skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I could start over and pick one language, it would be Java. If I could pick two or three I'd add Python or Ruby but let's stick with one.

Everyone knows Java is great (or at least pretty good) for "building large systems" like the article said. You can learn a lot about software engineering from all of the practices that have built up in the Java community over the years. Note that I'm not talking about gross JavaEE stuff, but just good, solid OO programming with an incredible about of libraries for whatever you need.

The real reason I'd push for Java is Android. Android programming is an incredible way for a newcomer to get non-trivial code in front of a large audience in a production environment. Writing an Android app has a decently steep learning curve, but once you get the hang of it you can really make progress quickly. Then you can publish to the Google Play Store with no app review, no $99 fee, and no Mac required. You'll get some downloads and real feedback on almost any app.

The first app I ever made was a total piece of shit and it got 50,000 downloads. It had a ton of bugs that people asked me to fix and it taught me how to make something that people actually want in an environment where I had nothing to lose. Even ended up making a few hundred dollars on ads which 18-year-old me thought was pretty damn cool.

There is an intoxicating feeling when you realize that a few hundred or few thousand people out there are running your code in their pocket, and it makes you want to create even more. It's the same with iPhone/ObjC I'm sure but I think Java has more other uses and Android is definitely a less intimidating platform for a beginner to just put something out there.
Ah, yeah, that's a much nicer passenger vehicle. I keep wanting to drive for UberX a few hours/week just for fun (I like driving), but my A4 (B7) has a pretty small back seat, and getting the right auto insurance + umbrella + etc. would be a pain.
I'm no expert in init systems genealogy but a quick search shows launchd was released in March '05 while Solaris 10 with SMF was released in January '05. Surely they were not working in secret over such a basic OS infrastructure component, so it's possible both exchanged ideas.

But more specifically, how do you think they are equal that SMF could be called a clone? I've had a Macbook for a few years but never bothered with launchd much. Care to elaborate?
The problem is that software complexity grows exponentially with code size. Well, maybe not exponentially, but more than linearly. And the article established that it's important to keep PID 1 simple.
I love this so much. It's freeing to think of English as just a hodge-podge of mismashed languages - because it is!

Current grammar is just a snapshot of the evolving mush of english frozen in time. I'm happy to let go of some of those awkward rules that sound so odd in our current version of english.

Grammar should always be the servant of meaning, not the other way around.

P.S.

If you're feeling truly adventurous, watch the 8 part historical documentary on The Adventure of English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t32nCpzxHUc (part 1)
the depiction of "wall street jobs" isn't very accurate...most people are not wearing many "hats", and quantitative modelers certainly aren't getting coffee for execs. outside of a small trading firm, you're likely to have a specific role as a programmer, quant, or trader. making 500k after a few years is very unlikely, and probably involves as much luck and being in the right place at the right time with the right people as startup options paying off.
Because it tries to fix human problems logically. Humans are not very logically creatures. We love to think we are, but most of us are very emotionally driven.

But there is nothing stopping you from incorporating emotion into your logical models.
I'm sorry did you ask what technologies, or what over-arching philosophy of self-improvement vs. pragmatic career development we should debate?
In other words, they work, but only when you don't need them? Funny definition of "work", that.

(This actually perfectly matches my experience. A good team can work in spite of a methodology; a bad team won't work regardless of the methodology.)
I have heard that they are extremely well-run and everything works as it should - however, they ask a lot of questions if you make bigger transactions.

For example, they need to know where do you get your money from, and if it's from mining, they want copies of bills for the mining rigs, and so on.
I think software development methodology 'erodes' over time.

For example original waterfall was kind of similar to agile methodology, there were re-estimations, milestones, prototyping... But I never heard anyone recently saying that our presumptions were wrong and we need to re-design and re-estimate.

Agile (scrum to be specific) in many companies is practically form of micromanagement. Number of companies are using 'agile' without automated tests and other necessary tools.
there seems to be a lot of author's friends commented:

aadesh 5 minutes ago | link

Very well written!
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philrapo 33 minutes ago | link

I've always thought the expected value on wall street seems way better. (probability * payout) since the equity in most startups ends up being worth zero.
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saurabh_math 39 minutes ago | link

It doesn't cover one important aspect though i.e. learning; I think one stops or is forced to stop real learning. Also stress levels is quite high at wall streets compared to valley.
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nikhilvij 28 minutes ago | link

Would like to add another point, about how important is a company's vision/mission to you.
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cover_drive 48 minutes ago | link

It will be interesting to see how this tussle plays out in the next 5 years.
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kechit 24 minutes ago | link

Well written.
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neo_110 39 minutes ago | link

Interesting.
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srakshe 38 minutes ago | link

Nice Read.
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sagarmw7 44 minutes ago | link

Nice blog.
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deepalimangle 16 minutes ago | link

Nice one
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Sorry, he really should have written "gcc, clang, and EDG" monoculture.

