skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You have chosen a particularly strange definition of "code".

<script>
var a = "hello, world";
</script>

<script>
doSomething(a);
</script>

My program is either syntactically invalid (because 'a' is undefined) or functionally incorrect (because it doesn't do anything) if you treat these blocks separately. This is Javascript code that relies upon script tags using the same execution context.

Once again, I (recursively) refer you to this comment:

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=843320
>> "Given that I object to the use of Javascript outside of browsers"

Fine. You seem to have something odd and bizarre against the language. Good luck to you and your quest.

You also don't seem to realize that swapping out js for some other language would mean exactly the same security issues, unless you actually fixed those security issues where they are - in the BROWSER.

If you would like to learn about the language, I'd recommend "O'Reilly Definitive Javascript". Also checkout Rhino.
Escaping from Google apps - from Google
I've always thought that building an iPhone specific version of a site is the wrong path to take, and that site operators should create a mobile friendly version that works on iPhones and other PDA/Mobile like devices. It seems to me that for an approximately equivalent work effort, one can cover a handful of mobile platforms instead of just one.

I'm especially annoyed when the sites iPhone version re-directs Opera Mobile and Fennec browsers to the main site. A decision like that limits the usefulness of non-Apple mobile users.
Italian poll on web frameworks
Screen for ghetto servers and startup scripts
I agree - it also syncs certain files I don't want synced - like log files.
I'm tired of this now, you don't seem to be reading comments, and putting up silly straw men.

You're well aware we're talking about <script> tags when used to load external source from other domains, so your example above is pretty irrelevant.

Good luck on your quest to rid the world of javascript!
Just so long as you don't drop the CFL! Have you read the warnings on that thing? Mercury gas accounts for as much as 40mg/bulb, and they say vacate the entire premises, change air filters, and destroy whatever the bulb broke on (like clothes or furniture).

Hazmat!
Joel Spolsky: How to become number one
With considerable uncertainty because I haven't spent much time with his buildings (maybe there is an "aha!" moment waiting for me), yes. The motive appears to be, "How pointlessly weird can I get?" Part of the method seems to be, "Let's make this EXPENSIVE."
cripple fight!
What if the training and consulting he offers really benefits his clients?
So let's presume that we come up with a better alternative, which this article doesn't suggest. By what mechanism do we replace all that is out there and ensure that the current js is not used anywhere by any of the bazillion web sites currently using it?

I think the horse is well out of the barn.
Oh, sweet! I know Duck Duck Go. Maybe I'll take the walk down.
I think I was equally as surprised to see Talasim which, as far as I can tell, doesn't really have IP per se -- just content.

I didn't know that simple content providers would even be considered for funding, honestly.
This reply is probably a bit late, but I've been riding bikes for more than 10 years. I know how to stop my bike and how fast it can stop.

The issue (just from what I've been told) is a question of contact area - bikes don't have much, cars have a lot more.
Is it just me or is the python being taught not very good? See for example this lecture: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute.... The prof starts off by saying that internal class variables should not be accessed directly through the instance, and rather through attribute accessors. The example code with the lecture posted above is littered with what I would I call messy python. Messy attribute setters and getters, catching KeyErrors instead of using .get() on a dictionary, etc.

If you're going to teach using python should you not teach pythonic practices as well? Or is it just about the CS? Otherwise there will be a bunch of MIT grads who will have to relearn python if they ever intend to use it in industry which seems to be the goal. The majority of the comments here seem to be in favour of teaching python because python is fun. Teaching python like java seems to me to take the fun out of it.

If academia chooses a language to teach with should they use the common practices of that language, or does it not really matter?

*edit for formatting... I'm new here
"Perhaps to prevent rampant Collusion, Corruption and Casteism in India."

