skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A developer pimps his wares by 1) still having a portfolio of sites they've worked on, 2) being able to have a reasonable conversation, and 3) being competitive on price.

You have no idea how goddamn hard it is to find developers - they're generally terrible at any semblence of marketing. And I say this as someone who spent over $100,000 on a web development firm for my startup before I was able to recruit an internal team. Everyone knows about Pivotal Labs, but after that, it's all-but-impossible to know where to look.
Ah yes, apologies, I completely misunderstood your statement.
Doesn't the documentation have to then become as rigorous as code --- effectively a high-level language in its own right? So writing the documentation becomes, well, just like writing a program without testing it as you go, without benefit of tests or (if desired) static type checking. If so, then the development process turns the programmer into a kind of human compiler: translating the specs into a dialect of C for the safety-certified compiler.
If you bought gold right in the middle of the subprime meltdown (early last year), you have lost money today. If you bought stock, you have made money.
Hmm. It doesn't really "simplify" locking. In does in the simple case of:

lock();
++value;
unlock();

Where a lock is used to protect a single memory location, and the critical section is straight-line code. But when the critical section is more involved, CAS based algorithms become considerably more complicated. CAS based algorithms which do not require mutual exclusion are called "lock-free algorithms," and reasoning about them is hard.

The wiki for it is a good start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-blocking_synchronization And I'm going to go ahead and plug the work I've done in the area: http://people.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/streamflow/
One piece of feedback: we've found that buyers don't think in ranges; they think in terms of budgets. If my budget is $10,000, I don't just want to see the $3K-$10K range; I'd want to see all the designers under $10K, so that I'd see the under $3K and the $3K-$10K group all at once.

EDIT: Second piece of feedback: you should add a "see other designers like this" on the page. For example, for http://haystack.com/company/161-right-sizer, there should be a link to see all other Chicago designers under $3K. (I got to this page by clicking on its card on the front page of the site.)
["should surprise"---what does that even mean? What if it doesn't surprise? Would that also be a surprise?]

It means that they are expected to exceed expectations. HTH. :)
And "Toys" [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toys_(film) ]. Warfare has become a game of economics (for the winner, at least).
A good question you raise: is subtyping itself even a good idea? (Why not make data non-subtype-able and make interfaces composable?)
As the Robot Devil said, "They're VERY good hands."
At $99 / month for Pro accounts, I can see 37 signals making a small fortune off of this.
http://docs.python.org/library/multiprocessing.html#module-m...

It has a Queue interface for passing objects, but also allows shared state.
As fast as possible is premature optimization in most cases. Python still wins.
yep. google is too in talks with twitter.
I thoroughly enjoyed the justification given for inventing something new despite the existence of XML / JSON / Thrift etc.
This is just silly:

I just can’t. I find the entire concept behind IDLs and code generation abhorrent. Coming from a background in dynamic languages and automated testing, these ideas just seem silly.

The point of IDLs is to provide a stable, exact, portable and succinct definition of an inter-application protocol. In defining the protocol explicitly in a language neutral way, it is easier to ensure conformance and correctness of implementation.

As a side effect, it does make code generation easy, allows one to optionally apply static typing to ensure that messages are always correctly formed, and ensures a _DRY_ approach across the board.

You could just as easily implement poorly defined interfaces using Protobuf or Thrift -- nobody says that you actually have to use an IDL, and the serialization format doesn't require it as long as you keep the messages self-describing. Moreover, a lot of effort has gone into making Protobuf (and even Thrift) as efficient as possible -- yet another serialization format is wholly unnecessary.

[Edit] Google even outlines one way to implement self-describing messages using the existing protobuf standard in the project documentation: http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/techniques....

Other methods including simply encoding fields as tuples of (name, value) -- protobuf includes value types in the field encoding.
That's no different than the digg/reddit vote buttons.
ummm is this twitters first revenue making step????

am i really far off or has everyone overlooked this? or are they going to give it away from free because their more concerned about growing the community rather than making $$$
Ha. Didn't think of it from that angle.. but that makes total sense.. Thanks!
"Suppose you want to write a new program, something like a text editor."

