skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even for Adwood standards this article is really incoherent. It's also a bit of a troll.

The original claim (that web developers do web development because they're too dumb to do real programming) is of course silly. However, building web apps is to a large extend about memorizing quirks, testing code in a dozen different browsers and dealing with broken libraries and lousy debuggers. Maybe 2% of the time you deal with interesting problems, the other 98% of the time you're dealing with mundane problems. Not exactly intellectually challenging.

I think that to a large extend web applications are all about interface, and interface programming is almost inherently mundane. After you've worked out how everything is supposed to work on a whiteboard the rest is "just the implementation". If you're working on desktop applications, it's very different, because the interface is mostly composed of standard controls. Back in the 80ies every console application designed its own ascii interface. Arrow key navigation? Let's build that from scratch! Essentially, web development is in the same stage. Most of the JS code is mundane boilerplate. jQuery/prototype is a leap in the right direction, but we're still in the middle ages here.

On the desktop it's different. MS Paint? Algorithms, and lots of them! Memory management. Flicker free drawing. Bézier-approximations for line drawings. MS-paint, which is a relatively trivial desktop app, has more interesting problems than blog engines, CMS engines, hackernews (the app), photo sharing sites and so on.

Other apps I have open right now? VMWare. PDF reader. Text editors. IM client. Browsers. Putty. All these apps had to solve a lot of interesting problems.

With web development you don't get to design your application (your web framework connects a method to an url), you don't get to pick an architecture (MVC is always the right solution), there are no algorithms to develop, there is no memory to manage, there is no state space to design.

Web development is about giving people what they want. People want inane things, and the web is the best medium to deliver this inanity. Good business? Occasionally. Difficult computer science? Hardly.
Usually it is 2x.

Tax gets complicated in these areas but the general principle is that, any time founders or others need to vest shares, the IRS regards the value of those shares as service income, i.e., taxable income. That is why trivial valuations are used up front even though founders may in fact believe the value of their stock to be significant even right out the gate. Once founders permit any form of "measurable event" to occur - that is, any event (usually involving a funding but also can involve paying people in stock measured by the value of services performed) that gives the IRS a way of putting an objective value on the stock at a time when its value would otherwise be nebulous - then that measure begins to define potential taxable income to those who receive the stock after that event occurs.

So, if a founder gets 1M shares at $.001, and has to vest shares over 4 years, any taxable service income attributable to that effort is negligible ($1K) (assuming an 83(b) election is timely filed - http://www.grellas.com/faq_business_startup_004.html). But, if the company takes in bridge funding in such a way that the common stock has to be repriced, say, up to $0.20/sh, any later recipient of 1M shares of such stock would be dealing with potential service income of $200K.

This issue can also arise if founders do a $.001/sh capitalization, and then do a funding that bumps up too close in time to their own capitalization. In some scenarios, the IRS can treat these as one event and attribute significantly more income to the founders than might appear from their own $.001/sh pricing.

As I said, the issues get complicated but that gives you an idea of the general principles.

A convertible bridge note avoids these tax issues by letting founders get funding without having to price the stock in any way - in essence, the terms of the note say it is a loan, repayable at x date, and forced to convert into preferred stock on the same terms (except for price discount) as those used in any qualified funding occurring within y period. In effect, re-pricing of the shares is deferred until the qualifying round. This lets the company defer the "measurable event" to the date of the qualifying preferred-stock round and lets them keep pricing nebulous (and hence "cheap") until then.
Tool of the Day: JokeyPhone: Humor on Demand
Nice to see scrypt getting discussed:

http://blog.phusion.nl/2009/08/13/securely-store-passwords-w...
Responding negatively to generic posts that ask questions yet reveal nothing about the poster's reasons for the question nor contain any elaboration on the poster's part as to their own <insert inane question topic of discussion> in the post.
"The reason most people want to program for the web is that they're not smart enough to do anything else"

The reason most people want to program for the web is that web is such an interesting and huge thing that is happening now and many people want to be a part of it and many others dream to make loads of money of it.

Web programming is not inherently bad compared to desktop programming. Of course there are many bad programmers who develop websites juts by reading a few ASP or PHP tutorials. But that cannot be generalized to say that all web programmers are bad. There were lot of bad programmers in the desktop world too. (Remember VB?)

"The reason most people want to program for the web is that they're not smart enough to do anything else"

Most of the people are not smart (at least when we look at them from our narrow perspectives). They are everywhere - in the desktop as well as in the web.

