhone would be a usability nightmare. It's not hard to detect a visitor using an iPhone and render a much friendlier version.
IE8 isn't terrible. I'm not planning to switch to it, but if I were already using it (say, I just bought a new Windows PC) I'm not sure I'd bother switching to something else either.

And hey, I'll gladly start using Bing if it spits out better results than Google
> For me, this is Haskell. Trying to write any decently large program (say, a Super Mario clone) causes brain hemorrhage.

Programming mostly in Haskell, I could say the same (brain hemorrhage) about imperative programming languages. There are just so damn (unnecessarily) hard to program in.
Ruby, used that way, is quite a functional language. I think you might find a lot of similarities to Scheme, which might make it easier to get in to. I know I did (although reversed .. I learned Scheme first).
Old and well-established enough that no-one is going to mistake it for a silver bullet.
Why Bing Is the Wrong Name
as long as the same story can't be submitted by 2 different people by submitting it into different catetgories
Here's one way to counter that argument: let's say you run a car manufacturer. You don't happen to know about the Kearns patent, but one day while driving home in an intermittent rainstorm, you find yourself wishing your wipers didn't have to run continuously. When you get to work the next day you stop by the engineering department and say "Hey, Joe, stick a 555 timer in that windshield relay circuit, would you?"

Five years and several million cars later, Kearns jumps out of the bushes and whacks you in the kneecap with a lawsuit. What should your penalty be? Do you agree with the judge that you owe some guy $10,000,000 for a trivial idea that he happened to have before you did?
I agree that he is not a mathematica expert but to be one is a pain, the documentation while good is a pain in the ass to navigate and why in the world with so many functions is there no tab completion.

Most of the naming seems to be okay in matlab but sometimes it would be nice if you could tab and see a list of matches.

and I much prefer matlabs: 'help [function]' to the output of '??[Function]'
JS based:

* Can record java version, flash version, other plugin info
* Can record screen size, browser window size, color space
* Can detect and record ad block presence

etc

Both have their uses.
You are not alone. By my data, 1 in 5 gov't employees or contractors is stuck on IE6.
I think this comes up enough that we should have some sort of FAHN: Frequently Ask(ed) Hacker News.

That said. Scheme with SICP, or The Little Schemer and then SICP
I use HN to find the two things that most aggregate sites don't provide.
Thought provoking articles.
Thought provoking comments.

Whether it is before I read the article, after, or both; I read the comments on HN. I rarely do that on <Insert Sitename>.
FWIW, if the iPhone ever does get flash, I may stop having an iPhone. Do not want.
Shocking statistics about Swoopo
As an fun exercise, go to

http://www.aa.com

and watch as they break every single one of these guidelines. I use aa.com as an example of crappy usability so often that my definition of "good web development" is becoming "the opposite of whatever aa.com is doing".
Uh, the author greatly underestimates the headache of filtering out bot traffic. It's bad enough that some of the fancier comment spam bots load javascript, but going through the server logs would be nuts. The "Contact Us" form would show as the most popular page, since it's constantly being assaulted by automated bot-net based attacks.
Sounds like an excuse to fire a department they can no longer afford.
Why? It will be easy to disable.
Codex Sinaiticus
Source: Reuters 2009-07-06. Summary:
* oldest Bible, 800 pages and fragments (of 1400)
* mid-fourth century, uncovered a fourth scribes
* includes Greek and some English translations
* collection of sections from British Library, Monastery of St. Catherine, National Library of Russia, Leipzig University Library
I learned OCaml first, and then switched to F#. Out of all languages I know (OCaml, Java, C#, C++, Python, VB, Lisp) - IMHO F# is the best one. Learning curve is pretty steep though, once you move past the basics.
Source: Reuters 2009-07-06. Summary:
* oldest Bible, 800 pages and fragments (of 1400)
* mid-fourth century, uncovered a fourth scribes
* includes Greek and some English translations
* collection of sections from British Library, Monastery of St. Catherine, National Library of Russia, Leipzig University Library
Likewise - I enjoy reading the comments/threads before the actual link - The comments determine whether I will read the link or not...oftentimes
YouTube is not the only site with Flash video on the Internet. The handful of sites you could name and point out special-case apps for still will not cover the set of interesting sites with Flash video on the Internet.
Not only is the "flash is needed for videos" idea going to vanish. The impact of the relentless improvements being made to the JS engines in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome are hard to over state. At some point, the combination of HTML5 and high performance JS starts to make me wonder how many other current applications of flash are doomed as well. It won't happen overnight, but I think the writing is certainly on the wall.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=614703
Build Safer Ruby Daemons with RobustThread
Bail set at $750000 for ex-Goldman programmer
Jokob Nielsen: Building Respect for Usability Expertise
Iran Declares War on 21st Century Media
Clojure. It's a lisp on JVM.
Link seems to be broken - anyone have a mirror?
We shouldn't ignore the effect of hindsight. Lot of ideas that we think today as obvious or straight forward, may not have been all that obvious before it got popular. In that movie, Ford and Chrysler engineers apparently had trouble duplicating his model.

