skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Doesn't Go have a GC? How can you then "picture what the C equivalent would look like"?

Yes there are GCs for C, but is anyone successfully doing "systems programming" (whatever that may be) in C with GCs?
Systems does not necessarily imply embedded. I work in systems and, as far as I am aware, the term simply means software which primarily services the hardware (as opposed to the user). Drivers, HW interfaces, anything which has to make assumptions about the underlying hardware it is running on/servicing.
> These languages whisper in our ears "you are brilliant and here's a blank canvas where you can design the most perfect abstraction the world has ever seen."

They also tell me "now you don't have to wait for the language designers or compiler writers in order to 'implement another feature'." Not that _I_ would necessarily be this "brilliant" guy that implements these features. Most likely I will just find some third party library that does it.
On the Structural Differences of the UK and US Systems of Higher Education
The current state is that the project files are MSBuild projects and Visual Studio itself supports only a subset of functionality (but leaves advanced things more or less alone). So the build system itself is quite a bit more capable of just what Visual Studio supports within the files and in many cases you can mix that quite freely.
Ctrl-[ is the ASCII for Esc. Ctrl effectively subtracts 0x40. So:

Ctrl-A = 0x41 - 0x40 = 0x01 = SOH
Ctrl-I = 0x49 - 0x40 = 0x09 = Tab
Ctrl-M = 0x4D - 0x40 = 0x0D = CR
Ctrl-[ = 0x5B - 0x40 = 0x1B = Esc
Ctrl-@ = 0x40 - 0x40 = 0x00 = NUL
You Can Now Have Sex With Your iPad
That would be a good experience!

You probably know this, but just a couple of generic facts up front:

Node.js is basically a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor_pattern implementation with some package management on top (similar to NuGet) plus a bit of healthy hype (solves all problems!). Microsoft is going to add this option as well it seems: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdev/archive/2014/02/18/introducin...

Angular is basically an MVVM implementation for JS, where most things are observable by default plus all the benefits and disadvantages of dynamic weak typing and lack of OOP. Directives are a new concept I guess, scope inheritance is another concept to watch out for (don't forget to install the Chrome extension for scope inspection - Batarang; .NET Demon + Chrome LiveReload is a nice thing to try as well when going WebAPI on server side). It is probably the best MVVM JS framework so far, so a good thing to know. Microsoft guys are using it too sometimes it seems (check the sources): http://status.modern.ie.
I don't really understand what you guys do. Are you just a cloud database for account balances, and we send you journal entries? And then you process the financial statements? I assume you don't automatically process the notes to the FS?
A million times this ^.

So much of the criticism I keep on hearing on... anything programming-related comes from people that have experience of basically ONE platform, which they tried to use for everything -- and obviously failed at times. Changing platform does solve some issues but creates new ones.

In time, once people experience a few platforms and they become able to distinguish when it is appropriate to use each tool, the true advantages and shortcomings of each.

Unfortunately many are stuck working in "one-trick shops", monocultures, and end up being inexperienced in the grander landscape of possibilities and completely loose the plot.
>consider starting a maker space. //

I've thought of this many times - mainly cause I'm too poor to buy all the tools I want and even the tools I have I wish it were easier to lend them so they don't die of rust before their otherwise useful hours have been used up ...

But, I've always thought that this would need to be a government supported social enterprise, never that it could make enough money to pay for rent+wage(s) and equipment, upkeep, insurance, etc..

Anyone actually done this and willing to share some figures (privately if needs be)?

Thanks.
Probably not a popular opinion but: I'm not really a fan of all the user-space async stuff that's become popular (IE: the nodejs/tornado style of single threaded apps with non-blocking IO).

Remember Windows 3.1 or old Mac OS with it's cooperative multitasking where you had to explicitly yield or risk freezing up the entire computer? It's basically the same thing reinvented with a nicer brand. I know I'm dating myself here, but it's really the same model. We came up with preemptive multitasking for a reason: because it's more robust and efficient.

Threads are dangerous, but basically you can avoid the danger for the most part if you avoid sharing objects across threads, and if you do that then with blocking IO your code flows linearly and you don't have to deal with callback hell.
Serious question: If you're building web products from scratch and can choose your environment why would you use .NET (other than "because I know it")?

I've personally never used it because I'm opposed to closed-source single platform languages / frameworks and would like to understand the mindset of those who use it.
Thanks, understand your points clearly.

I'll point out that I did spend a lot of time, energy and money on application security at Engine Yard (and still do as board member) and I'm very proud of our security record there.
By systems programming I mean writing the code that applications and distributed systems run on top of. Raft (https://github.com/goraft/raft) and groupcache (https://github.com/golang/groupcache) come to mind as examples.

