skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh... The simple life of those who choose to have no choice... You just download the official tool set and program in the official languages against the official APIs.

As for the Java-related stuff, installing NetBeans is pretty much a no-brainer. It even comes with its own Java runtimes, if you want it to. And it can work with Java, PHP and Ruby. From phone apps to server apps running on those 1000-core Azul beasts. That's a range Windows can't touch.

Eclipse is a little harder to download (there is a bewildering amount of options) but it's one impressive tool stack and rightfully deserves that compliment people traditionally reserve to Emacs: it's a great operating system, lacking only a decent IDE.

To put it in other way, do you really want to hire a programmer who can't understand/install/adapt/make his own tools? It takes me about 15 minutes to be functional with any *nix box, given a decent network connection. With Windows, I need a little more time, but Cygwin is my friend.
I'm not sure "the relationship between ability level and challenge" is what MC means by flow, if that's what you're saying.

Q: "What is "the flow experience" and what does it have to do with motivation?
A: The flow experience is when a person is completely involved in what he or she is doing, when the concentration is very high, when the person knows moment by moment what the next steps should be, like if you are playing tennis, you know where you want the ball to go, if you are playing a musical instrument you know what notes you want to play, every millisecond, almost. And you get feedback to what you're doing. That is, if you're playing music, you can hear whether what you are trying to do is coming out right or in tennis you see where the ball goes and so on. So there's concentration, clear goals, feedback, there is the feeling that what you can do is more or less in balance with what needs to be done, that is, challenges and skills are pretty much in balance."

http://www.edutopia.org/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-motivating-p...
My reasons for homeschooling are mostly for better academic challenge. (One example: my oldest is now able to be dual-enrolled at our state university at the age of a twelfth grader, taking the upper division abstract algebra course and the algorithms and data structures course for his "high school" program.) I have changed in religious point of view over the years, and my personal website reflects a point of view that is not my current view. By working from my name (ascertainable from my HN profile) to my personal website via Google you'll find my large website on homeschooling, Learn in Freedom (oh, well, I just told you the name), which is NOT current but is nonetheless informative. My oldest son would like to bring the web technology on that site into the twenty-first century, as I would like to bring some of its facts and figures a decade more up to date, but it will do for a start.
One word from Greek:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pedophile

Another word from Latin:

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pedestrian
Well, I might let my 7 year old walk the 3 blocks to school on her own (or with the neighbor kids) except for the last street crossing onto the school grounds, which I'm not comfortable letting her cross on her own because of the crazy scene from all the other parents dropping their kids off in cars. (Ironic, isn't it?) So, I walk with her to make sure she gets across that street safely.

(Before you ask: there are 6 potential street crossings onto the school grounds. The school can only afford to staff one of them with a crossing guard.)
It's not really a small sample, is it? You're sampling (allegedly) 100% of the stranger abductions in the United States, so your sample is perfectly representative of stranger abductions in the United States.

But yeah, I would expect the numbers to change quite a bit from year to year.
You don't have to be deep into twisted. You can just try to make an app with it, or run a demo or something and let me know what works/fails.

As Tornado has no unit tests, it's difficult to see what's right or wrong without a human actually doing the work.
Comparing the elegance of two languages is a matter of taste. Perhaps a better comparison is F# to OCaml, since they are both variants of ML.
ICarousel – Free Open source JavaScript based Horizontal images slider
That's for the full population. It would be more relevant to know the breakdown of in-vehicle vs pedestrian / bicyclist deaths for children.
Here's what he said:

"But there are performance issues with the scaffolding and stuff, and they recognise that, which is why the new build will be better."

Any rails dev could tell you that scaffolding is irrelevant to the performance of a typical rails app. Yet he mentions "scaffolding and stuff".

Also, DHH has said numerous times that scaffolding is mostly just a development tool. I think people who still trot it out as one of the problems with Rails are deliberately ignoring what he said.
It's not a matter of friendliness. It's a question of choosing friends carefully.

I have seen proprietary software so friendly it ends up catching the digital equivalent of STDs
Most things in programming haven't changed and won't change. Yes, we programmers do float on a river of coding, passing through an ever-varying scenery that is the programming environment.

But the river itself and its flow remains the same.

There's a lot of fuzz all the time but, for example, in the last twenty years what has really changed? The playground has invented itself a few times and we're juggling primitives of a much higher level of abstraction as before. But there are always the set of primitives and, out of them, our job is to create the rest of it, the new things, for we are makers.

Doctors aren't makers of new but practitioners of what's known.
I think you've missed his point a bit. He doesn't like code generation in general, which would mean he wouldn't like CakePHP's scaffolding either.

If you read other interviews with him I think you'll find he's surprisingly modest about the whole thing. I've never heard him hold PHP up as particularly better than any other language, and he's the first to admit that it can be messy.