Then I open up the GUI builder for almost any language, throw a pre-built text box in place, and press compile. Next?

Not arguing against the language itself. It's just that using "text editor" as a use case is about as descriptive as starting with "Suppose you want to write 'Hello World.'" It doesn't tell you anything about what the actual requirements are. Compiled isn't necessary to build a text editor. Java isn't excluded. Etc.
I disagree. The last thing Python needs right now is to make Python 3.x even more different from the 2.x line. As a strategic move, I think it makes a lot of sense to stabilize 3.x and wait for it to gain momentum before going on to more syntax changes.

Though I have to say, I'm quite disappointed that PEP 380 is getting left behind, since I find the alternative to be pretty ugly and heavy-weight.
I understand the philosophy and yes that has in a way future-proofed the JVM. The question is "Does it make sense to try and include advanced language features in a round-about manner into Java ?" Surely this approach only leads to additional complexity and broken features.

Why not put that effort into a newer language running on the JVM ?
Great idea! I wish the maintainers & implementors of other languages would follow suit.
A better filter than just "Other Cities" would be nice.
I know it is very fanboi of me, but I remember the Wired Pray cover. I remember Michael Dell saying "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." ( http://bit.ly/3CupAe How bout them Apples?) I remember thinking Jobs was an idiot when the cut off Power Computing, I remember thinking killing 3.5 inch drives was a disaster, and USB only, and OSX was terrible, and, and and. And while Apple is far from perfect, as is Jobs, the relentless execution they have displayed over the last 12 years is truly inspiring.

Keep it up Apple, and please don't get too complacent. You and the personal computing industry are both better off when you are running for your life.

(And thank you for producing a laptop that my wife can create DVDs on without calling me for technical support)
Good ideas/feedback. Thanks for posting.
You should clarify. "Expectations that are set by people that have no idea what Apple is really doing internally"
Same here, even though I'm using Chromium on Linux with the chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfree package installed (so it should support all HTML5 video formats that Safari does).

There don't seem to be any VIDEO elements on the page, so I guess they're only sending them to a limited set of "supported" browsers.
I'm getting an error message: "Twitter search results are currently unavailable."

Fail Whale on Bing?
While you are right that a text-box is a bad example of a programming language, what he is talking about is a text editor.

A text box is not a text editor. After all, take a look at Vim or Emacs. They have their own languages, syntax highlighters, language analysis tools, GUI and ncurses tools, etc... A goodtext editor is a huge piece of software - millions of lines of code (I think), perhaps, in the case of Emacs.

Although I do agree with you - good examples are important.
It's a phenomenally bizarre way of solving the problem. Not only do you have to maintain patches to sshd (which increases maintenance costs and makes deploying security updates considerably more time consuming), but you also risk introducing security bugs in sshd itself.

There are already plenty of external solutions to this problem that do not involve patching vendor-shipped software, and writing your own is not difficult.

Here's one -- http://code.google.com/p/splatd/

Will synchronize public keys from LDAP to local hosts, automatically create home directories, delete user's home directories when their accounts are deactivated after a grace period, etc -- and you don't have to patch sshd.
The GIL is an implementation detail; not a bug.
Apple has a netbook - its called the iPhone. I use my iPhone like I would use a netbook and then some.
you should require people to provide references for each work completed.
Ideally it should otherwise you are vulnerable to a range of differential attacks. In practice it's a compromise between performance and security.

