skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some languages are really different, function, object oriented. While you can learn to write code in a new language fairly quickly, figuring out what the best practices are in a new language, what libraries are reliable, can take much longer. Maybe learning a new language the runs on the CLR/DLR or JVW isn't quite as different, but languages are ecosystems that take experience in order to make good decision.
This Team has an "I"
Agreed, basic formatting (rtf) and easy to use and bundled.
The industry turns on a dime, but is slow to retire proven technology.

I have been slow to retire vim. In fact, I keep learning new things that make my work easier (like :arge filename --- the e means it's like :e, to edit a file, but it also adds it to the arglist, so you can move back and forth the list of files with :n and :p; and :tabnew, ^PgDn and ^PgUp give you tabs and switching between them).

It seems inevitable that the day will come when the Eclipses and IDEAs of this world are more productive (some say it already has), and when it does, I won't be up to speed to make the switch. I don't think typing support is critical for understanding problems and solving them, but it helps.
Sigh. Over 40 geezer checking in, but because I spent my 20s pursuing a music career, and then a number of years in QA, I've really only been doing pure software development for about 4 years. The problems I've been encountering these days mostly center on the physical demands of the job (typing and sitting) -- joint pain, back pain, tendinitis, etc...

Yoga has been helpful, but I'm wondering how long I'll be able to cope.
...but be sure to guess correctly! If you make a mistake and choose a technical specialty that isn't hot in a decade, then you're really screwed.
"The only middle-aged programmers we have are absolutely solid"

As a several year veteran in the government contractor space and from personal experience as a configuration manager, I strongly disagree this this. I've seen poor and mediocre programmers survive as programmers well toward retirement age. Part of the reason is that programming isn't the only skill that they provide. They provide domain knowledge on the systems which the gov (mil and civilian) rely. Then us poor sods have to clean up after them and clean up after them, and hold their hands on radical new ideas like object oriented programming. I could really rant on this topic if I wanted to.

Another perspective: I mean, how many coders do you know that make it through a few years working who have NOT developed some significant domain knowledge?
Why is everybody so concerned about poor google having to deal with people that could "game their system" ?

I don't really care one way or the other about the merits of this case. But courts and legislatures in this country have put limits on contracts. The notion of "Well, you agreed to the contract, so..." has been thrown out long ago.

There is nothing legally wrong with the Google contract. But if you want to talk about what's right in a moral sense, then it's right that if you unilaterally terminate a contract, and there is financial consideration involved, you should inform the other party about the termination and include a reason for it.

There are limits on contract law in this country precisely because both parties in a contract are often on unequal footing. And that's certainly the case here. Consumers are forced to consume contracts as-is that are nearly always one-sided or slanted towards the bigger party.

There's no specific relief to this problem as far as I can see. But there's also no need to sit here and advocate it, either, which is what you're doing. Unless, of course, you find yourself personally benefiting from such uneven contract negotiation. In which case, more power to you, and also, you're doing nothing good for humanity.
It seemed like joel was pimping his website. That's true. I mean, it actually seemed obvious to the point of being tacky.
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Its hard to understand why, with so many shortcomings, things that are very practical and day-in-day-out issues, the author remains positive about his choice to switch from the blackberry to the Pre. I have seen, but not owned one so miss all the little things that make or break a device. The device choices seem to remain the same, with a new contender in the middle:

[keyboard centric activity, little browsing] - Blackberry

[some keyboard, some browser] = Palm Pre

[little keyboard activity, heavy browsing, gaming] - iPhone
On the other hand, Google's interns are producing...
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2009/05/spotlight-on-develope...

I know a developer who was learning two new programming languages and started writing serious production code within three weeks of starting his first job post graduation. He took over maintenance of a complex application and rewrote it in a new language. He managed to double his salary 18 months into the job. There risk in hiring someone unproven, but you can buy that down quickly.
You're right. Let's compare to a more adequate language. Like Ruby.

def inc_all(i, xs)
xs.map { |x| x + i }
end
Like the no thanks part at the EO article.
I dunno... being an iPhone user for 2 years now I'm fast on the keyboard -- really fast and accurate. I also own a BB for work and I find typing on it to be quite a chore these days. I think there will come a time when people really have to re-evaluate the bad rap the iPhone keyboard gets. I admit it's probably not for everyone but lots of iPhone users are very quick and accurate with it. I suspect humans can adapt to almost any type of input/control system with enough practice.
Just curious, but don't you think you should accept the risk wrt ROI on CPC ad campaigns? Yes, it might not convert. It might not even be seen by anybody remotely interested in your product. But that's the nature of it. And the nature of business. Isn't it?
Wow. I find it near useless.
Start was painful for me, since I'm red green colorblind, and I was confused to if I was supposed to be seeing anything, and then I saw the explosion of red.
The demo is impressive, but Flash absolutely can do all those things, albeit in Actionscript rather than Javascript. In fact that's the reason Flash has largely replaced all the other video plugins like Quicktime and Windows Media Player. They weren't customizable. Flash is.