FWIW, I'm a huge fan of CakePHP and I use it daily (although I don't have much use for scaffolding). Its plenty fast if used correctly, which is a common feature of any good framework.
The link you yourself cite shows a fourfold speed advantage for procedural PHP over ROR. Not mentioned is the large memory footprint of a Rails process compared to a procedural PHP page. It's the usual phenomenon of trading off development time and complexity for performance. I'm sure if you wrote a web app in C, it would run even faster.

Rasmus's point in the article is that as soon as you move away from simple apps under light load into real applications, it is no longer enough just to rely on Rails magic. You find yourself needing to understand the innards of what is a very complex environment, and dealing with an idiosyncratic development community that considers monkey-patching a neat programming techinique, and likes to publish its documentation in video format.

He doesn't seem to me to be saying 'don't use Rails'. He's just pointing out you should be fully aware of what you're getting into. Caveat scriptor.
Yes, this.

Our school also requests parents driving their kids to school to consider parking a couple blocks away and walking the remaining distance. A few people seem to do this, but it seems that the majority still can't fathom doing anything but dropping their kid off at the curb in front of the school.
In some grad schools you're assigned projects, but at others you need to continually figure out even what problems need to be solved and which avenues of attack would likely yield the best results. This is much like what startups do, and in fact figuring out the important problems/attack strategies is much harder in my experience than performing the experiments themselves. I don't see how this is "hand holding", but perhaps the grad schools with assigned projects feel more like a normal job.
"In general, it seems like Twisted is full of demo-quality stuff, but most of the protocols have tons of bugs."

http://bret.appspot.com/entry/tornado-web-server#comment-163...

That's not "wasn't for us" that's a very vague comment insulting the project. If that were true, I think it is fair to at least describe what they were -- or the nature of them -- or something.
A BugMeNot-like service that does not centrally host any data and therefore cannot control which domains are supported. Two possible approaches might be:

1. Use some sort of generative approach with hashing, salting, and a PRNG. Advantage: minimal infrastructure. Challenge: maximizing probability of a successful login, when the domains that don't like it might try to poison it.

2. Create some kind of P2P sharing for the logins. Challenge: it should be as easy to install and use as the BugMeNot firefox plugin, or it will never catch on.

BugMeNot is practically useless now, since it seems to comply with all take-down requests.
"- You have to spend lots of $$ to be able to program in F#."

"- You can run your code only on a Windows machine (reliably.)"

Why not mono?
- You have to spend lots of $$ to be able to program in F#.

[...]

- You can run your code only on a Windows machine (reliably.)

port install fsharp
That's only true if IE is open source, which it isn't.
I won't deny F# is probably the wrong choice for people who don't use Microsoft technology already. But still, many of your points are wrong or misleading:

- F# is still considered an unreleased research product so you don't know what they'll do with it until it's released. It's within the realm of reason that they would submit it to a standards body like they did C# at which point your criticism is moot.

- Your point about Open Source is a decent point. But people who choose closed source projects tend to do so for their own set of reasons (mostly support and the fact that they don't have the time and/or skill to look through a languages source code to figure out a bug themselves)

- Again, it's unreleased and you don't know what Microsoft will do with it. At least for web development Microsoft makes free software available for using C# and VB.NET (called Visual Web Developer). They could very well integrate F# into that.

- This is just opinion mixed in with conjecture (since again you're talking about an unreleased project with no real community yet)

- I've used Mono and found it very reliable so this is just misleading

Finally, you're quoting an article written by a guy trying to make the case to Microsoft developers. He's talking about his upcoming talk at a Microsoft conference after all.
I use coLinux to get around the networking issue. It's sometimes painful (you need to use a pretty old kernel), but it gets the job done, and it feels a little more performant to me. It's also nice because I can easily spin up a "server" if I need it for some special purpose.
That's a poor generalisation, and I assume you've built it on the back of a single observation.

On the contrary, my observation is based on comments I've read in many Python community forums, especially when applied to Python vs (your other high-level language of choice). For example, I've read many comments to the effect of "I like Python over (Ruby, Perl, etc) because it promotes one right way of doing things and having one package for handling problem X." I am not stating that this belief is a Python language requirement, nor do I believe that this observation adheres to all Python coders so yes, it is a generalization. But my generalization is certainly not based on a single observation. Finally, I will gladly play the devil's advocate and agree that there is little way to prove this generalization, short of spending several days collecting emails on Python mailing lists, which is why it is offered as an observation only. It is an observation of the practices of a community not something codified into a PEP, at least as far as I know based on my limited research.

