skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I interviewed with one. A .NET web development studio, can't remember who specifically. They called the stuff I did "open-sourcy" and I could tell they looked down on it. I think it's the perception that cheap programmers use cheap tools, produce cheap code and are low quality.
My cornsnake fits the OP's description (well I think he's cute even if my wife doesn't), is smaller than a python when full grown (5' last I measured, about a half dollar diameter), learned 1 trick (which was one more than I expected), and is much lower maintenance than the dogs and cats (and even fish) I had previously.
I'll tell you what I'll get, man--Two cats at the same time.

Damn straight, man. I've always wanted to do that. I figure if I were a hacker, I could hook that up. Cats dig guys who can code.
Moreover, C# is an obvious direct descendant. I can't believe he said Java would have none when it already does!

Edit: ok, I see this is from 2003. C# might not have been on his radar yet.
Quite an interesting read. Did anyone else fidn it worrying that Ingo Molnar attempted to benchmark a scheduler that aims for interactive response using:

* kernel build

* pipe

* messaging performance

* OLTP performance

And then wonders why he doesn't get an improvement?

One of the other posters puts it perfectly:

"Do you know what a normal desktop PC looks like? No, a more realistic question based on what you chose to benchmark to prove your point would be: Do you know what normal people actually do on them?"

In answer to the parent poster, see Nikos Chantziaras' posts.
Man, I would take almost any page of this as a poster for my room.
The phrase "black hole" has no place in that article, that's marketing hype.

Black hole works by gravity. Their device works by reducing reflectivity.
Java (the language) != JVM

There are plenty of good languages for the JVM (Clozure, Scala, ...), but Java is not one of them.
One of the odd things about C, historically speaking, is actually how impoverished it was compared to macro assemblers written at around the same time. Those didn't have much of a type system either, but you could get all kinds of power with them. No modern assembler is really comparable, much to my dismay.
To counter this article, they're going to have to set all the clocks Grand Central back by a minute.
Here's an idea: filterable categories for StackExchange, instead of a new site every week.
Putting your cat outside is the most efficient way to shorten the cat's life, anyway.
I remember doing some of Dave Thomas' code katas when he first posted them, and thinking that they were fun but a bit pointless, and generally rather too easy to learn much from. The other month at work I did a presentation at work on Andy Hunt's theories of programmer skill development where I mentioned katas, saying that I didn't really see they had much value. However, Ron Jeffries' celebrated failure to write a sudoko solver puts a slightly different perspective on this.

If your daily work involves doing algorithmic stuff, even if it's only moderately demanding, then I don't see that you will get much benefit from doing the same sort of thing at a more noddyish level.

However, if your daily work isn't like that, if perhaps it is in the vicinity of what used to called Data Processing (e.g. implementing payroll systems), then I can easily imagine that your coding chops might get rusty. In which case, taking deliberate steps to avoid that would be sensible.

[This argument only applies to the question of puzzles improving ones work, rather than being fun.]
True. The "on Earth" at the end implies that this device is something you might find in space, which seems unlikley too.
Google Wave: What is it? Why should you care?
Sorry for a personal note, but... "C is for the critical sections of video decoders, not for entire applications?" PHP is bad software?

And you are the one who calls others kool-aid drinkers here? In my opinion, these are absolute statements that have no substance.
Actually, you sort of prove my point there.

How does someone looking at the code know which parts of projection and model get multiplied here ?

At least make it:

view.setVector(projection.getMatrix() * model.getVector());

Because '*' applied to a model or a projection could literally mean anything, there might be many elements in those structures that are candidates for multiplication.

By making it explicit what gets multiplied the code is less clear than it could be.