It might very well touch a large number of blocks to stop an attacker working out where on a disk a particular file is. There are a bunch of rsync freindly crypto implementations that minimize this effect
Yes, it’s stupid (ambiguous, imprecise) terminology, but pretty common usage when describing computer benchmark results.
You mean, like http://code.google.com/p/textadept/ ?
ALL HAIL APPLE
I'm surprised that "Austin" isn't on the list of cities.
I don't know what's wrong with me, since a lot of people seem to like this guy, but his posts just piss me off.
Yeah. It's funny. As soon as you start doing it, it's really not that hard to keep up with.
Which seems to come down to "we don't like explicit protocol definitions via IDLs, think they are somehow incompatible with dynamic typing ethos, and didn't understand that Protobuf/Thrift can very easily be leveraged to provide dynamic self-describing messages without having to define a whole new encoding/protocol specification".

See also:

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=895607

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=895280
Woah there. This is the kinda stuff we saw in the early dot-com days. Mobile will be big, but there are some huge hurdles to get over...just off the top of my head:

1-Bandwidth limitations. Have you tried using AT&T in San Francisco?

2-Divergent platforms: I write mobile software for a living and I'd say about 60% of my time is spent making the same software work on a different device. This is ruthlessly inefficient and I've yet to see anything (aside from the single resolution iPhone) to address this issue.

3- User Interface: Small screens, small keyboards.

Mobile will be big, but it's got problems, and if too much VC is poured in now we'll build up a market that can't be sustained. It's already happened, in some ways, with the iPhone marketplace.

Easy does it.
Canonical and IBM team up on Ubuntu-based Win 7 alternative
I'm not sure the analysis is correct at all... I own both an iPhone and a MacBook Pro, and neither of them quite serve the purpose a netbook would.

I'm considering getting an Asus netbook within the next 6 months should I hear no word of an Apple version. I'd rather run a lean OSX than Linux, but I'd be fine with Linux if it meant I'd have a portable full-sized keyboard with nice i/o options and a big-ish screen.

Perhaps the plastic Macbooks would compete with an Apple netbook, but it's hard to believe that a significant number of people who already own a Mac and people who wouldn't considering buying a Mac wouldn't purchase a netbook.

Correlation != causation, Gruber.

Unreasoned speculation and a small assortment of media articles do not a convincing argument make.
Except that the answer would simply be nonsense if applied to Clojure. It does too have safe, fairly lightweight concurrency, FP and immutable persistent data, both a standard library with all the trimmings and scads of add-ons (via Java), yadda yadda, modernity out the wazoo. What's it missing?

(I think the actual answer here is: mindshare. Respondents heard Lisp and assumed CL, maybe Scheme.)
Here is a decent article about the research: http://www.bioedonline.org/news/news.cfm?art=2325
That logic doesn't seem very, er, logical to me.

The post is basically a bunch of quotes about Apple a netbooks. Some saying they should have one because an Apple netbook would be cool (it probably would be), some saying not having a netbook is hurting Apple (they seem to be doing just fine), some making shoddy predictions about slumping sales, and some saying Apple is a missing an opportunity (maybe they are).

And Gruber's conclusion appears to be that had Apple had a netbook they'd be losing money. How does one reach that conclusion? Presumably, he means that netbook sales would cannibalize high end laptop sales. But that's doubtful. Most people who buy a netbook either have a high end laptop as well (like me -- I have a Macbook, a Sony VAIO, and an Asus EeePC) or were never going to buy a high end laptop in the first place.

So... you can debate the merits or necessity of Apple adding a netbook all you want, but claiming that adding a netbook would have caused Apple to _lose_ money is just silly.

That said, Gruber appears to be a Yankees fan, so he can't be all bad...
Hmm , i think i understand what it does and what its used for but i still think the UI Design can be improved a lot and made more intuitive, as a first pass: Wasted page space,very small font sizes, colour combination can be better, too many tool tips.
Here's another feature I'd like to see: Availability.