Now, being able to do that customisation natively in Javascript is awesome, but the issue of HTML5 adoption is a much bigger problem and it's even worse now that there are competing codecs. Adoption of any Ogg format is usually a good indication that the pointy heads have won over the pragmatists. H264 is the more sensible choice for video.
I agree completely, in case it sounded like I was just ragging on C++. When I do that, I accompany it with all the many reasons why C++ deserves the treatment. =)
I charged $150/hr to setup a VOIP server, and $40/day to teach Scheme. What could you possibly triangulate from this?

Just know your industry and ask your peers.
Ye, that helps thanks. Any more data points?
The metaphor applies to teams where interaction between members is crucial to the teams success. A one-man basketball team will never win anything.
You can change your credit card number (cancel the card).

You cannot change your SSN.
But no Java 6 as a default Java, and on 32-bit machines.
This is awesome. You have a free place to stay in Austin, TX for a week on West 5th street if you'd like to extend your research. Please contact me if interested.

This town has it's edge in B2B but there are a lot of people here seeking to add B2C to that list (the fun stuff), especially given UT is a campus of 50k young bloods. ATX has a low cost of living/business, great public schools, healthy state economy, no state income tax, and liberal-centric social policies. We produce a lot of talent @ UT, but it's milked out of here by GOOG, AAPL, MS, SUN, etc. as soon as it graduates.

TX doesn't have quite the goods as SF (especially in terms of financing — but easy to bootstrap), however Austin is a city most people move here and end up not leaving.
if you have larger fingers, or long nails (for ladies), then you are going to have trouble with the iphone keyboard.

Sure, you will get used to it, and be decent at some point after lots of practice, but i still find the BB Bold/ old Curve keyboards the best in mobile keyboards.

And I work with Mobile devices, so i have tried 10s of them.
"PHP is not any worse or better than any other language."

Haskell fits as "any other".

"Haskell is a functional language, PHP is not. So it's not a valid comparison."

So, PHP is not any worse or better than any other language that's just like PHP?
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I can definitely see how this force works against generalist programmers.

Come on now, what basis do you have to say that someone who is a generalist is unable to provide value to people through the software they write? Do people need to be excessively specialized to make something people will pay money for?

And for that matter, I could see the generalist programmer fairing better, because they don't lose the general theory things are based on while diving incredibly deeply into a narrow body of very specific knowledge. If the job/labor/consumer/whatever market presents some new area of need, they're in a better position to go learn and capitalize on it.
Is there a mirror of that site. It looks like we HN'ed the site to stone age.
I did this regularly in high school. It usually worked, although I failed a class as a direct result of this technique... so not recommended in general.
The key is to make the algorithms and mathematics, not the languages, your tools. Some things never change.
I don't understand what that graph is showing. Which variable is independent, or supposed to be? It can't be buckets as a function of collisions. At first I thought he had his axes reversed (from the customary y as a function of x), but it's not a graph of collisions as a function of buckets, either, because reading it that way implies that a very small number of buckets produces a small number of collisions, which is obviously false with a hundred million inputs being distributed over ten or less buckets.

It looks like a graph of the moral equivalent of 1=1, by numeric methods. What am I supposed to see there?
It's been a few years since abstract algebra, but might it have something to do with finite fields? I seem to recall that modulo primes held special significance (i.e. you can't have a finite field size other than a power of a prime).
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The article writer (Nathan) used uniformly distributed cryptographically secure random numbers as his test data. Any decent hash for integers that doesn't throw bits away is going to produce a nice even distribution for that kind of sequence no matter what the divisor.

The problem with hash tables is bad hash functions, or hash functions which perform badly on certain data, where "perform badly" means recurrence of certain patterns, usually "latent periods", i.e. too many function results that are divisible by some number or one of some set of numbers. If those numbers have factors in common with the bucket count, then there's going to be trouble.

For example, a poor hash function might turn up even numbers twice as often as odd numbers; if the bucket count is also even, then the even buckets will have 50% more collisions than the odd buckets, on average. A prime number of buckets guarantees that there's only one factor that can clash, rather than a bunch of them.
For a uniformly distributed input set, it doesn't matter how many buckets you have. When you take your modulus, you're going to mix well, regardless of whether its prime or not. This is what the article (accidentally, apparently) confirms.