Are you aware of any significant compilers that use anything other than these as frontends at this point?

(microsoft, intel, portland group, comeau, etc all use the EDG C++ frontend)

I guess XLC still does (or it did when I was at IBM 7.5 years ago), but not sure they are really still in the running.
Using Dokku to Deploy PHP Applications with a "git push" on DigitalOcean
I've been getting some reports of SSL warnings. It appears that some computers don't recognize StartSSL's class 2 CA. I'm going to issue one from their class 1 to see if that solves the issue.
Empiricism Is Not a Matter of Faith (2008) [pdf]
What is the point of diverting so much talent, money and energy towards such an aimless pursuit? Entertainment has value, but only to a certain limit.
Linux was never UNIX. Influenced yes, but not UNIX. That said, in the FOSS world it is never 'game, set, match' it is 'game, set, fork' :-). For what its worth though, these sorts of debates have happened forever, MOTIF vs CDE, Streams vs Sockets, Signals vs Events, TCP vs OSI, Etc.
Most people who sell bitcoins at LocalBitcons.com have their price based on an exchange plus a significant premium, not to mention, amounts you can get are very small. A lot of Bitcoiners don't look into Ripple or totally discount it as they see it as a competitor, when, in fact, it's the only thing that can save Bitcoin and keep it truly decentralized.
I browse, participate in comments, and rarely/never submit links.

The topic is interesting but I can't support such a poorly-constructed poll.
Hitlist, a Smart Flight Finder That Saves You Money by Telling You When To Fly
'Hitlist, meanwhile, hasn’t so much invented the concept rather than re-imagined it for the mobile age, with “lean-back” search in mind.'
I'm in the US, and I've never seen one. I suspect Chromebooks will go the way of netbooks before them.
But people don't...
I use this PPA: http://www.webupd8.org/2012/01/install-oracle-java-jdk-7-in-... -- which has no Java files but can automatically install Java when it gets a new version. It seems decently up to date (though I would recommend never running Java on the web anyway, unless you have to because you live in Denmark).
The logical next step: finally we'll get practical, usable EMP guns. After all, it won't be murder to knock down a spy drone, and in many situations the drone operator won't even complain since their activity may have been of questionable legality in the first place.
Maybe I'm just being dense right now, but you said:

Cars [...] actually decreases the number of customers who can get to your store.

I don't see how the comment I replied to proves/explains that statement.
I agree with the privacy concerns. That said, I tend to use G+, Twitter, and FB only to post links to new content on my own web site - very useful use case for these 'social' web sites. I also use a separate browser for just Google, Twitter, and FB.
I am becoming more and more convinced that the single most important part of the development process is the creative one. Seems every successful project I have seen has been one with a very well directed creative development team.

My hypothesis is that when you get engineering and management teams to try and manage out the creative aspect of most projects, things just go poorly.
Popular Pays
FWIW, it was originally in the title, in brackets.
Wearable ‘neurocam’ records scenes when it detects user interest
Knowing Me; Knowing You
Where's the fooseball and beer?
Sure thats correct. Also People have multiple twitter accounts (I agree ratio may be smaller).
Apparently, Japanese electronics firms succeeded at this in the 80s and 90s with embedded control of digital appliances.
Yeah.. luajit and its amazing ffi module to the rescue here..
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2013-Jun...

Anyone has more information about this from the kernel perspective ? Will systemd be the only API ? Sounds strange.
I'm comparing just Bitcoin to Ripple and Bitcoin isn't Turing-complete either and arguably for a good reason.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

I've been a web developer for 13 years. Following a specific methodology doesn't matter, as much as focusing on the important aspects of the project, which are the customers, and what difficult problem the product solves.

The funny thing is that even if a team does this, it is not guarantee of success. If the customer base is too small, or there are lots of competitors, even the best software will fail. Conversely, if the customer base is massive, and there are few competitors, even poor quality software can succeed. Luckily for the software industry, and not for consumers, most teams do not follow these guidelines with the net effect being a TON of poor quality software.

Obviously here, Stackoverflow, and various other programmer focused sites, it's common to focus only on the coding side of the equation. The reality is that the best software comes from the collaboration between customers, designers, programmers, testers, usability experts, and sales. When each group brings their strengths to the table and focus on a common goal and solution, everyone wins. However it's very rare, since often the programmers are seen as the builders, the designers as the painters, testers as a nice to have, usability as a fad, and sales as being helpless.

To clarify a bit: design != usability, functional != usable. A beautiful design does not mean usable, look at the very confusing swipe action based calculators on iPhone. Functional is an auditorium with 20+ projects, usable is having the specific video cable dongle.
I love that book. It explains a lot of the value of being a software developer - craftsmanship.