(If you were being sarcastic, I couldn't detect it in your sentence, so I will respond to it as written. Apologies if I didn't catch the tone right.)

yeah sure. When a seed funder decides to spend 10,000 $ on a company after extensive interactions with the team, his first concern is to avoid "collusion corruption and casteism" and so he has to have line item veto ;-)

I wonder if PG and co lose their 17,000 $ occasionally to people who just take the money and blow it gambling in Las Vegas? After all they just hand over the money, with no "guarantee" that the team will actually start coding/running a company.
dar makes 2 things easier for me:

1) Incremental backups with only a small 'catalog' as the reference instead of having to have the full backup available

2) Ease of splitting the backup set over multiple devices with the ability to unmount the device in the middle of a backup once it is full to mount a new volume.

These things can be done with tar, but not without some extra work.
To clarify one other point. Ubuntu has already reverse-engineered Dropbox (as Ubuntu One)

Having an automated sync of folders with the cloud is hardly rocket science. Dropbox packaged it up nicely but I doubt Ubu' really reverse engineered it they more likely started with something like rsync or unison and made a nice clean and simple frontend modeled on the simplicity of Dropbox.
RMS basically invented Open Source, and I believe he is allowed to say whatever he wants!

So what is he think that Miguel De Icaza is a traitor to HIS ideals! It's his opinion!

And, when you speak with friends, don't you ever accuse and attack anyone for something he did or said! Why isn't RMS allowed to speak his mind, and speak freely!

I believe people are too harsh on RMS and love to portrait him as psycho, weird and eccentric to the level that allow them to discredit him.

RMS is a guy of principles, let him be!
When a co-founder dies
No I agree, I would prefer not to work in .NET for my personal development honestly, but I do know that like my shop, some corporations or small businesses are already locked into the Microsoft stack, and won't consider something like Rails or Django for their production applications.

Obviously these are normally for more business oriented, intranet style applications, not normally public sites, so scaling is a little different and normally they will have their own server licenses already.
Ridiculous: Verizon Pays ASCAP $5M Interim License Fee For Ringtones
The headline is a little misleading. This seems to be more about making sure you're aware of the problems that occur when you allow users to have vanity URLs.
Is there something specific that you'd miss being able to do, when going from high karma account to newbie account?
Www.twiiter.com
The College Calculation
"The most subversive question about higher education has always been whether the college makes the student or the student makes the college."

It is remarkably hard for colleges to show that they add value to students that students couldn't accumulate by themselves during the same time span as college attendance.
Anything that scores me points with my wife gets my $$$.

When my wife called me and said, "Honey, I love dropbox" I figured this team had hit a homerun. I'd been pushing a backup/network solution for her for a few years because of various harddrive failures and file loss debacles, but only dropbox dropped in and "just worked" for her - she's the perfect candidate for dropbox, moving between multiple laptops and computer labs for document editing and statistics programming.

Good luck to the team there and many thanks. I hope you all get filthy rich. Seriously.
I didn't say it was an exact analogue I said the point was the same - simplifying the process using a gui (some think those things are mutually exclusive!). Nor did I even imply that dar is a good solution.

Now if you'd said what's the point of it versus ark, or more likely, rsync or unison I wouldn't have answered as I don't think there is one.
Valuations usually are calculated in a way to benefit whomever is doing the calculating.

That said, a company is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. If Twitter (or anyone) can create the perception that their company is worth x, and then sell it for x, then it really was worth x.
I feel your pain, the company I got my programming start with was locked into the Microsoft stack already so I was really motivated to use .NET to get a leg up.

And yes, I honestly can't stand webforms, the other person that replied here was spot on, the MVC framework is what you want, there is still a learning curve to the environment like anything else, but when it really starts to shine is the debugging, really, that's what I feel personally is the most power aspect of VS. The debugging is simply lightyears beyond using a terminal debugger to me.