The win of using a prime modulus comes when you have a non-uniformly distributed input set (though of course you could craft an especially evil input set). Mod prime is just more likely to produce a more uniform mix across a larger set of input distributions.

Since we're talking about a general-purpose hash table, we can't assume we know anything about our inputs (i.e., that they're uniformly distributed), so we use a prime number of buckets just to up the odds that we come out ahead.
For the sake of imagining someone working at an employer where they have no real control over the direction of the product, what value do they bring other than their technical skill set and analytical ability? Presumably the value most developers out there deliver is producing a coded up version of someone else's specification. Outside of having enough business acumen to know when to shut up before the management threatens your employment (if remaining employed is important enough to you), what else is there?
Yeah, I moved it to another server. Waiting for the server to get back up for it to 301 redirect it.

Edit: It's back up.
Why don't you call Dell, IBM, Sun et al. and become a sales partner? it's the IT equivalent of street-corner pushing and you will learn how much things are worth IRL very quickly.
I could see a hash tool being useful here - maybe even some sort of upload applet that sends the hash too. If the uploaded hash matches the hash generated on your machine, you have less plausible excuses.

Of course, you could just use Scribd's iPaper to preview the doc - puts the owness on the student to verify.
I think it is important to point out that there may not be a correlation between the exploit and his hanging himself; some other members of his immediate family also committed suicide in years past.
For the lucid moments he has, which people would argue about the frequency of, Alex Papadimoulis discusses something similar to this in one of his site articles, providing what I think is decent insight on why they make it to retirement age:

http://thedailywtf.com/articles/up-or-out-solving-the-it-tur...

FWIW, I think there's enough people in this audience that wouldn't be happy holding on to a job they aren't particularly interested in keeping up to date on, simply because they have the domain knowledge to make them "safe". I could be wrong though.
If you build it, they will come. No, maybe a 70-year-old grandmother won't install Firefox to view your awesome site, but other people will. Given enough really useful websites using the new functionality, people will install it. It will be used.
Evaluating Bing with Mechanical Turk
Yes, you are wrong. It will install something (with your permission) if you click the "Download" link.
If you look at what's going on at Google and Mozilla you'll see how "HTML5" features might become adopted and standard way faster than what one might expect.

Both of those see the Web as their business, and as such – their own to extend, patch up, speed up and evangelize. Kind of like what Microsoft feels like about C# and .NET, and Apple – about Objective-C, C and Cocoa.

Palm and Nokia are also jumping on that train. So are many others.

The future is not that bleak, dude.
It's a histogram. It's counting the number of buckets (y axis) for each number of collisions (x axis). He's showing that the distribution is the same for both methods; if one had a clear advantage, it should have a relatively more uniform distribution.

The problem is that the input distribution is uniform, so you'd expect a pretty decent distribution of collisions regardless of what your modulus was. A prime modulus only helps for non-uniformly distributed inputs.
That said, while I appreciate your sentiment, I know in my heart that the author is right.

Even the "keep up with technology" people know in their hearts that these articles are correct. Everyone knows programmers have a half-life, they just are in disagreement about when it kicks in. Nearly everyone would be surprised to discover a 60 year old programmer who was still gainfully employed. 50 is really pushing it, 40 is pushing it, and 35 is starting to push it. In contrast, nobody would think it was weird to see a 40, 50 or even 60 year old doctor or lawyer.
For the record, this was written 10 years ago.
I asked this elsewhere, but I'll ask it again here, and I am being completely sincere. Why pick things to specialize in at the expense of other things you elect not to?

Specialization is not free; it decreases flexibility, and would seem that it would decrease cross-pollination of ideas from different areas of knowledge. It increases income, for sure, but also increases the attendant risk that people won't have need for an X specialist right at that moment, or at least no one you would want to work for.

I'll grant that generalization is not free either. Someone who really needs an X specialist will pay top dollar, because the supply is likely pretty low. And people may not trust a generalist to go and implement some specialized X performing application.

I think there are opportunities and attendant risks for both. I really don't think either one wins outright. But, I'll be happy to listen to words of wisdom you might have on this.
Can we please say "on their intranet" instead of the misleading "cloud" buzzword? (FWIW Googlers call it the "intranet" too.)
Agreed H264 is the only reasonable choice. Ogg is great and it's cool that it exists and is supported but if there is no common codec that works flawlessly across all the implementations we will have a huge problem on our hands. h264 is going to be the dominant codec for the next decade so not supporting it in the web browsers just inconveniences everyone until they do.
The spread of those social assumptions may signal a technological crossover that echoes the proliferation of e-mail itself more than a decade ago.
It doesn't fit your description of "a minimal text editor", but I"ve been happy with the free and well supported ToDoList:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/applications/todolist2.aspx

It supports fairly full featured, hierarchical to do lists. However, it also has a rich text component for its comments, that supports the features you describe. I use that component for quickie logs; Control-D inserts a timestamp at the insertion point.