That's a good point though. A lot of people mean different things by systems programming.
Where are you getting the idea that every generation is poorer than the last? I personally think that there are certain trends in governance that are not doing us any favors in terms of economic stability and growth, but my most pessimistic assessment would still have each successive generation getting richer, just at a slower rate than would happen with better policies.
I'm even more concerned about the friends of those participating in the experiment, particularly those that were part of the group filtering out more negative messages.

If a friend made a post deemed negative, that would otherwise signaled to close friends to check up on that person and intervene if necessary, there's a very good chance these messages would have been filtered out in a system like this.

The potential affected population becomes much greater than the 155,000 being experimented upon then, and would have put a much greater number of people at risk of not having any close friends or others available to intervene, who would have otherwise been able to do so if the facebook algorithm hadn't been altered to follow this bullshit happiness metric for research purposes.

I really hope this becomes much bigger news, and some action is taken to ensure something like this doesn't happen again; but considering the lack of funding and attention given to mental health, especially in the work-till-you-drop business world, i sadly doubt it.
There's no question I wrote this with a consumer/social filter. I didn't go into enterprise (like storage, for example), even though I worked 8 1/2 years at a network storage company. There's definite bias toward a Twitter platform that never materialized.

I was careful to say "50 Top" instead of "Top 50". I know it's nuanced, but I didn't want it to be an end-all be-all king of lists. Just "Hey - here's 50 I'm watching."
I'm 30 years old, and judging by the immaturity of HN comments these days I'm older than most of you n00bs. I like how your shitty comments don't get downvoted.
SVG is a good solution too, but it can really suffer performance-wise, especially on mobile, tablet and when animating svg node positions.
A big number of those in the "Acquired" column were acquihires that saw the product killed shortly after.
Swatch internet time in PHP: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.idate.php
Lots of the companies acquired had their product changed or killed afterward. This could have been a much longer post.
I'd love more company-designed-and-built towns. There's plenty of land. I'd be happy to look at a town built by a private company (probably a single-purpose entity, but imagine if Whole Foods got into this?).

As long as there's a basic level of legal protection from state/federal law, having municipal-level government handled by a hybrid of company (as vendor/owner) and residents would be interesting.

It's also something people have looked at for outside the US -- e.g. the "Free Cities" projects, and various free trade zones around the world.
Shorthand systems also exist in other languages. I'm aware that there was something called a "fast writing" system in Korea and a version of Pitman-Graham in Japan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand#Modern_Japan
Simpsons already did it. Well OK, @sanchothefat already did a similar thing using Processing.js over at http://hascanvas.com - bit old now but he had plenty of interesting user contributions over the years.
I was waiting to see how long it would take one of you to get upset about that.
Ask HN: have a few min? can you help my girl land her dream job?
Dear HN: My dear friend Maiko from Paris is trying to win this modeling contest in Paris so she can go to California and fulfill a lifelong dream. Think you could help us out with some votes and love? This is her http://imgur.com/ayBRrC6 and here's some of the work she's done: http://vimeo.com/48562900 (this is something a friend filmed to test his camera) http://vimeo.com/99134595 (and this is a film she's shooting inspired by David Lynch, David Cronenberg & Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Here is the direct link to her voting page http://www.lemeilleurjobdete.com/gallery/profile/id/41183/(you can vote up to 15 times per day! You just need to scroll down and click on "Je vote" and enter your email/name. Make sure you don't check that last checkbox so you DON'T get the newsletter). We'd be very thankful if you could help! We're at 900 votes right now but some of these girls have like 20k-50k votes!!! How the heck do they get so many votes? Outsourcing? (j/k). Cheers & happy sunday! Oh, and we're on Reddit too! http://www.reddit.com/r/helpmewin/comments/29f8jz/bonjour_from_beautiful_paris_redditors_im_taking/
Yes, I'm clearly an idiot. Thank you random internet person.
not sure why you're getting voted down...i came here to say that same thing. it's kind of funny.
Unless your valuation is $10M+ and your notes' caps were $6M+, I don't see how investors won't own ~55%+ after Series A (before accounting for 20% option pool).
"Windows devs are typically only good at Windows and get lost very quickly outside of their comfort zones"

this is actually an oxymoron. Assuming we are talking about a one-trick pony, yeah, I can see how that is possible, but it's clearly a straw-man argument.

The problem is the mindset that all .NET developers are .NET developers only. This is completely false -- all good developers I know are comfortable on a number of platforms.
ResearchGate's Open Review [1] and PubPeer [2] have some of what you might want. Both had excellent discussion/criticism about the acid-bath stem cell paper a few months back, for example. However, at least for PubPeer, the active papers seem to be mostly biomedical.

[1] http://www.researchgate.net/publication/259984904_Stimulus-t...
[2] https://pubpeer.com/publications/F0CFE0360002C25DC0BEFE28987...
1.'Grad students' is a misnomer. I should've known better.