If they're simple arrays without further fields attached to them then you could do:

view = matvecmul(projection,model);

And that's pretty close to the overloaded example.
Ask HN: Please review my app: Was it up? - dead simple monitoring
This has been posted 4 or 5 times by now.
I can take my unlocked GSM/3G phone to a foreign country, buy a local prepaid SIM card for less than €5, and save a fortune on roaming charges. Operator competitiveness is enhanced when I'm not abroad, since they know I can dump them any time - so long as I didn't take a 'free' phone with a long contract - and go with their competitor. I pay €9 a month in Finland for a phone line, no included minutes/sms, and uncapped 384kbps data usage, on a rolling one month contract.
The automatic litter boxes aren't that much better, in my experience. Sure, some days you won't have to pay attention at all, but every few days you'll have to completely take it apart and clean it, because the mechanism is easily clogged. This was true both with a straight rake box and a circular rotating pan, but maybe some brand has got this right by now (it's been a few years).
By the time you have walked half way along the beach to the icecream stalls, the distance between them will be negligible. If I walk up to three icecream stalls, I'll be right infront of three icecream stalls, so location won't matter.

I'm not sure how this aspect applies to the political senario, which is the more interesting one.
sometimes we think about offing ourselves, but never generate any serious motivation because that too would require passion.
One thing that I spotted. The validation error messages cover the Was it up? logo on the right. Perhaps move the error mesages on the left.
Hedge fund chatter fingers Big Blue man
Are you kidding? Unless you're a breeder it's socially irresponsible not to fix your pets.
My verdict: The code is just fine. It's the syntax of the extension methods that is causing the audience to panic and flee:

public static IEnumerable<TResult> Pairwise<TSource, TResult>(
this IEnumerable<TSource> source,
Func<TSource, TSource, TResult> resultSelector)

"Too clever" is, if anything, a polite way for a relative beginner to describe this code. I'd go with "fscking illegible" myself.

When, as a language designer, you find yourself designing syntax like this, it's a sign that you have drunk the Kool-Aid too greedily and too deep. In exchange for precious, precious type safety you have traded away the legibility and learnability of your language. The inevitable result is that, five years from now, you will be one of those frustrated people who grumbles on message boards, wondering why everyone prefers to use PHP.

Try a different language. I suspect that in Ruby or Python this code would not be so "clever". In Scheme it would be par for the course.
"There isn't any documentation," replied the business guy who had created the idea and written the checks to the programmer

This is so vague, that it borders on absurd as a case of point. A counter could be levied by this example that many times the business sees no value in documentation, and is in a rapid cycle to get a first version out the door and is leaning on the developer to get it out the door. As a developer who is being contracted, he is familiar with the source so documentation is not critical for him to understand or maintain the system. It not until something goes wrong and the business is looking to sever their relationship with said developer, that documentation becomes important and it is always the developers fault if it is not done. If the business did not pay for documentation then they have no valid expectation that they should receive documentation.

Conversely, the developer should stress the importance of paying the developer to document the system and help them understand the pitfalls of not having the system documented. The if I get hit by a bus speech.
I created this service mainly as an exercise to help me learn more about distributed applications. Behind the simple interface sits a multi-node setup with multi-master replicated Tokyo Tyrant instances for persistence.

I'd appreciate any suggestions or improvements.
I agree that it's not optimal to cover the logo. The problem with moving the error messages to the left would be the increased total horizontal with of the page. I don't think I'd go wider than 1024px as I'm mainly using a low resolution netbook at home.
Yes, females going into heat is very annoying. That's why there's spaying. Wild cat populations are a big problem, so not only does it save you from listening to the howling when she goes into heat, but it's also the right thing to do.
Allowing new sites with individual branding is how they make their $$
And plus you get to watch them eat, which can be pretty cool even if you feed them frozen (once I warmed the mouse up, wiggled it around, and my cornsnake attacked with such vigor that there was a smear of blood against the cage.)

I really want to know what this one trick was.
A dog, but not any dog.

It's a white one, I found it lost when he was 2 weeks old and took care of it.

They are loyal and make lot of fun when you are alone.