At the same time you will see that the ratio of good programmers to bad ones is orders of magnitude higher in some specialized fields like compiler design or kernel design. Just remember that this is not a sign that all good programmers are in the desktop. It just means that smart people tend to cluster around in places where other smart people are. There are places in the web where the ratio of smart people to dump ones is higher. Think about the engineers in Google/Youtube. Cloud computing and distributed computing are all hard problems too.
1) Social Media sites (reddit, hacker news, slashdot, facebook)
2) Nail chewing
3) Excercising

And no-I've never been able to overcome bad habits. My short attention span when it comes to learning has helped me though-since I'm quick on the uptake when I go from subject to subject it lets me suck up a lot of info. And nail chewing..I wish I could quit but unfortunately my fingers are always there and I end up chewing them when I'm concentrating.
I, for one, welcome our new Javascript-kernel overlords.

Seriously, what is he talking about? You could perhaps make the argument that GUI apps are by-and-large web-based at this point, but his argument is just as bad as the one he's arguing against: frontend development is not the only development.
Wrong on multiple counts, starting with calling Lisp "LISP". I could go on line by line and show an incorrect assumption or just plain FUD (on both languages btw):

LISP's most-used datatype is the list, but strings are also a basic type, and dictionaries are supported to some degree through association lists.

FUD. Lists are not the most used datatype, at least by this Lisper, classes are. Dictionaries are supported fully as hash-tables. Association lists are usually written when testing stuff in the shell, but quickly made into a more robust datatype.

Documentation String .. Python has apparently copied this straight from LISP, as it has the same feature (also at the module and class levels)

Yes, same in Lisp. Classs and packages also take docstrings. I can't think of any top-level definition form in Lisp that doesn't take docstrings.

Exception Handling .. LISP can achieve a limited sort of exception handling through "catch" and related operators

Lisp has the condition system that inspired Aspect Oriented Programming. Lisp condition system is still the envy of everything else out there. People should really start learning things before they write authoritative texts on them.

Multiple Namespaces .. Multiple namespaces are central to Python; every Python module gets its own namespace, with a simple syntax (module.varname or module.funcname) for referring to objects therein. LISP packages are essentially equivalent to Python modules in this respect.

And he misses his chance to bitch about the one thing that's imperfect about Common Lisp :-P

LISP uses CLOS, which is a fairly (but not completely) standard object extension to LISP.

Was this written before 1994? That was the last time this sentence could have been correct.

Forced myself to read this just to debunk it.
People like to say that the web is replacing the desktop, but is this really the case? When I look at the web applications I use on a regular basis (Amazon, craigslist, LinkedIn...) I cannot think of a desktop app they have displaced. I cannot say, for example, that "I stopped using desktop application X because Amazon is so much better". On the other hand, my trips to the book store are less frequent because of Amazon. So I would argue that web applications are popular today because they are a convenient way for people to use a range of services traditionally offered by brick and mortar businesses.

Edit: I also don't understand why people bother building Photoshop "clones" for the web. If the goal is to clone an existing application and just move it to the web, what actual problem is being solved?
Not really about PR. We want to find start-ups and teams we can build long-term relationships with.
Why Do You Do What You Do?
Pack a day smoker.

Quit cold turkey 3 years ago - through willpower. Not impossible & not easy.
This is the one to look at if you are interested in sane data structures for representing editable pieces of text.
That makes no sense to me. Google Native Client is just a desperate attempt to hide expensive code from other companies. How many nuclear power plants, switches, routers, undersea pipelines, servers and UPS systems are needed to run a Facebook turd-app connected to Google DRM anyway ? Talking about the slowness of Javascript is amusing when 856 sub-systems needs to be operational for a Web 2.0 "Hello World".

Give me a break. Americans have no cash and live on credit, thereby creating a marked for AT/T, McDonald's and Google.
That all depends on how much skin. Most incubators I've heard of take small stakes in a lot of companies. The start-up just becomes one more fish and it rapidly becomes a numbers game for the incubator. I might be wrong though.
> Who cares about platform or depth of technical knowledge?

The programmer does. There are a lot of really smart programmers that just want to work on interesting challenges. And if you're the kind of programmer that enjoys solving difficult problems, you're not going to find many when building web 2.0 apps.
but I think you know what I mean

No, I have no idea what you mean.

it's no longer subversive.

It never was. Some criminal acts involved computers, I guess crime is subversive.

At most you could say there was little demand for hacking skills back in the day. Where's today they'll get a good paycheck.

It's hard to feel cool and subversive when you're paid well. Tough cookies kid, grow up.
Transmission and distribution costs of electricity are ~30% of the total cost, so if solar panels become cheap enough, the transmission and distribution costs for centralized facilities will become a large part of the cost. Of course, if we get room temperature semiconductors by that time, those costs will come down.
This could only happen since Neil and Simon are co-founder/CEOs. I can't imagine any external shareholders would have approved it (if they had them).
I applaud his efforts to avoid premature optimization. It's amazing how fast computers have become; storing the buffer as a string and that string gets regenerated every time a key is pressed.
A smoker myself - Not that much anymore, but still a smoker. Need to find that willpower.

