skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's the biggest problem with PC: it just makes you to switch your brains off, to the point where blacks who have nothing to do with Africa are called african americans.
This PC trend is really retarded.
...if race exists at all. Isn't as true to say 'people have variations in intelligence; some are slightly inheiritable.'
An introduction to infrastructure fiction — Improving Reality 2013
Well, then you can unlearn Java right now!

http://xamarin.com/
http://phonegap.com/
http://www.orubase.com/
etc.
etc.
etc.
I believe the previous discussion was

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6607661

( Which I only still have open because I wanted to program the article at some point...)
Not sure about that... actually most (well-written!) android code is already pretty wasteful with resources, because its abstractions upon abstractions.

To get a simple button on the screen, you need an Activity with a Fragment with a View with the button inside, with a few more layers inbetween. The gui is loaded from multiple XML files and resources, with lots of dynamic property binding going on. And even don't get me started on data storage and SQLite...

Writing an app in python wouldn't add much to this - it actually may allow you to avoid a couple of layers (the dreaded FactoryFactory syndrome of java). Python's weakness is number crunching, and I agree, you wouldn't want to do that in Python on Android. But just to show a gui, or to access a web api, python's performance should be more than enough.
Randall Munroe's (from xkcd) newest idea
Yup I second that. Intellij IDEA is currently very good with Scala, especially if one avoids SBT. I use it with Maven and everything works smoothly in a project with several sub-projects and various external dependencies (most to Java libraries).

I suspect the awfulness of SBT is causing a lot of harm to Scala adoption.
There are not that many countries/capitals where I've not been in Europe, so I think I can compare instead of pushing my hometown:
My personal top of metropolis:
1. Berlin - great startup stuff, cheap (in context of west Europe/ Germany), sexy, English, easy to adopt from e.g. US
2. Istanbul - cheap, hacker friendly, kiloton of culture, but need to manage/like a bit asian way of life. Best food.
3. London - great startup stuff (services and top people), high costs but high revenues also. So great if you want to earn a lot, not sepend a little.
4. Dublin - low taxes, good startup stuff, all US IT is there (but maybe already working for Google etc), moderate costs, no language problem

- Northern countries (Scandinavia, Baltics): good/moderate startup activities (ask me, I'm from there), high costs and also revenues (except Baltics which is vice versa), low corruption, e-services (eg. Estonia: open company in 15 min online). Can manage in English mostly (less in Baltics but still). My key problem: long winter

- East Europe: low costs and revenues, high corruption (paperwork/tax pain), problems with English except in small startup enclaves, need local friends (especially bigger countries like Poland, Czech Rep, Romania). If you can cope with this a bit Asian/Russian lifestyle, I'd skip it and go to Istanbul already, you'd have not only pain but also gain of this mess.

- South-West Europe - each country is quite different, but generally medium costs and revenues, need to know local language or friend (spanish, italian, french, greek), ton of culture which tends to bring also bureaucracy (expect months to your paper processing) , high living quality.
EPA Bans Most Wood-Burning Stoves
Depends on your motivation, if you're looking to learn a language for the sake of employability then yes Java is definitely worth learning.

On the other hand if you're interested in learning something that will make you an overall better programmer it's best to learn something different than what you're familiar with (most likely Java isn't much different than what you've used), e.g. learning C (if you haven't written lower level code) or a functional language (if you've never used one) will grow you much more as a developer than adding yet another generic object-oriented language to your skillset.
Crap to stop doing on startup websites
"Owning code in deployment" = "on call for any code problems in your group, even code you didn't write".

At least that's how it was explained when if interviewed there.
Google Impact Challenge India 2013 awards
Smog prompts wood-burning ban in parts of LA
> She's a big part of why the NSA is as powerful as it is,

At this point, isn't it unsafe to write letters to such people?

