skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you have developers that know Java and nothing else, which is not all that uncommon, it's really your only option. And since any developer who can't or won't learn additional languages is probably not very good, using a language like Java provides the fluff and bloat necessary to keep these untalented devs from screwing too many things up. Java's primary advantage in general is interchangeability of engineers.

If you have developers that know other JVM languages, or who can learn, then I would say there is no advantage because any language on the JVM can refer to object built in any other. This is why things like Jython, JRuby, Rhino, and Clojure are cool.
How Google Maps deals with border disputes: Two Countries, Three Maps
... and I'll pay, if they give me DRM-free 1080p H.264 downloads, the same way the music industry lets me have DRM-free 320kbps MP3s now.

And of course they're sensible enough to go for that market... right?
Orkut - My profile
To the best of my knowledge that is a uniquely human trait. And we not only harness it - we are dependent on it. Over time our digestive systems have adapted to require cooked food. (Every known culture cooks food. Theoretically you can live on uncooked food. However the few who try it have to eat constantly and tend to be skinny...)
This article's headlines is misleading as the content makes little to no comparison to other operating systems. It is barely a review mentioning non specific things and how things are "better" then they were on Vista. Hardly in depth, it is not worth reading. A better title would be:

Windows 7 is better then Vista
How to (or not to) promote your blog
The first Linus comment on that page is the best comment post I have ever read.

It make so much sense ! I can see clearly now !
It depends on your relationship with that person. For some of my relationships it is perfectly normal to return a call two months later.

In general it helps if you're clear about it. I have a friend with two cellphones, and she never answers either of them. I know this, and just e-mail her instead (which does get a quick response). I tell my co-workers I only read e-mail once in the morning, and they will have to walk to my office or call me if they have something more urgent (this is quite different from company culture). Etc.
"Just Another Day At The Office" - Nate Lawson's Help-Wanted Ad
I think I tried this when I was writing it, and without numbers the page seems too unstructured. You need something, and bullets don't do it.
If "servers and embedded devices" are a "caveat" to you, I'm intrigued about the world you live in.
I guess using twitter for political organizing falls in the same category as DDT: fine for other nations, illegal in the US.
1. dev tools $0, good point. Though I can find plenty of free dev tools in various language and tech stacks for a windows Box too (everything from c++ to python). I've actually never purchased dev software for a PC. But most developers do. So I can give half a point.

1b. MS Office equivalent has certain features for certain users: like...?

2. See, it's these kind of vague wishy washy non-quantifiable statements that don't make for an appealing switch statement. "Get it cause you'll be faster!"

"Faster at what?"

"FASTER at...stuff!"
To compare apples to apples, Clojure's agents are also allocated from a thread pool allowing many agents per thread. I'd imagine you'd see similar performance between the two.
Glass brick company
Glass Blocks supply and installation services for residential and commercial buildings including allied steelworks and glass block frame. GBW Contracts ltd offers complete glass block wall package in house.
Linux is still the most deployed Unix.

Even if a commercial version (like OS X) may surpass it in the future, it will contain parts from modern Linux distributions. And it wouldn't last too long.

What I like about Linux is that it is getting better and better. And it also is the most versatile OS available.

I first used Linux in 1997, when I first tried a Red Hat CD included in a magazine I read. The user experience was just awful, while today's Ubuntu Linux is almost as good as Windows and OS X.

The kernel has also seen major improvements, especially in stability and drivers. My wireless stick, the sound card, my video card ... these work out-of-the-box on Ubuntu.

The communities around Linux may move slower, and have fewer surprises, but they do move forward constantly. In contrast, Microsoft may have the resources to pull off a Windows XP, but every once in a while bad things happen ... like Windows ME, Vista (after 5 or 6 years of waiting), a frozen IExplorer, etc...