Of course you're right, and I worded my initial post a little wrong, it's always a matter of opinion and what you're used to, but even after using multiple frameworks, nothing feels quite as integrated and polished to me as the VS environment.
Petition for easy entrepreneurship....Seen this anywhere else?
I would have liked to see a couple that could host .net projects.
We badly need someone like Stallman to stay true to free and open-source principles. Without someone radically keeping to his visions, everything blurs to mediocrity.
To me travel is an excellent industry to be involved in. It's 8 trillion dollars and expected to double in the next 15 years because of the baby boomers. Can't go wrong with the largest industry in the world and it's doubling. Serious oppty!
[...] sometimes, "a competitive free market" and "a stable, regulated public utility" are both local maxima and may have very, very deep minima between them.

QFT.

This is a very, very important point, and one that is usually lost in the vociferous arguing between those who prefer one pole or the other.
Killing one of the most popular languages isn't a solution, it's only wishful thinking. The situation with JavaScript isn't that bad, we just needs better tools such as a secure way to source external JavaScript and better protection against XSS and CSRF attacks... If these issues are solved, then 90% of the problems are solved.
Silicon Valley startup reinvents the lowly brick
The New York Times, The Atlantic More Join Data Archive Experiment DocumentCloud
That's what I was referring to. He also has a web page:

http://www.swapmeetdave.com

On it he seems to express rather conservative and religious views; make of that what you will.
Falling death rates produce a population explosion, but only for a generation or two. After that, birth rates fall in line and things level off.

So the first part says population increases due to reduced death rate. The second clause that this effect is limited to about 30-40 years. The next sentence that birth rates "fall in line" which I read to mean decline to account for the reduced death rate. Finally "things level off" meaning that the rate of change of population is reduced to 0, a plateau on a population graph.

Which overall I read to mean that whilst there is a short ("generation or two") increase this is rapidly accounted for by falling birthrates and the overall population growth is near zero, ie population is not increasing.

Do I take it you didn't mean to say that?
PR Pro: It’s not the embargo process that needs work
"Microsoft apologist", wtf? Microsoft != Nazis
This is an excellent point. It annoys me daily.
India 19th most corrupt nation
Isn't this case law though? If so this case will be cited in future cases: it paves the way for future rulings on this.

Future rulings are likely to come earlier making the new business model less viable.
We're entitled to wishful thinking. Wishful thinking gives us something to aim for, and then we can evaluate in realistic terms how far towards that goal we can get.
Still technically correct... the best kind of correct!
Maybe it's an atypically good product.
Another case of "government intervention" that will benefit us in the long run.
Death of the American Empire...
> It seems to me that for an approximately equivalent work effort, one can cover a handful of mobile platforms instead of just one.

As pretty much everybody who tried it discovered (and PPK is currently documenting, see http://www.quirksmode.org/m/table.html and http://www.quirksmode.org/m/css.html), while this is simple in theory it's extremely difficult in practice, because there's much more variance within the mobile space than within the desktop one (if you think 10 browsers -- including variants -- over 3 platforms is difficult, consider an order of magnitude more on as many low-power low-perf platforms).

Even if you restraint yourself to fairly advanced phones (and don't have to deal with WML, cHTML or XHTML MP) anything beyond basic (unstyled) markup is risky.

Thank science the space is currently coalescing into either Webkit or Opera browsers, but it's still a pain.
I agree completely. Love or hate RMS, you have to respect that he says what he means and means what he says. He has absolutely no filter and is pathologically incapable of telling a lie. I don't always agree with him but I do admire him.
Can I ask, not to make a point but because I genuinely don't know, what software Uncle Bob Martin has shipped? What products has he worked on?
Yes, yes of course it's a matter of personal opinion. How much time have you spent in VS though, out of curiosity?

I worded that post very poorly, but the point still stands that the integration, power and seamless feel to debugging in VS is unlike any other solution I've seen or used.

Don't forget I use rails for almost all of my personal development, I love the environment and framework, BUT, tool for tool comparison after working fairly extensively with both, to me, it just doesn't have the same level of detail and polish.