You may end up on one of the "lists".
Burn ban in effect in eight Washington [state] counties
Diets Sucked So I Invented My Own - 7 pound in 7 days
A normal car would not tell you there was a problem and suggest corrective action, then demand you pull over when safety parameters were exceeded, keeping you safe and healthy with minutes to spare.

The first you would know there was a problem in a normal car, would be when you felt or saw the fire.
No worries, I understood that. I just thought you were in a great position to actually preform such a study, if you were willing to run it on a group of students :-)

I can certainly understand why you wouldn't "just try Smalltalk on a class or two", though!
Kraft Studios Handmade Notebooks for Creative Minds
'Last week, the less-than-a-month-at-Canonical new guy sent out the toughest template letter to the folks behind a “sucks” site.'

This is not an excuse and reflects poorly on all management when you throw the new guy under the bus. The only response to this[1] is "I" not "the new guy". You are the captain of the ship and don't get to hide behind the new guy.

1) If there is legal consequences and not PR, then you probably shouldn't state anything about what happened inside and should only speak the absolute truth or the parts your lawyer let's you.
Eh, sorry, but geology is full of theories that were (and are) later tested, most getting discarded after the testing, and a few holding up and being accepted as true. Just like any science out there.

Do you know of any macroeconomical (because, really, that's all about macro) theory that was discarded since Keynes become mainstream?
As Dave Thomas in his talk http://www.infoq.com/presentations/metaprogramming-ruby says "Java is for average programmers - a scissors with blunt knifes" If somebody wants to learn now, its good to go after the future market which would be dominated by mobile, apps on cloud. The programming trends is poised to be move towards a mix of Functional + Object Oriented, Procedural. JVM will still be around, as its battle tested but will be programmed by something else (Scala, Clojure seems to be picking up). Golang/Dart will be a deadly combination as well. HTML5 Mob Apps will pick up steam. We choose Scala, Golang, Ruby(scripting), Ruby on Rails for our tech stack at http://www.megam.co
Steve Jobs: Thoughts on Flash (2010)
Great Smog
I also don't fully agree with the statement that Java (or other JVM based languages) is the pinnacle of interoperability. Try interfacing between e.g. Python and Java some time and you know what I mean. Besides JNI or some other JVM based language, interfacing between Java and something else basically means doing some form of IPC, which isn't fun.
You always have to weigh things against each other. Is whistle blowing unethitcal if it exposes a greater evil? No. This is the case with every single possible action, not just disobeying your boss in secret. Is murder unethical? If it saves the lives of 100 people, maybe not.
> An electron may in some abstract sense suffer that force 100% of the time, but that has no bearing on whether your specific measurement context has similar confidence.

Of course not.

But because every electron is (according to our models) identical, we can get closer to eliminating the errors in the specific measurement context (with the exception of uncertainty principle and effects related to it, of course)

> If your argument was true, science would be entirely true, uncontroversial, complete, and done

I am not claiming that. And getting to the "end of science" of course may never happen.
For tech people interested in finance, it would be hard to beat Two Sigma. http://www.twosigma.com/
Hopefully the worst that most Yahoo employees will have to endure is being "bristled". The company is struggling; cutbacks have to be made; reducing workforce usually happens through a variety of means.

When people are being threatened they 'bristle', like a cat I suppose. But in this case the CEO is not likely to back off in fear. I suggest more pro-active methods: sharpen up your resume; work harder and produce more; hit your goals reliably.
Teenagers say goodbye to Facebook and hello to messenger apps
Find a 3D Printer Near You
Altcoins could be made more valuable if a) they performed some function that Bitcoin cannot feasibly perform, and b) if some type of atomic inter-cryptocurrency trade protocol could be produced which would allow low-friction trade between cryptocurrencies, and without the use of centralized exchanges.
News reports before the typhoon hit said 4000 people had been evacuated. Why only 4000? Lack of resources?