NB: I have a garden
Re: "Romeo and Juliet". Didn't they both die? That kind of "passion" is generally immature, unstable, and leads to catastrophe.
So, in generative encodings in GAs, the principle is simlar. An indirect (or generative) encoding is where one gene can represent an aspect of a developmental process instead of directly specifying each component.

I haven't heard of generative encoding before -- it sounds really cool. I could imagine something similar done with Genetic Programming. You could design a DSL (domain specific language) that is capable of building Neural Nets and then perform GP on programs written in the DSL. This could take the pressure off having to design a good development algorithm -- the GP would would do that for you.
If you name your language 'The hundred-year language' then you are asking for people to do two things:

- misinterpret you

- be underwhelmed with your performance

Something like that requires full time dedication of at least one person during the initial phase (say two decades or so), and after that an opening up.

By putting arc out there before it's 'ready' there is an upside, you get feedback from the community. But you also get an installed base and pressure to perform, and that's a drawback.

The haskell community has this motto: "avoid success at all costs". It took a long time to get haskel to be where it is today, and that has a lot to do with their motto. But it was the way to keep it clean and consistent. And arc was/is meant to go for the same if I understood it all right.

You can move fast in the programming language field, but then you'll have to be 'practical' and 'compromising'.

Or you can move slow, but then you risk 'irrelevant' and 'theoretical'.

A 'true' one hundred year language would try to strike a median between the two, it would be developed with a resasonable speed by a really small, core team that was very dedicated to the work.

Arc answers some interesting questions (it's essentially a better lisp), but it has one more drawback compared to lisp, which is that there is only a very small community behind it. This stops it from gaining widespread acceptance, but that is actually a benefit if you want to stay flexible.

But the window of time that you have to remain in that mode is not infinite and I think that the speed at which arc is coming along is mostly driven by improving HN (scale, features) than the other way around.

If HN were to move to say clojure (I know, that's cursing in the church, but I think it is one of the more realistic options when it comes to dealing with growth) then all the drive to keep arc going would be more or less lost.

A programming language for a community of '1' is a hobby project, but if HN came out of 'arc' then in a way the project has already succeeded, just not in the way that it was originally planned.

My longer term prediction is that clojure will occupy the niche that Paul described with the '100 year language', it's also based on lisp, it's headed by one very smart guy that is willing to work with a team of people providing input, it's gaining adoption fast and it solves some very pertinent problems (multi-programming, how to bring the functional paradigm to the web, STM) in elegant ways. And putting it on top of the JVM was sheer genius.

Time will tell, 97 years to go.
If you think any pet is low maintenance, you are confused. Even cats, the lowest of the cute and cuddly variety, are notoriously high maintenance. You have to change litter boxes regularly or they will find new places you can't get to. They are mainly nocturnal and will often want to be fed at 4AM. They scratch furniture. Mind you, my wife and I have four and I love them but they are not low maintenance.

All pets require a reasonably high level of maintenance, especially those in the cute/cuddly genre. For you to get a pet and expect otherwise would probably be detrimental to the long term health and happiness of the pet.
What if what I like to do is read news aggegators and comment on them? Sooo not marketable.
Axolotl for the cool name and '+1 regen' ability.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axolotl
Managing your reputation through Search
blogging?
Wt: A C++ web toolkit
Type safety is vastly overrated.

Dealing with polymorphism in a clever way (say by using duck-typing) is the way to get much the same effect, the only price you pay is that the errors shift from compile time to run time, and that's unacceptable in some situations.

The mess above is a typical example of taking something to an extreme.

I remember there was somewhere a coding standard (I think it was microsoft) that required you to put the initial letter of the type of every parameter in the function names.

People come up with something ('typing' or 'everything is an object') and then try to shoehorn each and every issue they have into that shape, even if it is totally not applicable.
Hadoop, S3, Google App Engine, Heroku, and other real platforms let you completely avoid dealing with machine-level bullshit.