I don't get why people are so defensive of their environments, or why there is such bias and hate for the different environments.
> Why isn't RMS allowed to speak his mind, and speak freely!

Nobody forbids him to speak his mind. They just think he's a jackass for making that remark. I agree. And that's my opinion and I do believe I have the same right to express that as he does.
> You seem to have something odd and bizarre against the language.

It's not "odd and bizarre" - it's a belief that the language is fundamentally unsuitable for the things that people insist upon using it for, and reasonably well supported by my own experiences of the language, as well as the reported experiences of others.

> You also don't seem to realize that swapping out js for some other language would mean exactly the same security issues, unless you actually fixed those security issues where they are - in the BROWSER.

I take it you didn't read my reasonably concrete proposals for the use of proof carrying code? It becomes a largely mechanical process to verify that the browser and the language implement "security" in a sensible way at that point.

> If you would like to learn about the language, I'd recommend "O'Reilly Definitive Javascript". Also checkout Rhino.

Thanks. If you would like to learn about Horse and Pony care, I recommend "BHS Complete Horse and Pony Care".
moe, what do you think of stackoverflow.com? That's running on MVC with a complete Microsoft stack.

EDIT: Also might be worth mentioning they use the BizSpark program.
English Premier League Predictions
The English Premier League continues its 2009-10 season with a full set of matches this upcoming weekend. There are not as many marquee match-ups as last weekend which had the Manchester derby.
It's painful to watch Unix SAs who don't understand shell scripts (which are, after all, a way of automating repetitive command-line tasks), because it is such an essential part of understanding the OS and how it works.

I think it is important to know when to use a quick shell script, and when to solve the problem with some Perl (or even some C.) Sometimes it is quicker to throw together a shell script, with a bit of sed, awk, or some simple for loops, automating the command line you just manually ran a moment ago; sometimes it's best to solve the problem by switching to some Perl.
Google is cloud-based? Geeze, all this time I was under the impression that they owned their own data centers, managed their own servers, and built-out their own network!

The article should be titled "Scaling your server infrastructure to Google levels is difficult and Google needs better QA and perhaps changes to their network topology to insure fewer outages." But I guess putting the words 'cloud' and 'credibility' in your articles gets more attention.

The press needs to better understand what they're talking about. The only people utilizing a "cloud" in regards to Google are those people running apps with AppEngine. Either that or everyone who uses an externally run and manager mail service is running in the cloud in which case the 'cloud' is amazingly stable and it is simply Google that is having issues.
Ugh, you're just like my family. "Why can't we just go camping in the woods, like normal people? Why do you always want to descend two miles below the surface of the pacific?"

Amateurs.
Total Recall: How the E-memory Revolution Will Change Everything
Obligatory joke. It was The Terminator.
You appear to be relying on the clairvoyant abilities of those you correspond with. My example could be re-factored into exactly the same situation you're talking about by substituting the body of each script tag with two files that contain the same code, but the example is valid either way.

Really, I don't understand the hostility here. Surely this is a worthwhile discussion to have? Either we can establish that it's not a problem that needs fixing, or we can establish that something needs fixing, and identify where it is.

Implying that I'm on some kind of vendetta just because I disagree with you about the source and nature of the flaws in javascript seems a little bit juvenile. These are genuinely-held opinions, and I'd appreciate it if you would not assume that I'm being disingenuous just because I disagree with you.
it had reasonable traction.

quite a few content providers have taken funding - venturebeat for example.
I imagine seedcamp would only invest in B2C with sizeable traction, but if you have that size traction you could probably get a larger round on your own.

I guess the advantage of B2B services like server density is that you can get to profitability reasonably easily.
A honest question. How is Mono going against the principles of Open Source software? Just by the association of Microsoft or am I missing something?

Edit: Just noticed that Icaza also accepted to be part of MS's open source labs.
37signals didn't make fun of Twitter. They made fun of ridiculous, unrealistic valuations.