Then again, anything in software that can be made a "documented repeatable process" in a really deep way can simply be replaced with a well-designed piece of software. So software is all craftsmanship, because everything that doesn't actually need to be craft, we automate away pretty quickly.
It's great that this author's upbringing was such that a robotics class for girls wasn't needed. My mom also taught her daughters that we're people, so of course I wanted a computer like the other smart kids at school (in the '80s).

But some children are raised to think of things as "for boys" and "for girls", and for those kids, a class for girls is absolutely useful. It isn't that those kids aren't naturally smart enough; it's that everything in their lives is telling them that robots are for boys. It's a shame that someone botched the explanation of the robotics class to her son.
Twitter ads are pretty much the same. Never pay for ads for Twitter and Facebook. More than 98% of what you pay for goes to fraud followers.
Looks like your site is down.

Did you have MVP packages before?
$ cat ~/.alias
alias g='git'

$ cat ~/.gitconfig
[alias]
st = status
br = branch
co = checkout

I don't see anyone else doing g='git' but I don't have to write out an alias for each command. For less frequently used git commands I forget an [alias] shortcut but I can always use the 'g' shortcut.
That article you posted is silly.

Regarding the first paragraph: well of course these are going to be literally translated; why would you not translate words like "search engine" or "browser"? Do you want the French to use the actual words "search engine"?

Regarding the second paragraph: actually, most of the words one would put in that category have translations: web (toile), driver (pilote). "wifi" makes sense as it is (as it was coined by an international alliance); "modem" still makes sense in French (modulateur-démodulateur).

Regarding the last paragraph, again, most of these make sense. "Fonts" existed way before computers and thus have a valid French word; "download" was appropriately replaced by "télécharger", from "télé" (distance) and "charger" (load). Again, why would French people use the actual word "download"? The former allows one to guess its meaning even if they have no clue what the concept of downloading is.

There are a couple silly things ("courriel" being one of the few valid complaints, and even then the same argument as for "télécharger" still holds), but overall it's really not crazy that a language would translate words so that they make more sense.
A methodology for lazy people? Sure, that exists. It's called going out of business.
You're right I'm only talking about Vancouver City proper. The provincial government, which controls the highway system, does not have the right approach and has been dramatically over building with the new bridges.
Don't Make Me Read Your Resume
A software methodology can be thought of as a cattle herding dog. The dog's sole purpose is to get the herd from point A to point B generally at the same time and in one piece. The methodology doesn't really matter, the results do. Leadership/management gets to pick the dog though and this is where people complain.... Everyone wants their own dog.
It's not the methodology; it's the people.

Been around long enough to observe 100% correlation, extensively.

And it's a small minority who are competent.
Every country does that to some degree, even the Americans. One thing that always niggles me is when I see an icon for the American flag for English in language options on web sites. Given the number of countries which have English as one of the primary languages (just off the top of my head: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, South Africa and, of course, the UK) it seems slightly misplaced for an American developer to put an American flag for English language options. Just as you wouldn't want a Mexican developer use a Mexican icon for Spanish language options.

A lot of the examples in the article you linked to makes complete sense too. In most of those cases the nouns are what's been translated and the proper nouns have been largely left in English; as far as I know, that's how languages normally work. That said, I don't see the point to the governments alternative word for e-mail.
"The trouble with computer science today is an obsessive concern with form instead of content."

Interestingly, literature has the same problem.
> Imagine a world where nobody dies in traffic accidents anymore?
> "hey hey I can use my phone to get stuff in ten minutes".

If I get the replacement parts for my vacuum cleaner for tomorrow, I won't get in a car or any transportation mechanism to get it to some store. As a side effect, your traffic accident number is down (less individual people driving) and the system efficiency is also up (efficient vehicles moving the goods).[]

What amazon does goes toward the goal you state. It does it in a small way, but it's here today, you can use it now, and it should continue doing it better and better everyday.

Google's self driving car might reach your goal to some point in some distant future. If infrastructure gets a lot better. And legislation problem get solve. And Google is still around by then. Is it so much better ?

[] BTW, You'll still have drunk people, but this problem might as well be solved by other means than self-driving cars.
TokuMX is a drop in replacement for MongoDB and provides ACID transactions, better indexing (fractal tree) and data compression (up to 90%). All without sacrificing performance, flexibility or tool support.

Tokutek engineers are top notch.
CAN CHURN FUEL PRODUCT ADOPTION?
The problem with MtGox is that they are preventing the switch. In a totally free market, that would be the standard scenario--as soon as an exchange got large enough, it could (and would) simply halt outbound transactions because there wouldn't be any regulations requiring it to switch (and economically, at that point it would be better to prevent outbound transactions than to compete for new business).