I completely agree with the rest of your comment and value your critique. Python is a great language that provides a diverse set of tools, which is why I also choose it to handle many tasks.
Friendliness of the community? I've not seen it. I've found the internals group to be particularly unfriendly, though perhaps that's not the one you meant.
I made tornado work on top of twisted by removing 1,389 lines of code and adding 92 (and I believe most of that was adding compatibility wrappers to keep the API mostly sane).

My effort is not done -- I do have a lot more code to remove. Where it is now, with having mostly just removed code, I can do far more than tornado can do out of the box, and I can do it starting with the same API. I did not modify twisted.

And seriously, these are all insanely smart guys. If they have to "ramp people up", they have to do that with their new framework anyway, but I can't believe that if I can understand twisted, they can't.
Tell HN: Web Standard for Sarcasm
In the past, bloggers/trolls/users who are being sarcastic had 4 options:

1. no indication of sarcasm

result: at least one reader thinks they are serious and replies with some nonsense response wasting his and other readers' time

2. <sarcasm /> tag

result: super dorky, too verbose

3. sw

result: no one knows what this means (see #1)

4. ps: i was being sarcastic

result: you are also a loser

THE NEW WEB STANDARD FOR SARCASM:

A committee of supernerds convened the other day and decided the new standard is to only capitalize the second letter of the sarcastic word:

for example:

Joe: I configurated it yesterday.
Bob: Configurated? Don't you mean configured?
Joe: sOrry!
Your perception of twisted may be as it is because you can do SO MUCH with twisted. If it's a web.py replacement you want, it doesn't add complexity.

Take a look at the diff to go from a friendfeed ioloop to a twisted reactor loop (with my adaptor) in tornado:

http://pastebin.com/f707e5ae9

You replace two imports with two other imports, and three lines of startup code with three other lines of startup code. Your app doesn't change.
I like Seth's writing, but I don't like this post. He's missed the point entirely.

In the Chris Bliss video, he's on a stage with all kinds of lights and scenery, performing an original routine in front of a crowd. In the Jason Garfield video, he's copying someone else's routine in a high school gym with no crowd. Sure, Jason's performance may be harder, but Chris Bliss's performance is more interesting. Its not that Jason made it look too easy, its that he made it boring.

Instead the takeaway could be this:

You users don't care if what you did was hard, they care about whether they like the product. And that's as much presentation (i.e. UI) as nuts and bolts.
> That's shortsighted. Maybe the short term goals had different accents, but in the long run, Twisted and Tornado have the exact same goals.

Actually they don't. Twisted is "an event-driven networking engine written in Python"

Tornado is "an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed"

Note that the scope of these things are completely different.
I wrote a little cl script called 'do'. It requests a name, description, and tag list for anything I think I might like to 'do' in the future. For instance:

Name: Gideon Series
Do a series of new-primitivism photos, Goldsworthy
pieces, except environment is cheap motel room. Bible,
towels, bad art, curtains, etc.
Tags: art, medium, moderate

Then I can forget the idea. When I feel the need to begina new piece, I can ask for ideas about art:

> do art

And one will appear for my perusal. 'Medium' and 'moderate' refer to difficulty and time required.

> do short easy

Helps to fill spare moments, when I don't have much attention to spare.
cough.
That Firefox is not a rewrite of IE, even though they accomplish the same task, was my point. Perhaps a better analogy would be the JVM and .NET's CLR.
I totally agree that a lot of sites fail to get the most important info front-and-center.

I recently started building http://minivite.com to address that problem.
In the words of Fred Brooks himself: The book is called "The Bible of Software Engineering" because everybody reads it, but nobody does anything about it!"
yeah the system sucks. I don't plan on introducing crotch spawn into this meaningless existence either, so I guess I'll never know.
> It's easy to deploy.

Yup. This is the reason PHP is trouncing Python. Python should be where PHP is, right? But it isn't. If you ask the Python folks for easy deployment, they'll go into a lecture about how it's ugly, or a hack, or not general enough. And then they'll start telling you about how you should be using WSGI.

You: "I like vanilla."

Python: "What? Vanilla? There are better flavors than that. C'mon. Let's get you some nice strawberry."

You: "But I don't like strawberry.

Python: "Well, you should! It's a great flavor! How many scoops would you like?"

You: "[Sigh]. 2. Sugar cone, please."

Python: "Here you go!"

You: "Hey, this is a wafer cone. And it's only one scoop. And it's sherbet!"

Also, learning to make a scripting language spit out some html is easy. Learning how to get various apache modules built, configured, and installed -- or convincing an inexpensive ISP to do so -- is a whole nother ball of wax.

AFAICT, PHP did deployment right, and is still making "better" languages look like they can't get their act together. I should be able to drop a .py file into my docroot and a persistent apache-managed python should execute it (when it's requested) and spit the results back to my browser. It's astonishing that we don't have that.