Also, exercise procrastinator. My problem is I don't put on weight, so weight loss (or maintenance) is not an incentive. But I know I need to work out, and have been doing some lately, even if it is a stiff 1 hour walks in the evenings
Surprise? Apple to bump up iPod touch storage
All paid for by Red Gate. We're hoping we'll find great start-ups we can work with in the future (and also help them get there).
Yeah, Vi is most likely full of clever optimisations as to how text is stored and drawn on the screen. Why reinvent the wheel?
The secret lives of magnetic fields
Keeping Colloquy/IRC up while I'm working. Just can't find the strength to close it like I could with email or Twitter.

Disabling highlight notifications helps a lot though...
What to Consider in Debt Consolidation
Procrastination - I haven’t been able to overcome it yet, things that mitigate it is - keep track of tasks, make them small easily achievable. Also make a new list every morning.
I've dealt with nail chewing my entire life. In the past year, I've (mostly) overcome it.

My solution: chewing gum. Keeps my mouth busy so I don't bite my nails. I go through a lot of gum, but I've broken the habit of biting my nails, so I'm slowly weaning off the gum.
And not using it for anything isn't super innovative either. The investors own the company, what's wrong with giving them their own profits?
Oopsla podcasts
I think the author misunderstood "Worse is better". Worse is not better because it is somehow more attractive to users. It is a better strategy, because by releasing early you get additional resources to continue building the big vision.

Consider company BigCo, which starts a massive $10mil project that will revolutionize the industry. It is epected to finish in five years. A small startup builds a little product for $1000 in a year, which implements one of the core features of BigCos vision. This is clearly a "worse" product. Using the revenue of $0.1mil, they enhance their product. This yields $1mil revenue after two years. Two iterations later the implemented BigCos vision in four years with just $1000 starting capital. When BigCo releases their final product it is already obsolete. This is how worse is better.

In the (Free) software world it isn't about money, but about users and developers. Gabriel tells a Lisp vs C example in "Worse is better", where "1987" is equivalent to the end of the five year period in my example: In concrete terms, even though Lisp compilers in 1987 were about as good as C compilers, there are many more compiler experts who want to make C compilers better than want to make Lisp compilers better.
Drug 'attacks cancer stem cells'
Doing hard things for the sake of it, or for no other reason than to find out if you can do it, is the very essence of hacking. It is also precisely that attitude which fuels research, discovery and invention. So while I can respect your preference for solving customer issues rather than technical ones, I don't think you should diss people who prefer working on technical ones either. Are you saying there's no glory for the people who wrote the JS engines running in your customers' browsers? What about the people who wrote the operating systems on which the web server pushing out your code runs? What about the people who wrote that web server? What about the people who wrote interpreters for whichever language you're using to code your web apps?

Those people deserve more respect than being dismissed as playing "stupid games", I'm sure. Lastly, I think if you're not feeling stupid 90% of the time, you're probably not working hard enough.
I'd Rather Be Raped By Pirate Bay Than Go With Spotify
My personal preference is the KohanaPHP (kohanaphp.com) framework. It's a PHP5 dependant MVC framewor with lots of libraries / helpers and reasonably good documentation.

When V3 comes out later this year it should compete easily with RoR in terms of speed versatility and so forth (from what I have seen)

Ultimately it depends on what your doing: I have prototyped fairly complex sites with ease in a day using Kohana. Im told RoR is pretty good at that too.

I usually recommend PHP for big projects - but I suspect that is because I have barely touched RoR and so am biased :)
this stuff is not reinventing the wheel. it is just building your own wheel, to better understand how it works. and other people (like i.e. me) like it, because then they don't have to write C, when they want to hack a little bit into the programs they use.
There's a small Ruby binding for Scrypt available on GitHub. All it needs is for someone put the time into making it a gem, and maybe bundling it with Scrypt as a Ruby extension.

http://github.com/coderrr/scrypt-ruby/
The decline of the landline
Imagine you haven't had a smoke for 2 days and want one. That's all that quitting is, putting up with that feeling for a long time. You get used to it!

It took about a year before I really stopped noticing that feeling. Whenever you smell one by walking past someone smoking, you'll want it all over again.

Oh, there are some real physical withdrawal effects as well. They leave within the first two weeks.
Web programming generally means stuff that runs in the browser; not networking/sockets, etc.
Nail biting.

Yes and no. Now it's not as bad as it used to be.
Sorry for saying that!

I too wrote my own editor in Lisp 2 years ago, and also wrote one for the Z80-based Z88, but that was too slow, although the Lisp version was okay. But the Z88 (6Mhz Z80) would have required a lot of optimisation and it was my lesson about how what can seem easy requires tons of special cases.

But writing an editor is a good way to learn some things about computer science.
As a former smoker, let me recommend the drug Champix to you. It really worked for me. Quite the miracle drug, actually - you just kind of stop wanting to smoke, and keep forgetting about it. Before you know it you haven't smoked for weeks, and you don't want to, either.