Now that the typhoon has devastated the philippines, the international community is sending aid, money, resources. Why can't the same be done before a disaster like this hits? I'm sure the millions pouring in now could have gone a long way to evacuate people or set up shelters, dams, pumps, before it killed 10,000+

And for the financially minded bureaucrat, I'd guess preventive measures would possibly cost less as well.
> Some of our target audiences are middle- and high-school students, some of whom have weak typing skills (we know from numerous workshops we run). Increasing even the raw number of characters is a real problem for them.

I certainly understand this argument, and I generally favour simple syntax over smart tools -- but how much of a difference would this make in an editor/IDE that automatically inserts the closing-tag? (you type case, the editor appends esac (but below the point you're typing)):

1: | #your cursor at |

2: case|

3: case:
| # you hit enter or something, ready to fill in
esac # editor has closed block/statement

I imagine typing-skills isn't much of an issue when editing/copying text -- as opposed to typing in new code?
I'll just leave this here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzxTXk1JCFw

To Americans: Is this even legit?
I'm almost 30, and I'm only now figuring out my goals for my long-term career. I've been all over the place. I went to grad school for electrical engineering, then I taught high school math, then I went to grad school again for music technology, then I worked for a startup, then I did grant-funded research, then I started a startup, then I became a consultant.

You don't have to know what you want to do with the rest of your life. But my advice to you is to pick something and go hard for it. Don't worry about whether you're making the right choice. Just make sure that whatever path you take, it's something you're going to learn and grow from. The only way you can lose is by not making an affirmative decision on your current direction. You're young as hell, there's plenty of time to pivot. How do you know when to pivot? When you have ceased to meet new people, learn new things about yourself, build new skills, and enjoy yourself.

I could be 8 years into some career job right now. Maybe I missed out on an opportunity to really press my claim in some particular direction. I don't think so though, because instead, I've lived in 8 different states, seen several different career paths, met fascinating people, built soft and hard skills, and learned an incredible amount about myself and what I value.

If you want to be a programmer, you can take some advanced level MOOC classes today. Overcommit yourself to it for a little bit, beyond your coursework. You can try to fix a bug in an open source product you use. You can volunteer your time for a startup in your area, and try to learn the ropes. Just start building. If you can make it clear that you're the type of person that will dive in head first to a tough problem and find a way to scrap together a solution, you will put yourself in demand in the tech world.

Good luck, and feel free to email me if you need any advice.
Ask HN: Is C++ still worth learning?
well, in contrast to the recently submitted Ask HN question about Java. I'd be interested to know how HN thinks about C++
I'm not just being purposefully obtuse here. When read in the context of his upstream comments, I don't think we can make any assumptions as to what he meant.
This http://kotlin.jetbrains.org/ is the best language for Android development.
No. Like Paul Graham said.. It's a dead end evolutionary. More advanced languages like python and javascript are going to replace it in few years.

Start with web apps. :) That's fun stuff.
This should link to the (better) original article, not the WaPo rehash:

http://www.tufts.edu/alumni/magazine/fall2013/features/up-in...
I wish people would promote this fact more.

Reality is well outside what the marketing would have you believe.

Also the reason people pick c#/java etc is simply due to it being a pretty good stable standard for fungible staff with decent productivity output and the ability to scale up really complex functionality pretty fast.
I submitted this because I wanted to see it discussed in this light. I think the author makes some good points but others are just plain wrong. For example, when it is said that Litecoin and other Scrypt-based coins were created just as a way not to let GPU mining rigs go worthless: I believe the existence of other coins with different algorithms is important, even to point out possible flaws in Bitcoin and the way SHA-256 is used.

Altcoins, among other things, provide a way for testing (sometimes crazy) ideas that can't be tested on Bitcoin at this stage, and allow for more choices to be given to the user (in the same way Linux is not the only open source kernel, GNU GPL is not the only open source license, etc.).