One of the problems with people advocating for a free market is that they don't understand what it really means: might makes right.
This is complete trash -- a mixture of the most deplorable kind of pop psychology, unsupported claims, even misspelled words. It represents pseudoscientific social psychology at its worst.
For serious arbitrageurs the divergence happened a while ago -- dollars and GoxBucks are not the same.
Nicely said.

One thing I found that helps a lot is to work on a product that includes EEs and MEs, e.g. not pure software. It really drove home two points:

- process can work if people actually follow it

- the craft part of engineering takes a long time to learn but software is such a young field that practitioners are distracted by shiny objects instead of focusing on learning their craft
Even though I am a big fan of some Google tech and their internal platforms, if I am asked who my favorite tech company is, I always say Amazon both because of AWS and their business/tech models.

I have had only one major consulting client in the last 5 years who has not at least partially used AWS, and that was Google :-)
Functions and preimages – a useful design pattern
Audi Nailed it with this ad
and here we go..
this is a new kind of torture.
Shazam Revamps iPhone App In Hope Of Increasing Engagement
The notice had to stay on the site - yes - but I wasn't sure if the link (which was only a small part of the notice) had to be included as part of the notice.
Well, kids born in the mid 80's are no longer early-twenty-somethings, which is a major target demographic of startups (i.e. major target demographic of this website)
Code Bootcamp that Allows You to Keep Your Job
Bill Gates: AMA on Reddit
Too bad it's a subdomain, I use the domain to guess a little what articles are about but I swear I spent 15 seconds trying to understand if it was clojure (core, stm both clojure lingo) or not. Anyway, first world problem.
In the 'figure out X' parts.
As an advanced vim user I have to agree. Just about everything in the "configuration" section could wait a bit, or is personal preference. At most to start with a .vimrc with the following is needed:

filetype plugin indent on
syntax on
set encoding=utf-8
>he is just juvenile and idiotic

So since you think he's juvenile and idiotic, that means that he shouldn't get any work?

>I think he's honestly just an idiot who has gotten lucky enough to be in comedy during the time in history that marijuana is very, very mainstream.

I think he's hilarious and I don't smoke anything. If he truly isn't funny, how does he keep getting involved in different projects? Obviously some people must find him amusing.
The founder may be Slovenian, but the company is not.

Looks like it is registered in Cyprus.

http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/sn...

-----

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&pre...

This article states they were first registered in Slovenia with the name Ekipa7 then they moved the company to Cyprus with the name Outfit7.
Now You Can Finally Launch a Groupon Deal Without Ever Talking to a Human
Not negligence. Malice :) I was really just imagining someone at Google realising what was going to happen and being secretly quite happy about it.
As the distillation of all building games down to the basics, Cookie Clicker is pure awesome.

You will have to force yourself to give it up eventually, though.
A couple of observations. First, we tend to push to maximize potential output. That means demanding more than could actually ever be done. I've come to the conclusion that if you're writing code that meets all requirements, on time and under budget, you're simply not ambitious enough. Pristine, perfect code is a sign of customer laziness.

The software we create today is tremendously more complex than the software we created back when I started in the 1990s. Part of that is standing on the shoulders of giants (and the libraries of giants), but part of that is also process.

The amount of process required for clear, effective communication increases with the number of parties involved. Creating good interfaces between components and the teams responsible for them is really a very difficult problem. If you're working on a three person team, it's easy. If there are 30, it's much harder. If it's 100, you probably can't even know every single person involved, much less avoid stepping on each other, not without a lot of process.

So what process does is increase the potential scope of a problem above what a small team can do (mostly by breaking it down into several interacting subprojects). That's difficult, important work, even if it's outside the realm of the average HN startup's imaginations and experience.
It's quite possible to demonstrate robust systems.

But you have to have robust systems first.
As far as I new it was. You noticed the flickering views and new-style GUI controls, eg. looking at the properties of a server caused massive update flicker, common to .NET controls (early versions only?)
Caps as control makes a lot of things very nice. Including hitting the "ctrl+[" which is the escape code for "esc".

So not only do you have easy access to keys like "ctrl+d" you also get escape.
Early-stage Startup Mistakes
It's silly because the words are jargon, and are not supposed to used literally. They might have been coined from some original meaning, but they are just sounds now, and divorced from their origin.

I suppose in france they also translate "main" and "void" in C programs?
Dumb Starbucks
Are you serious? Don't they have anywhere to play? Like a park? I find it hard to believe that poor kids don't have anywhere they can play.

If not, I don't know how better off people in the UK can live with themselves. I would also be seriously concerned about my safety in those areas.
So... javascript, javascript frameworks, and javascript variants. I think "Javascript, Javascript, Javascript" was accurate enough. And Bootstrap is easy.
Division of Labor: GM, Toyota and Adam Smith