This is the most frustrating thing about any designer I've ever contacted or worked with.. Half the time their plates are so full that you can't get a slot.. I'd like to know that in advance so I have a better idea of wait time..
I'm running Ubuntu 'NBR' (note book remix) and it's an amazing little package, highly recommended. The netbook I use is one of the small acers, it has a 3G card slot and NBR recognizes and works with the 3G modem better than windows did on the same machine.
Agree. We're working on that. Stay tuned.
also small caps are harder to type its just tedious to change the case so often
Disagree. As I said a week or so ago. Retweeting is often the same as an email asking you to forward it to 100 friends to get good luck. I don't think that makes for very good measurement of what is important and what isn't.
The margins on netbooks are currently so small that they're essentially a commodity, and apple has never been a commodity company.

Netbooks are clearly popular, so it seems unlikely that apple simply isn't interested in the market. The question is "can apple create a netbook that's differeniated enough from the rest of the pack that they can get the margins they want on it." The fact that one doesn't seem to be in development yet suggests the answer is 'no', but they may just be focusing their resources elsewhere.
For me the goals of zimbu look very much like the ones of ooc (it was mentioned a few days ago http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=882864) and ooc looks much nicer than zimbu.
12 Characteristics of Successful Internet Entrepreneurs
RT @google: Tweets and updates and search, oh my
Ask HN: Where did you learn about security/attacks?
I have noticed quite a few HN users are well versed in security and various attacks (recently mentioned is the "cleaning lady" attack by cperciva (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=895411)). I consider myself well versed in basic web attacks (SQL injection, CSRF, etc.), but I would love to learn more about the algorithms themselves and I'm wondering where you guys/gals learned about encryption algorithms in general and the various attacks on them. Same thing with the general security issues (like the one discovered by dfranke on hacking arc).

Are there any resources you could recommend to those (like me) who want to learn more?
You might want to check out Stack Overflow Careers.
Trying to make all your programs go by those 5 commands?

http://tuxtraining.com/2008/10/27/tip-bash-shortcuts http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2005/08/bash-shell-shortcuts.h... I don't I can function without
I think the code generation part is a lot worse than the IDL part.
IDL is best if it can be generated directly from the service code (using appropriate and syntactically valid markers in the service code to specify what to expose) or if the IDL can be used to generate an interface layer for the service which automatically attaches itself to the correct implementation methods.

Otherwise, you've got to maintain the IDL separately from the service implementation, and keep the two in sync manually. That's a pain, and the bigger your service and/or the more people are involved with developing it the worse the pain gets.

I have three concerns about BERT:

1) It looks like every method in your service code is automatically exposed. That could turn into a security problem. I prefer to explicitly indicate which methods to expose.

2) It looks like your function names have to match the function names exposed by the service. That's fine as a default, but could become a problem over time as the service evolves. Sometimes you want to rewrite the guts without breaking API backward compatibility,

3) I'm not sure how complex the RPC part is; HTTP is plenty capable of sending binary requests and returning binary responses on its own.
Why?

Doesn't it depend on your goals? For example, I expect Haskell to be a hotbed for experimentation for a long time to come. In fact I think people choose Haskell because it is continuously evolving.

I know that I picked Clojure recently not just because of it's features - I picked it because it _wasn't_ stable, it _wasn't_ all figured out. In fact, as part of the community, you can actually contribute a hand to it's future.

It's just Python has matured to the point where people would rather experiment with it's implementation rather than it's syntax/expressivity. It also has to do with the fact that this looks like part of a growing effort to make Python _immensely_ popular - going head to head with the likes of C++/Java.

As far as I'm concerned that's a good thing for Python.

But it does mean if you're looking for new ideas in PLs you'll have to look elsewhere. But it's not like there's a lack of excellent and popular candidates these days.
I'm half-seriously considering implementing it. The basic form I have in mind is something that looks a bit like Clojure and runs on Parrot. I'm not attached to either of those ideas, but this being 2009, I think it should have some support for parallelism and access to libraries out of the gate.
“doesn't seem to be in development yet”

How do you know?
Actually, I've been using encfs on Dropbox, and size really isn't much of an issue. In practice, I mostly want to synchronize dot-files and other small files across computers, and broadband to Dropbox isn't terribly slow.