The problem is that their constraints rule them out for a wide variety of use-cases, I'd go as far as to say: most use-cases.

When building anything serious (and no, the next twitter-bot doesn't qualify) you quickly realize that you'll have to deal with at least some of the machine-level bullshit - because otherwise you'd be either paying through your nose, or simply not be able to implement what you need.
Germany's Coming Energy Revolution
In Boston, they then build in lots of random 30-minute delays after the trains have left.
Hacked Facebook Apps used IFrames to Force Malicious Software on Users
If you get your own cat then neighbours cats won't come into your garden.
Something like this Google Tech Talk, "Polyworld: Using Evolution to Design Artificial Intelligence"? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m97_kL4ox0
HTPC – Intel Atom Media Center Inside a CD Player [DIY]
Hacker's extradition put on hold (Gary McKinnon)
I have a dream where you can code Lisp via diagrams, this is a nice aproximation of it.

Anybody ever tought of that? First you draw diagrams of Lisp metaphors with Lisp, then you can code Lisp by creating diagrams and evaluating them. Thanks to the almighty powers of Lisp you could then draw or code meta-diagrams to guide diagram modelling. The biggest challenge, imhhho, is getting the Lisp diagram representation right to make it sound.

I was thinking in joining a Lisp open-source project to get up with Lisp application coding pratices, any suggestion?
Functional abstraction in general is not too clever. This particular code example, though, absolutely is. As mechanical_fish pointed out, it's pretty much illegible.

DRY is only one of the principles of good code, and not the highest one. The highest one would be that the code must work. The second highest that the code must be clear to the reader.

I warmly recommend this excellent talk by Marcel Molina Jr at RubyConf 2007, about what makes code beautiful:

http://rubyconf2007.confreaks.com/d1t1p1_what_makes_code_bea...

He gives a good example of a case where using too many abstractions results in unclear, and hence ugly code.
Is this the same reason we have so many nuclear warheads in the world? (Yeah I'm comparing nuclear warheads with cats).
This is great but I must know: does stackexchange allow automatic rendering of latex formulas like wordpress? If not then I think this one is going to have a hard time taking off.
The convention you refer to is "Hungarian Notation", and Spolsky's essay on the subject is required reading before you get too vehement about it's stupidity. Basically, it started out as a relatively useful convention, then got misunderstood and misapplied and morphed into a ridiculous version of itself.

I wonder sometimes if the same thing has happened to type safety. I'm not convinced it is a bad idea, actually. I am convinced that it's not well-served by having Java as it's poster child. If my mental picture of a type-safe language is something that reads like this, no wonder I'm inclined to think it's overrated.
Cat's are definitely the best for low maintenance.

I highly recommend Litter Robot (http://www.litter-robot.com/). I've tried 3 other automatic litter boxes and this is the only one that doesn't make a mess of things. I can leave it alone for several weeks with no smell and then just swap the bag and add some litter.

For an automatic water supply, I recommend the 360 Drinkwell (http://www.amazon.com/Drinkwell-D360WB-RE-360-Pet-Fountain/d...). Stay away from any water fountains that require you to take them apart to clean/refill. With the drinkwell, I just pour in a cup of water every week and clean every 2-3 weeks.

For food, I've been happy with one of the simplest dispensers out there: http://www.amazon.com/Doskocil-Petmate-Café-Feeder/dp/B0002D.... No need for a timer or anything like that. My cat did overeat a bit initially, but I switched him to light food and it's been great ever since.

Good luck!
this sounds like it fits your description perfectly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vuW6tQ0218

or maybe a mechanical_fish ?
Wow, 24 years of ugly. The only one that's even half decent is the 3.1 box -- despite the ugly "New!" badge and the ridiculously condensed font...

It's hard to tell from those small images, but what are those strange boils on the Windows 7 logo supposed to be?
I've been working on something similar to this in my free time; yours is very nice :D

The only thing that I looked for that it doesn't seem that you've got right now is the ability for me to see the sites that I have registered - it'd be nice to be able to enter my email address and have the site tell me that you're monitoring x, y and z for me.