That said, Its not about how simple or how hard an idea is right? Its about how much value it adds.

EDIT: In your example, as long as it is not willful infringement and as long as he started making them before he patented it, there will not be any penalty. But in case of ford and Chrysler, its willful infringement.
Do these things really work, or are they random and software validates a belief in them?
BT Opts Not to Deploy Phorm Behavioral Ad System
HN Guideline Reminder: Please remove numbers from post titles
Just a gentle reminder that we are encouraged to remove non-meaningful numbers from post titles before submission. I thought this reminder was necessary because of a decent-size group of front-page submissions including top [X] lists, see:

http://skitch.com/sant0sk1/bssdm/hn-lists

From the guidelines page:

'If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."'
Fastest Bikes: Top 5 Fastest Bikes of the World
What about clojure? With a Java background it's easier to grasp, has all the modern features and a friendly, supportive community. It's load of fun, you could even use SICP with it. For job opportunities you need a good load of luck with any functional language. With such a close integration with Java you have a high chance for a stealth clojure project. :-)
Personally, I've had a phone for two years, and ran into non-youtube video quite frequently.
Obligated? No, no one can force you to leave with notice unless it was contractually enforced. However, it is common courtesy. And you refer to "the employer", who exactly is this? The CEO? Your direct manager? The board of directors? A lot of times the ones who have to let people go are not the ones responsible for the decision. Your boss may not have wanted people to get cut and may have totally disagreed with the way they're being forced to do it. But being the self-entitled person you seem to come across as, you're gonna stick it him and the rest of the coworkers you leave behind? That's fine, you're entitled to do that. But more often than not, karma is a mean bitch and she will come back and kick your ass.
I think you mean 'could not care less'.
Culture Club: How Companies Bring Cool to the Workplace
why does ycom not have search or suggestion feature like digg? seems like something that's needed to handle the growing popularity of this site.
Yes, of course ... edited
In consideration of your background, scala would come to mind. There is some dispute about whether it's a functional language, though.
The first Photoshop icon
Relative value and high-frequency trading are very different animals. With relative value, you probably don't even know if you have statistically significant results for a couple months; with HF, you have evidence within hours.
Enough sites use Google Analytics wrongly (by including it at the start of the page rather than at the end of the page) that I have used AdBlock+ to block it.

Edit, since someone has downvoted this comment without offering a contrary opinion:

My comment is an argument against trusting figures on ad-blocking obtained using externally hosted javascript. If you host the analytics javascript yourself, no-one will be motivated to block you. And the reliability of statistics such as colour depth and browser window size are probably unaffected.
> Let's end this line of conversation here, as neither of us benefits from it.

Good idea.

> I realized the only thing keeping my life boring was me.

All along, I wanted to point out that you contradicted yourself, which was most likely quite apparent to you too.

Claiming that you (and your parents etc) have never been bored in your lives when it's just not true (by your admission too) is, well, disingenuous at best, especially when you do it to embellish how magical your life supposedly is. Your chronicling of all the QuirkyMagical things you've supposedly done felt a bit off too.

We're pretty much all computer nerds here, and we've all wasted quite a bit of our lives feeling bored and sorry for ourselves.