If you think of Bitcoin as just another open source project, and consider "altcoins" to be forks, you'll find forks that are basically just copies of the main project with some values adjusted to the will of the creator, and you'll find more elaborate forks that actually add something new (even if these additions prove to be inadequate to merge into the main project at some point).
The second type of forks is, in my opinion, very desirable, while the first one is pretty much useless and, sometimes, is nothing more than a pump-and-dump scheme.
In fact, there are many spamming sites in non-English searches. If you like these info,I can mail you some.
Fuck off MRA.
Tory Burch Boots Cheap For Sale
How much of the 'batteries included' approach of Python will work well in the Android environment?

It reminded me of this: http://www.tinypy.org/
Think.
But 100% of TV networks get their news from Twitter. So, ipso facto, 100% of US Adults get their news from Twitter.
I agree, it's pretty much the same old, same old.
These frameworks are very limiting comparing to developing in Java. They might be easier to use (I don't know about that) but you would find yourself resorting to Java for the more complex stuff.
Do you know where you can find a good place to rent without already being on site ? AirBnB obviously costs a lot more
I'm from Manila, now working in Singapore. I've read Cryptonomicon two times already and enjoyed it immensely.
I came from the capital. My family lives beside Laguna lake in Taguig. Whenever there's a storm my village gets flooded (mainly due to poor flood control) and everything becomes hard in terms of dealing with your daily business. Obviously nothing in comparison to what Haiyan did to Tacloban city, but the panic induced by the thunder, the cold feeling from the rain, plus the fear of losing a lot from the waters and looters is still deeply etched in my brain.

Now I'm based in another country but I have lots of relatives in the area that was in the path of the storm. Also, this estimate came from just one area (although the worst hit). We are a hardy people but to get this every year coupled with the stress of knowing your officials are stealing a fair bit of what could have been used to help... well, kind of pulls you down.
A look beyond the Twitter IPO finds rot beneath the gloss of recovery
A sentence is usually not a paragraph on it's own. A news story should be more than six sentences.

Why not share the actual research instead?

http://www.journalism.org/2013/11/04/twitter-news-consumers-...
A Future Of Pipes
The problem with twitter is that it's 160 char limit is too short to be useful without an embedded link. That makes it useful for quick notes and as a pointer to actual news but not getting news itself. Since twitter restricts apps from accessing tweets in commercial volume, the usage of tweets to generate "magazines" full of news that are easier to read doesn't happen.

I use it as a subscription mechanism for my blog in addition to rss. But not much more than that.
Well, yeah. It's awful. Don't use it.
'Should I still be using Java?' is the question that almost ask myself once every week. And till now my answer was 'Yes'. I have worked on many languages including dynamic languages and compiled languages.

We are making heavy investment with our code every day, and I feel no other language is close enough with 'Java' with ease of programming.

Dynamic Languages are great. But without help of IDE and easy way to debug, there is no way we can use any great language. Language on itself is useless. We need tools to be able to use it. If you are the master in programming, then you can do great stuff with dynamic languages. But 99% of programmers out there are not masters of programming.

C# is great with Visual Studio, but costly to use. Java have Eclipse which is free.

We don't need code that is small, we need code that is bug free and easy to understand.
Modeling fanfiction reviews in R
That's no good for Twitter. That just means the TV networks are the ones who get to make the advertising revenues instead of Twitter.
Who is Iran's Ali Khameini?
For enterprise applications usually you would use REST. And that is pretty easy, almost automatic.
9/11 was our Reichstag fire. The government created the domestic threats in order to have leverage over its domestic enemies (dissidents). This is a common tactic.
Yep - I worked at a company where our entire codebase was inside a folder in our web server. We actually copied things locally and had to paste in changes via FTP.

I tried to make the team switch to something like Git or hell - even SVN - something to manage the code and not have it all in one point of failure but that fell on deaf ears.