How frequently are you polling?
this is awesome design.
12 Cool Ideas from Event Apart Chicago 2009 (Web-Design)
The ideas behind hungarian are sound, but one of the reasons the name 'hungarian' stuck was that the names were unpronounceable.

Modern IDEs make that whole thing moot anyway, but the notation is still being used afaik.

There is nothing wrong with type-safety per se, it's just that when it gets to the point where it is literally 'in the way of progress' that things have been taken too far.

Ideally its something that's there when you need it, and override-able when you specifically don't need it.

That way you can do your type checking at compile time for the 70% or so of the code where that makes good sense, and where you're happy to have those guardrails to save you some time catching stupid bugs.

The other 30% of your code you can be as free as you want to be knowing full well that the price of failure would be a very angry end user.

That's because I think there are multiple 'modes' of programming, if you're writing a one-off data import script then type safety is just a real pain, as soon as you want to do that every day at a few thousand locations you'd better have it bullet proof.

Now you need two languages for those two situations.
The thing to remember with a parrot is that it may be around for the rest of your life. They are seriously long-lived animals. It's quite a commitment if you aren't positive you want one.
For what it's worth, HTC releases new images really soon after the official announcements of new Android OS versions. They actually form the basis for many 3rd party ROM's that you'll find online.
Beware The Reverse Brain Drain To India And China
Depends on the type of python. I have a ball python that's maybe 4 feet long and he's full grown. They live quite awhile as well - mine is 14 years old now and he doesn't seem to be any different than when he was 4.
Can anyone point me to a paper giving Clojure's formal semantics, if there is one?
If you register a site you'll get an email with a link to a settings page which lists all your subscriptions and offer one-click unsubscribe. For now I only allow one site per email though. The plan is to offer several sites per email and lower poll intervals for a small subscription fee in the future if there is any demand.

I poll every 15 minutes. I should probably mention that somewhere for the technically minded.
Time for some anarkitty! http://anarchyinyourhead.com/2009/10/15/lapsteading/

Well, it does fit the hacker culture's disdain for authorities.
A) Hilarious Office Space reference

B) When did you overtake nickb on the leaderboard? Congrats!
Any animal is quite a commitment.

A guy I know bought two dogs because it seemed so 'nice', then he found out how much work it is to have two dogs (and how much it costs), so he ended up giving them away to some lady.

Some people make these decisions much too light and I'm quite happy that the OP takes it serious and is not going on the spur of the moment.

Dogs especially can get very attached to people, if you don't want to make a dog-life-long commitment then please don't get a dog.
for me, windows nt workstation 4.0 was where the product peaked. we finally got a consumer version of a real 32-bit os, rather than a flimsy shell sitting on top of dos. its gui was attractive, by microsoft standards. it wasn't yet loaded down with crap.

windows 2000 was the one that made me jump ship. to me it looked like "baby's first computer" or something.

after that i spent several years in the wilderness, trying various alternatives. linux didn't appeal to me for very long. i eventually settled on beos, including a short stint working for be. when they went out of business, i switched to macs, and here i still am.
Awesome graphic. However, it misleads the intuition because the area of the circles scales with the square of jobs lost or gained.
I rarely travel outside of the US. Currently I do use an unlocked GSM phone, but only because it is very well integrated with voip and I don't have a voice plan.
You may want to change the verbiage of the email - it looked like it was just an unsubscribe link to me. I wouldn't have clicked it at all except for the fact that you just said it would take me to a settings page.

(Right now it just says: "To unsubscribe from this service, go to: <link elided>")
I think this is as close as it gets:

http://java.ociweb.com/mark/clojure/article.html
Honestly, the litter robot makes me think of what a toilet in the death star might look like.
This isn't Java, this is C#. (In Java this would be more verbose).