2.Ideally HN would've been the internet utopia that the intelligentsia turned to for respite and nourishment.
But if HN(algorithm+users) performs a filtering function on all the posts submitted, then it has evolved to consistently rank posts relating to web-based software development over anything else. Now this previous sentence is rather harsh. There are many wonderful articles on physics , social sciences , philosophy, history etc that are featured on a daily basis. But for each such article upvoted there are a multitude of github.io's .(Which,again is great. HN is after all for hackers and entrepreneurs). Every now and then though I come across a post linking to a blog that provides such delightful insight , a visualization of vectors , a new perspective on chemical analysis ,a novel line of questioning on the usefulness of reason and logic that I wonder if there is a multitude of such material 'out there' that I may be missing out on.

3.By grad student I meant anyone pursuing a rigorous(again dodgy semantics) scientific education(whether enrolled or on their own) while trying to fit the pieces(the various dependencies,if you will) together.

4.As for the whole possibility of creating such a site , I was merely checking(at least at the time of posting) if I was the only one that felt the necessity .
Erlang has preemption and process isolation in user-space.

Go's goroutines also somewhat approach proper user-space preemption/isolation.
Thanks. I'm currently using subdomains only for trusted services, but I will definitely look towards this direction.

I guess there is still some tricks when the user lands in a subdomain and needs to be redirected to another, e.g. www -> mobile, but I'll figure out the details :)
The World As It Is: Post-2008 Economic Reality Part 2
I still find it very difficult to read. Even expanding the font size isn't sufficient.
That's true. It's not just GC actually. Slices and goroutines don't have a direct analogues in C either. But it is fairly easy to reason about the runtime complexity of these conveniences.

But like I said, if I didn't care about GC or concurrency, I'd be writing C.
Node.js, native:

var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
res.end('Hello World\n');
}).listen(1337, '127.0.0.1');

What's the point here?
This is probably an insanely pessimistic view, but my first instinct after reading this is that there's got to be some absolute misery juuuuuuust below the surface of this place.

Having seen and dealt with lots of HOAs (and seen how incalculably awful they can be), I've got to imagine that life in The Villages is probably pretty good if you play along with all the rules, trim your hedges just so, and keep paying those dues and growing old quickly and quietly. But if you're the kind of person who wants to change something, or is unhappy about something, or wants to improve something, or wants to do something even a tiny bit outside the boundaries, life gets rough pretty quickly. "I'm sorry, the board has decided you cannot do that." ... "I'm sorry, this decision is final." ... "I'm sorry, you must comply."

In short: The Villages is probably pretty nice if you're a follower, and pretty nice if you're an owner, and probably pretty awful for anyone else.
>He should have written his blog in Haskell, but he didn't, and I know why: because a language, which throws all these features together is no longer a practical language.

Actually, it's because I like Go's standard library HTTP server implementation!

I'm not claiming that Haskell or Rust are magic bullets, or that Go is useless. Far from it!
These two statements made me cringe:

> But, for systems programming, abstractions suck. They always, always have a cost.

> Generics? Here's another if statement, put it inside your for loop.

If you care about speed (and many systems programmers do), this is exactly the opposite of what you want to do. Unlike your proposal of putting potentially-costly if-statements inside of for loops, generics/templates in c++ provide zero-cost abstraction (in terms of execution time. If you think dealing with the error messages presents too high cost in terms of developer-time, switch to clang).
Yeah, it's not really the user-space part I have an issue with, just the lack of preemption. Erlang obviously has concurrency solved pretty well.
True of course, but no more or less so than regular "government" of the people. You need look no further than Bell California, the poster child of how a few crooks can take over a small town and line their pockets. Unlike Bell, the Villages actually seems to care what their residents think :-).

Given the changing demographics of the developed world (lower birth rates and longer lives shifting the median age higher) this sort of system is inevitable. It can also be an effective way to keep costs in line. If the 100,000 residents are cared for by hospitals that are not trying to maximize profits (the profits being driven by home sales, services etc) you can get pretty efficient at maintaining a solid quality of life for folks.
STM is not appropriated for distributed systems but why hasn't it took off more in the concurrency world?
So what if my website is at Heroku?
How is it an extra DNS request?

Whether you use www or not wont it will still be two DNS requests?

www.mysite.com
static.mysite.com

compared to

mysite.com
mysitestatic.com
The generics thing turns out to not really be a problem. Yes, writing 100% Abstract Data Types is unsatisfying. However, when I'm actually writing custom data structures, I generally have an interface that I want to use because I want the data structure to take advantage of a peculiarity of the data being stored.

But, you know, bad for a teaching language.
There are different types of shorthand. Some are phonetic; some are spelling based. Journalists should be learning teeline which is spelling based.