One day a distribution like Ubuntu or OpenSuse will be as good as Windows or OS X. When that happens, you can't beat its price or the freedoms that come with it, even if people don't like changing their environment. This is exactly what's happening with Firefox or any other successful open-source projects out there ... once they reach critical mass, they are unstoppable.
Since along time ago.

Good, so I can recreate my PC computing experience at twice the price.

Not a reason to switch.
How does it compare to Groovy and Grails?
Not very useful commentary. All they are saying is that like Wal-Mart, Google is big, which they have done by offering things people want.

A much better comparison to Wal-Mart is Amazon, which at least is in a similar industry, engages with a similarly complex supply chain, and has a far more analogous business model.
Are Clouds Green?
Poll: HNer types
I was thinking about the type of users that make up this community. I know what type of activities I do with the site on a daily basis, and I know they are not enough to keep the site going. So I conjectured that there are a number of 'primitive roles' that are needed to keep this site operating well. My list is:

Posters: They post new articles they find from the outside world.

Commenters: They comment on stories they find on the front page.

Upvoters: They upvote stories they like on the front page.

Filterers: They frequent at the 'new' page and upvote stories they like there.

Readers: Those that simply read the content (nothing wrong with that, they are probably the largest group by far).

So, please vote up the set of roles that you feel describes the activities you do a lot of.
Reader-only
Commenter-only
Poster-only
Upvoter-only
Filterer-only
Poster, Commenter
Poster, Upvoter
Poster, Filterer
Commenter, Upvoter
Commenter, Filterer
Upvoter, Filterer
Poster, Commenter, Upvoter
Poster, Commenter, Filterer
Commenter, Upvoter, Filterer
Poster, Upvoter, Filterer
Poster, Commenter, Upvoter, Filterer
Protip: Don't use overpriced hardware that everybody complains about (clogs up, cramped hands) as an example of superiority.

Considering the very large number of complaints about clogged up $60 magic mice, I'm convinced that my $10 dell bargain bin mouse is better. Plus if it breaks, I can use one of the 5 others backup mice I bought for the same price.
In case you weren't already aware, Microsoft provides free images of XP and Vista with IE 6, 7 and 8. You have to get a new image every few months but they work great for making sure this doesn't happen. Only takes a few seconds to boot up the virtual pc and check your layout and functionality.

http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=21e...
The problem with being smart is that you're never smart enough. In school I was considered very smart, and that was great. In grad school, I was smart, but not the most, and this makes you hurt inside. Then you start to learn that is effort that really matter.
How about just getting the preview to format correctly in the first place. The way it's typed into the text area it looks fine.

Users shouldn't have to read a manual of markdown tags to enter text on a site, not unless it does some really special stuff.
OS X is on a lot of phones though (the iPhone)
We've been using Grails (Groovy) at our startup with great success. A few warts early on with regard to how Grails wants to handle packages and URLs, but we push a lot of transactions through this system (sorry, I don't have exact numbers) and Grails has held up remarkably well. It also cut our initial development time by about half.
Clickable link: http://www.perqworks.com
Umm well I was respondign to the guy above me with references to the 2 spaces to get a line break problem. Markdown does not parse \n (at least not so I have seen) at all.

The textwalls problem I don't have a solution too :)
This is ridiculous. TimBL has been using identi.ca instead of Twitter for a long time because he supports free network services. No mention of that in the article.

http://identi.ca/timbl
Ask HN: Looking for a startup to join in San Francisco
I'm posting this anonymously for obvious reasons, but wanted to reach out to the Hacker News community as I am looking for a new opportunity with a startup (preferably in the consumer space with < 30 people) in San Francisco.

I'm currently a mid-level product manager, but have worked as a usability engineer and software engineer in the past. The reason I specifically want to join a startup again is that I love wearing multiple hats and making a real difference. I also love making great products that make people really happy.