That Twitter was the subject of a ridiculous, unrealistic valuation is not Twitter's fault, it is the fault of the person doing the ridiculous, unrealistic, valuation claim.
A weekend trip to the bottom of the pacific sounds lovely* but I think I'd take fresh water along rather than going to the hassle of desalinating. But camping is nice too ...

* Sounds like something a wife would say "sounds lovely dear but I booked us in to visit my mother, maybe next time".
Using CS to unravel the mysteries of biochemistry
"Can I ask, not to make a point but because I genuinely don't know, what software Uncle Bob Martin has shipped? What products has he worked on?"

AFAIK, he is the chief maintainer of Fitnesse. It is not particularly ground breaking code, and is by no means an epitome of design brilliance. That said, at least he walks the walk and puts some code out there (like Kent Beck [junit] and unlike the rest of the agile "gurus". )

Most of the agile "gurus" can't code for nuts(e.g: Ron Jeffries's "Sudoku Solver" attempt is a public example of how not to use TDD, as is his book on TDD ing which is full of pious agile homilies and terrible code).

It is instructive to make a list of the initiators of the Agile Manifesto and try to find some code written by them so we can judge their skills. Mostly crickets chirping.
USB 3.0 Hard Drive
More like convicted monopoly abusers.
The expensive part doesn't seem to be too speculative: http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html

Wow, I didn't realize California and the north east has such high energy prices compared to the rest of the continental US.
Seth Godin takes down pages from Brands in Public
In some ways the native app route solves the browser problem (or at least it would if Apple and Android supported Web widgets like Nokia WRT/Ovi SDK and Opera Web Widgets). This way there is no doubt which browser will be used, whilst still using easily portable code (HTML, JavaScript etc...).

Also if these widgets interact with the service over an API then any developer can adapt the service to their favourite platform.
Toward healthier living: -40 pounds while living in front of a monitor
Nice link! There are PDFs of old APL texts, too.
Even my dog can do that. Oh wait, there's no comma.
This is why we don't see more Microsoft developers coming to open source. There are quite a few out there who are interested in it, but their skillset leads them to Mono. Why would anyone want to help out in a way that would get them treated as a pariah?

I appreciate all the things that rms has done, but he's gone off his rocker; why people still pay any attention to him is baffling to me (other than the tabloid qualities of paying attention to him, I suppose).
To extend your a) a little, Stallman has every right to be suspicious of a company which has; deliberately targeted GNU/Linux in the past and said it's coming after it, said GNU/Linux infringes patents, is a convicted monopolist in the USA and the EU, deliberately uses its power over system-builders to shove GNU/Linux out (desktops options and netbooks), used its market power to make ACPI/power management difficult for other operating systems and much more. People seem to forget these things all the time when discussions come up. IBM used to be the big bad guy at one point too, but they now have a track record of community contributions to point to and say "we are different". There is no such thing with MS, and the top management went from Gates to Ballmer who sees rivals commercial or otherwise in a very combative way (going to "kill Google", GNU/Linux a "cancer"). When someone who was/is considered to be part of your community works with, helps and defends an entity which has tried to attack you and desires to do so in the future then "traitor" isn't a bad name for them. There's plenty of money to be made with GNU/Linux without doing any of the MS stuff he does.

Miguel de Icaza never got over his incapacity to land a job at MS (it was no visa because he didn't have a degree it wasn't because he was stupid) and has always sought to emulate them and defend them from that point onwards in some weird psychological relationship. Novell is suspicious in its intentions and it seems they'd gladly see others get sued if they had a waiver. They are not a community player at all.

Miguel putting "God" and "Love" in his post he doesn't clear up any of the issues while he sits there trying to evoke an open source hero mystique while working on a Microsoft platform clone... for the iPhone.
Indeed, everyday I'm using this wishful thinking thing in hopes they won't give me a COBOL project that day. :(