Strongly recommended.
I wish I had read this 2 weeks ago. Last night, I got my program working perfectly, but too slow! I quickly did some bench marking and immediately asked myself, "Why did I do it that way?" The answer: to get it to handle everything I wanted. I had feature creeped myself without even realizing it.

Back to the drawing board this weekend. Same core functionality, but much smaller footprint, and hopefully, much faster.
Fontplore: A crazy table UI to check out fonts
Two innovative revenue models for a free piece of software
Maybe AR is new to you, but AR isn't new to me (I worked with video overlay AR in college in 2002), and I fail to see why anyone should care about these mobile phone AR systems. Cell phones have poor video quality and frame rate leading to a mediocre video overlay system at best. Combine that with the screen space wasted on a street level perspective, and a shaky hand, and you have an application that sucks all around. Regardless, I have to watch people pat these developers on the back as if it were difficult to combine a GPS signal with accelerometer and compass readings and project some boxes into a 3D scene.

Please take this with a grain of salt: nobody cares. Users want an easy to read, easy to navigate map, with good review data. The built in Maps application nails the first two (it even uses the compass), and does an okay job on the last one. You should be concentrating on what isn't already done well.
Ask HN: Do investors want a single CEO identified?
I'm a Bay area hacker currently working on a startup with a co-founder and a small team. We've been getting some interest from VCs.

We're wondering how much we'd need to formalize the business if we took VC money. Specifically, would we need to specify one of the two of us as a CEO? How do startups normally deal with this?
Recap: A Firefox Plugin That Liberates Paywalled Court Records
There is a photoshop clone for the web that is really successful: www.picnik.com
Just because a language is easier doesn't make it actually easier to program in. When you make it easier to build a larger structure, you naturally end up taking on larger tasks. Poor programmers can get sucked into building a gold-plated hacked up version of something they wouldn't have gold-plated in a "harder" language. (And you have not seen the depths to which a program can sink until you've seen someone create a total hack of a Python program!) Good programmers take on tougher tasks to bring more value to the user. But either way, problems in the real world are and will remain complicated enough to suck up any "easy" we can bring to a task.

Where a C programmer may be stuck in a codebase debugging memory leaks, a Python programmer may get stuck walking through a 20-level stack trace to figure out which things are blowing away some attribute on some value that he thought he set and causing the web page to fault.

When we make things "easier", we just take on bigger tasks. Programmer skill will still be the dominant factor in quality of the resulting system. In some ways the "easier" tasks are harder, as there is a lot more opportunity to make bad cost/benefit analysis due to the larger scope of the world of possibilities.
It may be a good way to find VC money and like minded people, but it's totally useless to the rest of the world.
A really great Coding Horror post (whats going on: TC has been pretty good this week, Jeff is ranting about good stuff... ;)). Anyway:

Writing Photoshop, Word, or Excel in JavaScript makes zero engineering sense, but it's inevitable. It will happen. In fact, it's already happening. Just look around you.

With that (very astute) comment in mind - is it time to look at Javascript as a client side egine.

By which I mean if the future is going to be web based (and with Office Online and Chome OS it is hard to argue that is not the overall "plan") then is JS a sufficient engine to work with. Do we need something a little mor powerful - with tighter bindings to the browser, filesystem (sanboxed obviously) and the web?
Sleepwalking. It's been a couple years, but I still write my hotel room number on my hand when I travel.
If they were doing feature tracking (following recognizable points in the video), this would far smoother. They don't even appear to be filtering, as their info boxes are shaking all over. Anyone demoing an AR app who moves the camera slowly is compensating for poor implementation.
I don't applaud that. I think that he missed one important step in the design of a text editor... There's premature optimisation, as in:

"I'll use a nice, buffered storage split in chunks that can be written back to disk to save memory... Even if it's going to be used for a field that accepts max 1KB of text."

And there's proper design:

"I'm writing a program which main/only purpose is to operate on text efficiently. That means I'd better create a good file/text abstraction up front, because otherwise I'll have to rip the whole thing apart and reassemble once people start using it for something longer than 1MB"

There's another haskell editor with vi-keymap and command-mode available - Yi. I think they're using the rope concept to deal with big files.
I love the free market! Nothing's wrong with the free market! Buy what you want, people!

I'm simply saying that, in my opinion, they do not offer fair value, despite what other people say. I'm of the opinion that Apple would have to lower their price significantly before I would consider a purchase of any of their products. I'm saying that Apple's excessive extra cash comes from an extremely high premium on all their products.
Reading this site while I should be working. (Not being snarky, it's completely true.)

I also do art direction for film and video productions which has led to an insane need for me to save anything I think may someday come in handy. Suffice it to say I have a huge pile of junk that I just cannot get rid of and it's growing.