Journalists should not be losing details and if they are that's their failure to take correct notes, but not an expected feature of using shorthand.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8356000/8356176....

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teeline_Shorthand
Looking forward to being able to get to DEN via train.
This seems like a pretty bizarre solution. Careful design of updates to be resilient to ordering errors seems like the appropriate response here -- for instance, using the remote site like a content-addressible cache, rather than a name-addressible cache.

In response to a cache that provides only bare minimums for functionality, the author seems to be suggesting throwing away all the the cache logic that browser vendors have gone to implement for you, and instead rewriting one's own cache atop LocalStorage and IndexedDB. This seems like a pretty concerning reaction -- or am I simply misreading the author's conclusion?
>So why use Go at all? Quit yer whining and just use Haskell or whatever. [...] Why hang around and complain?

Well, I think it's a good idea to get people thinking about programming language design. Sometimes it's really hard to tell what's wrong with something if you don't know about anything better.
It's reasonable to consider us as a double-entry accounting data store. But we don't just store balances, we store the entire audit trail, including links to source documentation.

As such, we make it easy to show customers and vendors realtime account statements, just like your bank does.

We also provide simple manual tools to allow humans to view and make manual entries as required via our iOS and web app.

We do not handle payment, but we do allow you to account for the payments you request and receive from other vendors.

Finally, we make it trivial to account for splits in marketplace applications, and liability positions in any prepaid models. For instance, gift card accounting is a natural fit for us.

In short, we simplify building core financial functionality for applications by providing developers an API to track money in the worldwide standard manner for the last 500 years. :-)
Microsoft ceased being a growth company in the late 1990s / early 2000s. It's now a mature to late-mature tech company.

As pg called it, Microsoft lost its dominance over the tech world by the early-mid 2000s. It was no longer mandatory to have "a Microsoft strategy" (e.g., partner, out-compete, be bought out). Today the pace is set by Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook. In about that order. The Economist's cover from a year or so back highlighted this.
That's still not quite right. It's not lazy evaluation that makes it feasible to "make a new tree" in Haskell (although it doesn't hurt), it's the fact that the new tree shares most of the state of the old tree and the data structures make the asymptotic time complexity of both update and retrieval very close to (but not quite) O(n).

If you haven't looked at persistent data structures yet then I'd definitely recommend doing so because they are fascinating. A few people have written about Clojure's data structures and the following article looks like it gives a good introduction:

http://hypirion.com/musings/understanding-persistent-vector-...
From reading all the previous threads, the answer seems to be Visual Studio.

Me, I use it because I know it, and because it works for me. I see no reason to jump ship.
I really like the feel of HighCharts. I've been using HighStock (their financial charts) for traffic analytics graphs and it works really well.
Well, why use Heroku for redirection? That sounds like overkill. Your registrar may provide web hosting, or possibly forwarding.
I wish it was available two years ago too!

Next time, or this time if you'd like to compare us against your internal implementation. :-)
I see you wrote "It would be nice"
StackExchange is not a great example since it was started by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood who already had a significant platform where they were engaging with their target market without user generated content.
It reads like his primary complaint is being forced to use "one true way", and the entire article and his decision are some sort of rebellion against this monstrous oppression, which he never describes in any kind of detail for us to understand what it is. I've been ising .NET for several years now, and the only complaint I can relate to is VS being a fat pig.

Many of his complaints about not being able to use other databases, lack of non-locking paradigm (async/await, parallel LINQ), are simply ignorant. And then he talks about windows devs being close-minded...
> Yet the army doesn't refuse to recruit 20-year-olds because they'll inevitably be paralyzed with terror when the guns start firing. Indeed, 20-year-old men are the first people that every army wants to recruit, in all cultures and all time periods.

That's what basic training is for. That, and developing unit cohesion.

Everyone gets paralyzed by terror when the guns start firing. You work through that with desensitization. Part of the training is being shot at by blanks. Young people are recruited because of the items Swizec listed, not because of some magic brain wiring they have at that age.

If you don't work through it, you get dead. Which is roughly how firefights between untrained gang members shape up. They freeze up and get shot. Bystanders freeze up and take a stray bullet. As simple as that. That's the fundamental difference between a trained and untrained gunman.
I think there is migration away from .NET underway, as Windows loses market share to other OSes. Desktop apps are becoming more rare. Web apps are being written in open-source platforms. A lot of the companies still using .NET are large fortune 500 ones, maintaining existing systems. Remember Cobol? I'm almost at the point where I consider .NET legacy. Perhaps, not yet, but maybe in 5 years. Does this mean the well is dry for .NET developers? Not at all. Large companies will pay small fortunes to find people to maintain their legacy systems. Either way, I think it's important for developers to become proficient in multiple programming languages.