Again, I realize it doesn't precisely fit your description, but on the chance you or another reader finds it of interest.
Disclaimer: I didn't read the full article. I can't stomach these types of "career strategy" articles anymore. This approach to life in general is very misguided (maybe less so if you just want a career to fulfill other goals), but for those who want to pursue a more idealistic life, just pursue your passions. Plan B is being an improv comedian. Plan B is writing the great American novel. Plan B is traveling the world as a war correspondent.

I left corporate world precisely because I felt "planning my career", as I was encouraged to do, was an absolute false way to live (for me). I couldn't reconcile the absurdity of it with the severity of the consequences if I didn't do it. But the consequences are all socially constructed, and they go away as soon as you change your mentality.

When I think of my heroes, I don't think of people who've hedged their bets here or there - they just did what they felt they had to.
Yes, is impressive; no, not all of those things, but most (I see you know your ActionScript 3.0); Theora is improving faster than H.264 (which is not improving) and so will surpass it eventually – without the royalty issues; I agree with you on all points if we are taking into account only the scope of the next two years – but we should be thinking a bit further into the future.
I can't completely buy it, only because I'm sure there are still companies or projects out there who need somebody with a decade's worth of low-level programming experience. Okay, maybe you can't make tons of money doing Rails CRUD apps because a trained seal could do that, but a trained seal couldn't write complicated C++ code.

My point, I suppose, is that your experience must still count for something within certain domains. Right? Or am I wrong on that, too?
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Things to do before you Die: Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination
Sorry, away for a bit and didn't see your reply.

> But checked exceptions seem unavoidable, as you can't (practically) avoid calling all the Java API methods that throw them.

Yes, that's what I mean by "at the edges". You can't avoid hitting the ones built into Java but you can stop them penetrating into your own code with a simple try / catch that wraps them with RuntimeException.
No, I don't think those measure up. The Ubuntu listing is too short and too non-specific to be much good. They also overuse acronyms and pack them too densely (PSP, MP3..).

The Kubuntu listing is better than the Ubuntu page, but still not there. There's overuse of bullet points, which limit detail. Everything is generally too terse and badly-organized.

They rely on prior knowledge and don't explain what the improvements mean to the users. What is this? "The new plasma-widget-network-manager replaces the old KNetworkManager applet." What does that mean to me, a new Kubuntu user?

Apple does it better. They have nice delineation of features, so you don't have to go looking for information. It's also listed in much more detail, which is the main problem with the OSS lists.

Actually, looking at both pages, it seems like the Kubuntu people are doing something fundamentally different. They're listing new versions of software, briefly detailing the changes, and pointing to the software changelogs. Apple is talking about the OS as a whole and dividing it into parts. They're not saying "iChat updated to version X"; they're saying "iChat in Snow Leopard has features Y and Z."
George Moschovitis is a very smart guy. Nitro started off as a Ruby app some years ago, and it rocked (as does its descendant, Ramaze).

I need to find some time to check out Nitro/js.
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The Self-Employed Depression
To me, the most interesting aspect of the post was the comparison between Bing and the old Live. I'd have liked to see a Live-Google comparison and perhaps Yahoo! as well, since it's often thrown around as a comparable alternative.

This seems to confirm my idea that Bing is less a revamp to the search engine and more a rebranding for Microsoft. Bing is certainly more memorable than Live or MSN were, and it's replacing Live and other MS brands in several non-search areas (Virtual Earth -> Bing Maps for Enterprise, for example). That's certainly nothing new for Microsoft, but this time they seem to be marketing it as a search engine change to get people to try the engine and hopefully switch from the big G.
has anyone found a way to get non-minified js version of this library? to me this library is as good as closed-source
I thought everyone would have heard of this by now - the original version of the game is called Mafia and it's been around for ages.

Even has a wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_(game)
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Original sites:

http://docs.blacktree.com/quicksilver/what_is_quicksilver (alcor's site, who's now with Google and working on the QSB)

http://code.google.com/p/blacktree-alchemy/ (Google Code for QS)

I try to avoid the shareware download sites whenever possible; they're virtually useless these days and can be a breeding ground for adware. On the topic of the Google QSB, I'm going to give this a test run; I couldn't get used to Butler and I hosed my QS installation, so I've been looking for a good alternative.
DoS Vulnerability in Ruby
TechCrunch on Floxee (a demo)