You: "I like vanilla."

PHP: "Here you go. Vanilla. Also take these napkins -- it's a little drippy."
That's really awesome. I'm a huge proponent of finding the real, actual insights and lessons behind a subject (plug: I blog at betterexplained.com).

The dirty little secret of education is that it's "ok" to cram and forget. Most classes reward that; education is about "being able to do something once" vs. actually remembering and applying it.

I hope you write more about your findings!
Which is the same as saying it's a failure of documentation and explanation.
Where I grew up it was common to have the school organize a rotation of somewhat senior kids to act as (unpaid) crossing guards (standing in small groups) on the major crossings within a few blocks of the school. They'd stand there in the mornings and sometimes right after school. Does this sort of thing ever happen in the US?
I was eyeing up the code earlier for this. This is great and is a good counter for my argument about Tornado's near drop in replacement. However, that's not my main point.

Ultimately, I think Twisted, due to the fact it does so much, is intimidating. The documentation lacks succinct examples of how to implement the very basic things people want to implement. The documentation to figure out how to make an app is buried under at least 3 clicks and even then isn't clear. The comments, when there are comments, in the examples don't truly explain the why of the actions just that they are there.

If twisted wants to be considered as a serious contender as foundation to develop web apps on, they need to take a look at how important very good documentation is to Django's success or how the simple, uncommented example at http://www.tornadoweb.org/ is more clear than the first bit of web example code at twisted: http://twistedmatrix.com/projects/web/documentation/examples....

I'm not knocking twisted, I'm trying to explain why when I went around evaluating what I would use in my projects, I did not choose Twisted. If you find my decisions and observations valid or not is up to you.
Track Twitter Search Terms Over IM in Near Real Time
I vote for super dorky
"I'm a PC, and more happy is coming"
nIce!
Well, we're working on the technology end now but I don't want to show anything until the bits are a little more cooked. You don't want me to waste your time with buggy code now do you?

What I was asking about had more to do with what kind of open source organization do you like to participate with?
You are aware that your link is of a study that covers only two municipal regions, both in Quebec. Not to say that Canadian children definitely walk more (I don't have the evidence to state that), but this is hardly representative of Canada as a whole.
Damn Small PHP Frameworks. Because size does matter.
F# is being released with Visual Studio 2010 so its not just a research product anymore right? Also the rest of the .NET framework source is available so I assume F# might be at some point as well.
I don't like using Cygwin on Windows because of the uncanny valley. It's almost like having a Unix shell, but I'm still on Windows, so things don't always work like I expect a Unix shell to work. I'd rather just use Putty to connect to development and experimental machines, and use Windows in the way Microsoft expects me to.

(Of course, I'd rather have either a Linux or OSX machine, but sometimes I can't choose.)
That's what I hate about people. What makes people pay attention isn't the ideas themselves, but whether it looks like you worked hard in writing it.

You're bitching that people consume ideas in different media, in different forms? I'm confused by this.
The use of words instead of numbers to indicate integer values is especially annoying to me.
Rasmus's point in the article is that as soon as you move away from simple apps under light load into real applications, it is no longer enough just to rely on Rails magic.

This seems backwards to me. I consider PHP to be ideal for simple apps. Rails comes with a certain amount of overhead (memory being the most important as far as cost is concerned), therefore I think it's only really useful for applications of a certain complexity. What makes Rails useful are some basic architectural assumptions (MVC + a bunch of low level assumptions / web helpers) that are surprisingly applicable to a large chunk of web apps. The magic is just some Ruby tricks to streamline things, but you don't "rely on it". Where Rails tends to fall down are limitations of the Ruby runtimes, or applications where the web front-end is not a significant enough part of the problem to warrant the Rails approach.

PHP is similar in some ways--it includes many web-based assmptions, but it doesn't make any architectural assumptions, which means there is no way to benefit from common conventions (eg. knowing where to look for a certain file or class definition, what a variable or database table should be named, where is the default place to put certain types of logic, etc). As such, PHP is better than any other raw language for web work, but it doesn't really allow you to easily utilize best practices that we've collectively learned over the last 15 years of web development.

That's not to say Rails is just plain better... to the contrary, I think PHP is a better templating language. The difference is that with PHP you are better off moving to a real language for your back-end on any moderately complex application fairly quickly. Rails, on the other hand, will let a significant portion of web apps (if not a majority) go quite far without any separate back-end.
IPhone app lets users help track infectious diseases
Ask HN: Stock Quotes API/Feed
Is there any service offering free stock quotes in an api or feed format. I'm not too concerned if there is some sort of a delay.
You forgot 'Great' without exclamation marks (see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=819160).
I like that they've switched tactics from "Let's passive-aggressively nitpick at Apple" to a pure "Look at how awesome we are!"