The real issue is conflict handling. When Dropbox detects a conflict between two versions which have become out of sync in a non-fast-forward type way, it creates two versions, the more recent version, and the old version with the host that created it and the date.

This is probably the right thing to do, but since it is doing so for the encrypted versions of the files, rather than the unencrypted versions, you end up with files like: "./j85-6kOFk3Gg0Lg1TiuqgqIz/8p2kJa8tboYSSpadfuiE9Tuq" and "./j85-6kOFk3Gg0Lg1TiuqgqIz/8p2kJa8tboYSSpadfuiE9Tuq (quiet's conflicted copy 2009-10-21)" with seemingly no way to access the conflict version through encfs.

If anyone has an idea how to fix this, I'd quite appreciate it. Otherwise, I'd really caution anyone from using encfs as a solution to encryption on Dropbox!

(TrueCrypt is a terrible solution for this as described in the posts below, due to needing to sync the whole volume every time.)
It makes usage quite a bit cleaner for some target languages, but it's also optional.
From the inspirations page (http://www.zimbu.org/design/inspiration), he's "avoiding" on of the best features of ruby:

Avoid:
* expression by itself is return value, causes mistakes.
Basically, this means not adding any new language features for about 2-3 years, instead focusing on making improvements to the standard library, and to performance and correctness of the core. The moratorium sounds like a great idea to me: it will help reassure people who are porting their code from 2.x to 3.1 that they won’t have to make too many more changes to keep their stuff working on 3.2 & 3.3, and other implementations (Jython, IronPython, PyPy(?)) will be able to catch up to 3.x features.
Administration plans big pay cuts at bailout firms
Agreed. There's also something else: in a well implemented IDL-based framework, you automatically avoid part of the version compatibility issue.

Imagine that you add fields/services to a class, without breaking the API. As long as you don't change the ids on your definition, clients with code generated for an old version of the class should still be able to call its services, without serialization/deserialization errors.
Apple might have something in the pipeline yet, even if it isn't the iTablet. There's some interesting recent development in the low-power processors, and Apple has one advantage above all the other computer vendors: they aren't tied to x86.

I think it's clear that Apple isn't going to run OS X on a device targeted for the netbook buyers. That leaves them with either the iPhone OS, or a completely new OS. The iPhone OS already uses ARM chips, a new OS would give them the choice between x86 and ARM. One obvious choice would the new Cortex A9 (http://www.arm.com/news/25922.html) processors. The ultra-low power variant is already as fast as the Atom CPU's, the higher power variants are much faster, and you can basically put as many of those cores on a chip as you want. Until now such power has not been available to ARM-based devices, so it might be that Apple even has a complete device ready, but was just waiting for enough speed to put in it.

Using this speedy processor and their customized OS, Apple can put something on the market others can't: an intuitive, speedy system that is designed to run on a small footprint. That might be something people are willing to pay a premium for.
Arguing that Java prevents you from writing good code is nonsense.

Well, I know it prevents me from writing good code. I start writing it and it becomes so repetitive that I just get bored and do something else. I can't see progress quickly, and doing simple things involves a lot of work. (A new test case in Perl is one line in a file. In Java, it's an entire new file.)

I've also noticed that I can cleanup legacy Perl codebases very quickly, but legacy Java codebases are often a total loss. There is often Just Too Much slightly-tweaked editor-written boilerplate, instead of actual abstraction. It hurts to look at.

There is a reason that lots of smart people don't use Java and it's not because they hate popular languages.
Consumer Reports surveys of their membership.
Dan Bricklin's Talk From Startup Bootcamp [YouTube]
Actually, I keep my KeePass database in a 64MB TrueCrypt container in my Dropbox directory, and noticed that small changes propagate very quickly - it's definitely not syncing the entire 64MB every time the contents change slightly.

I don't know whether this attests to Dropbox's amazing delta compression, or implicates TrueCrypt's encryption.
Scala/GWT/App Engine/Eclipse