Ultimately I create a private repository on Bitbucket and pushed the code there using Git and used that as my personal backup in case shit hit the fan.
It would be nuts if the interconnects have higher survivability than the firewalls. Mangling the battery will almost certainly significantly reduce the voltage (I didn't quickly find anything on the Model S, but for the Roadster, the output voltage is achieved with a final series arrangement of sub-assemblies, breaking that should directly reduce voltage).

Of course it will still create dangerous situations and experience will be valuable in judging just how dangerous.
Isn't Trademark a form of domain camping, too?
Well, it ain't exactly Tocqueville, but it does provide an interesting perspective on how the US is viewed abroad.

The thesis is simplistic though, and can be distilled along pretty obvious classic political theory: every society has to balance liberty against order, and decide how to deploy power to defend its borders. It's the essential question in classic political philosophy from The Republic to Machiavelli and everything that came after.

It's not enough to simply repeat the ancient truism that "power and fear are dangerous," which should be axiomatic by now, particularly coming from a German point of view, which has spent the last half-century-plus contemplating that exact question, from the point of view of having quite dramatically been both oppressed and oppressor in that time frame.

The broad question that needs to become visible and widely discussed in American politics right now is both classic and novel, and quite frankly we need help in guiding this discussion:

The classic question that needs to be resurfaced is, how does the US become self-conscious and more transparent about the specific boundaries we draw between protecting order and establishing liberty?

The novel question in the new post-9/11 context is how to manage that same balance in the ongoing battle for intelligence which by definition requires tremendous secrecy and daring.

It's clear that many both in and outside the US are profoundly uncomfortable with the current state of NSA surveillance and I agree. But what is an appropriate level of surveillance? How can US citizens take back control of that conversation and make deliberate decisions about that kind of society we want to be?

And that's really the underlying problem that I think the Speigel article was simplistically, indirectly getting at: citizens in the US no longer have the democratic power to make those decisions. But in order for the governing powers to trust democratic processes to make those policies, we need to become self-aware and articulate enough to advocate those policies, and bring up leaders that energize and focus that discussion with real statesmanship.

Statesmanship! Where is it? Can it exist in the current broken and polarized political environment?

To the degree that we still have some democratic processes in place we are responsible to say more than just, "Snowden is right!" We have to know what kind of society we actually want to be in this new context.

The enemies and threats are new, but the questions are ancient. We have not yet adapted old answers to the new context. And for that we need not only novel political theoretical solutions, but the strong statesmanship to apply them.
This is a question I keep asking myself, specially within the web development enviroment. The company I'm currently working for wants to use Java for their web service needs (I'm trying to push a RESTful approach, but I'm have 0 knowledge of how they could start that in the Java world). So I ask: is Java worth learning for web development (scalability, lines of code, etc)? If not, why?
The nice thing about Bayesian algorithms is that they are probailistic. If only a couple people flag as spam, it will have little effect on everyone's filtering algorithms. If, on the other hand, enough people have trouble unsubscribing to make this a serious "problem" then the email is arguably spam.
Metasepi team meeting #7: Snatch application on tiny OS
Java isn't as flexible (or hip) as Ruby or Python but it's still in huge demand, and there are far more Java jobs than jobs in those languages. Here are some reasons I listed for learning Java in my Java tutorial:

- Are going to a college that teaches Java

- Want to make Android Apps

- Want to program for a large company, like IBM

- Want strict rules to help prevent errors (at the cost of some flexibility)

http://www.learneroo.com/courses/11/nodes/78
There's no need to interface cpython and java. Looks like jython is already faster than cpython, so just use it, interface is ok.
Can you come up with one thing that you can't do with Xamarin (C#) that you can do in Java (Android)? It's most certainly not 'very limited', I have no idea where you got that information.
The best part of java is it's a good language where beginning programmers can learn design patterns and program design. I like java for this because it has single inheritance. Android is a good example of strict use of design patterns

If you want to be a startup guy then I wouldn't bother with java but if you want to be a good programmer it can't hurt