If you've managed to turn your life around and stop wasting time, that's great for you, but to the rest of us, what you've been saying here feels too pretentious, dishonest, or like "rubbing it in", or highlighting your own awesomeness, and none of these things is very classy.

It could be that I'm all alone in thinking this, or it could be that no one else just wanted to say anything, because this is HN and we're all serious and business-like, and you're an intelligent and eloquent fellow.

I wasn't participating in a dick-waving contest though. I just couldn't help but think that you knew exactly what I meant to point out a couple of messages earlier, hence the "twist".
i'm aware of searchyc, but i'm not going to go to a second site before I submit content "just to check". however, i would search before submitting if was readily available in a practical and usable manner. search seems fundamental to a data intensive website considering the importance.
Bouillon, the less known brother of Google Wave
Haskell is a bit into the weeds if you're just starting out. I jumped in with Erlang, as its pretty pragmatic so the tutorials out there tend to focus on getting crap done and not so much theory.

Once you've written some code and feel comfortable with FP, then drink the Haskell-aid.
I use it to read stories and also to discuss with mind-like people and share ideas.
One of the great things about javascript based analytics is that the cached version of your page is just as good as someone grabbing it directly. You can set long cache times on all of your pages without worrying about people viewing your site without you knowing. This more than counteracts the handful of people who have javascript turned off.

This is also particularly important for sites like heroku who have an HTML cache sitting in front of your site. If you serve pages that are cached, javascript logging is your only option.
Could be due to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
Am I the only one that can't read a list like this without looking for how the website posting it fails?

----------

On the menu:

"Navigation and IA"

But...

Under "Writing and content quality":

"Acronyms and abbreviations are defined when first used."

----------

They say "Pages are free of 'scroll stoppers' (headings or page elements that create the illusion that users have reached the top or bottom of a page when they have not)." But the site has THREE footers, any one of which could be the end of the page.

----------

They say "Things that are clickable (like buttons) are obviously pressable." But the text "Usability Training" in the third footer is inexplicably clickable.

----------

One that counts as an epic fail... they believe there is such a thing as a "standard browser width window."
EMC raises offer for Data Domain to $2.4 billion
> Learning curve is pretty steep though

Do you mean it gets difficult, or that progress gets fast?
I thought it was a good idea. No one would have to say something like "not programming" anymore.
These people are leaving for better jobs that they already got without that reference and are probably long term workers as long as you don't keep pushing and pushing cuts to see if you can.
Damnit, I'm all ten of those.
Ask HN: Advice on an Idea
I am trying to create a web framework which assembles, configures and links independent components to create complex web applications.

Basically I find that if I have a meta data definition of a context, what components to load in that context and what properties to set on the components and the links between the components i can assemble any application.

The framework reads the above meta data and constructs the application.

Why is there no such framework to compose applications at component level instead of object level.

I have see vertical constrained applications like Popfly, Webbly or Wuffo implement similiar concept, only those are not generic component assembly framework.

Has any one come across such a framework?

Will not a Assembly oriented product development where there is a clean separation of Assembly from coding will make us do complex application.

Any advice would be much appreciated.
I used to just read the articles rather than the comments as well. When I first read the "Ask HN" stories and the corresponding comments, that's when I realized that the smart and respectful people here are what make HN.
Ok, I give. What does this have to do with anything?
That probably could have been phrased better. Of course accomplishments in the field are important. What I mean is that if I'm kind of on the fence about a candidate, I'm more likely to say 'hire' if they show me who they are.
Forgot to enable caching. Should be up now.
Interview with Jason Fried from 37signals on FOX Business
I think that one of the major objections to such a framework would be that it would be difficult to create a reliable system when the components are hosted in so many different places with each of them being a point of failure.

I had an idea very similar to yours a while ago (I called it 'softbricks'), but I never could find a way around the reliability issues.

You're basically constructing applications from widgets that can be hosted by any number of parties, if you figure out a way to make it reliable I'm fairly sure you have a winner here.

There are 'object brokering architectures' that come close but none give you the kind of functionality that I think you are going for.
Well, that is why patent law keeps lots of lawyers busy. There is a principle of "nonobviousness" in patent law that requires enough engineering or science knowledge that most patent lawyers are persons with undergraduate degrees in engineering or science.
... if they show you who they are and you like them. I noticed from the hiring process where I work that hiring decisions are often based on personal chemistry, sometimes without regard to qualifications. Or more precisely, qualifications are sometimes used to rationalize a hiring decision that has already been made on the basis of personal chemistry. And I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing -- I'm more likely to be productive if I like my coworkers.
Of course it does. There's a ton of apps and services built upon the Flash framework.

But hey. Flash is bad. Rarr. Objective-C good. Woot.
Ask HN: where are the clones?
you know, the ones that were going to be written in a single weekend?
Food Wars
So listing field-relelvant "accomplishments" is bad form at Fog Creek? Ahem. Good to know, I suppose.

Actually, it would be good if every company just listed this sort of "how we hire" on their web site, so that you can steer clear of the ones you find absurd.
Not Lonely at All — Matt Mullenweg
We fear what we do not understand and cannot control.
That's 8x revenues, and a whopping 600x earnings after taxes...
white makes the video size quite irregular - and a lot more different from TVs (as far as I know, the background and frames are usually black). That is not an excuse on itself since it's a different media - but making it similar reduces the adoption barrier.

And it looks a lot tidier with a cleanly defined black square anyway, imho...
Thanks for the presentation. If hydrogen is not the answer. What other technologies have potential?
> One, which was mostly held over at Hacker News, generated good discussion on the value of cover letters in various hiring situations.

...

> The other group, from the Programming Reddit, was far more hostile.

This is a good encapsulation of the difference between the two sites. If you want a polite place where something is respectable because it is well written, and where agreement is the preferred outcome, this is the site for you.

If you want a place where ideas themselves are challenged rather directly, and where respect is not automatically given because of flowery writing or authority, then for all its faults, Reddit is actually far better.

You can tell which site I prefer to read:) I get sick of the way people here get modded up and lauded for ideas that contain at their core severe and inexcusable logical, scientific, or mathematical problems. What I think should happen is that we should be looking through the skin and presentation, seeing if those ideas are worth anything, and if they're not, helping each other out by saying so clearly.
I am new here, was just curious....
Thanks
That seems like an unwarranted assumption, but I'm going to be an optimist and agree with you.
That assumes you know people are hashing (or more specifically, which few passwords are hashed out of this enormous database you've stolen). How do you tell a random password from a hashed one as an attacker?
Maybe it's just me, but I can't relate to a feeling of "guilt" simply because I haven't used something in a while. I'm not attached to my stuff, I just don't care as long as the place doesn't look cluttered.

The only reason I have to toss stuff (that's paid for) is if it takes up too much space. And I have acres of storage room.
All hat, no cattle.
video is already covered by special-casing sites like YouTube

Is that a good solution? it has the consequence that in order to make your new video startup site successful (on the iPhone), you have to first pay off Apple. That sounds to much like the anti-net-neutrality stuff for me.

And I can't then embed video on a blog post, or somewhere else that isn't a "special case site" for video.
I wouldn't link to my own blog ordinarily, but I recently wrote a post for a homebrew JavaScript event framework that's similar to this: http://blogs.claritycon.com/blogs/sean_devlin/archive/2009/0...
"What is probably the oldest known Bible is being digitised, reuniting its scattered parts for the first time since its discovery 160 years ago. It is markedly different from its modern equivalent. What's left out?"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7651105.stm
Ceph distributed object based filesystem
I'm an author of this article - thank you all for commenting. I don't have an intention to start a flame war - both methods have pros and cons, but in this "GA craziness" people tend to forget that log analysis even exists. Hence the article. :)

And yes, Dataland Software "sells" interactive web log analyzer, but I can't really see how's that important?
It's definitely better with "turn off the lights", White is too bright for my eyes and adds distraction.

for greasemonkey users: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/49726 "turn off the lights" everywhere in youtube :)
Yep it happens, but most videos are also viewable searching for the title into Youtube. And as I said I really hope that HTML5 will remove this last problem... The only left problem is P0RN of course... but there is http://pornhub.com that is iPhone ready.
When you say Full House problem, are you referring to collision of names? (All Google comes up with is info on the 90s TV show)
Yes, but at least that one password is not stored across a multitude of sites with varying security.