If anyone is either hiring or knows someone who is, you can get in contact with me at hn.jobseeker@gmail.com.
It's a fallacy that OSX has less viruses due to market share. The reason there's virtually no viruses is because there's separation of privilege on OSX. You don't run as administrator the way you do commonly under Windows.
I'm not here to spar. I was just using the generally accepted definition of the term. Defining a specific market segment is, by nature, adding a condition or limitation that adds some necessary context for certain statements: Nature Valley Peanut Butter Granola Bars are the most widely deployed snack...in my cubicle.
I like the "perq" name... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PERQ
I didn't consciously notice that items have numbers next to them until a few days ago. The numbers communicate the same thing as the relative position. So I doubt it makes a difference for me.
For all intents and purposes, that field looks like a rich text editor. Of course I wouldn't read instructions on how to enter text. I learned how to type in rich text editors a long time ago.

I wouldn't want this guy doing usability design on my site. Woof.
How about just randomizing the order on the front page? That's a more standard approach to testing something like this...
I don't think it's fair for people who don't have cell phones to call my cell phone and expect me to pick up. It's a two way street.
At least Google's customers don't get stampeded to death by peers as they enter the premises.
As I write this, #30 on the front page is yesterday's #1. Just remember that from time to time and you might not give the numbers so much significance.
Funny how when you make something 'minimalist' the smallest changes can upset the balance because they are a large part of the whole.

One a 'bombastic' site such a small change would hardly be noticeable. HN is like a laboratory experiment.
To prevent that in he future:
1) Test in all browsers you are supporting
2) Learn about <input type="img"…>

BTW article linked in OP suggest you can use any format for the image, and suggests .jpg. This is very bad choice—save jpegs for larger photos, this format does not work well for icons/buttons, PNG (preferred) or GIF would be much better option.
A web service isn't a web application?
IE6 users and status-conscious creative directors
If you don't want to set up Selenium yourself, you can use http://saucelabs.com/, which does it in the cloud for you. hugs (Jason Huggins) pops up here on HN from time to time, as well.
5 years later, 5 ways that Ubuntu has made Linux more human
I use the numbers mostly when browsing pages (with "More"), since there is no other indication of what page you're on.
For the past several years I've been thinking about spotting startup errors like chess. You make a trivial-seeming decision early on, and a smart player can tell you that you've probably lost the game, but you don't know it for another 20 moves or so, and by the time you fail the key mistake is obscured by all the other bad things that happened as a result of it.
OK. Though there's more to Germany than Hitler.
Side question: is there a CPAN or Gems repository for similar open-source Java libraries? I know that Apache has lots of Java libs, but beyond that, I have no idea where to look.
But last I tried to use them (a month or so ago) they no longer work in anything other than MS Virtual PC. VirtualBox, VMWare, etc wouldn't work. So, now you need to be on a Windows PC to use their images.
Justin.tv is hiring, but they may be further along than you want:

http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
Make your own SNES games with developer cartridge
If Madison were an Iranian using Twitter to coordinate government protests, he’d likely be considered a hero in the West.

While I don't agree with this guy's ideology, it is interesting to see how our government reacts when "disruptive" technologies such as twitter are turned against it. It certainly looks like the police overstepped their bounds, but regardless of whether this guy gets convicted, the police have already won. They succeeded in taking this guy out of play for most of the G20.
http://m.mlb.com/ uses a hybrid Freemarker / Groovy / Java framework called MVC+GF. During the 2009 season it was able to scale with out issues during peak hours (9th innings, etc). That's hundreds of requests a sec a server - pretty cool.

Groovy is used cause it has closures (java doesn't) and is simpler and easier than Scala.
Interoperability with GSM-based networks is not a God-given right.
But this problem was fixed in Vista.
Good point. You probably can use the libraries from Scala. In any case, you wouldn't be using Scala's concurrency features.
Tell HN: Use this to talk to others at StartupSchool & coordinate related events
I'd take the "About Matter" section off the end. I have clients in the HRO space, and I tried to read it from their perspective, and the copy in that section is jarring.

Obviously, this is gorgeous compared to the other leave management apps that HRO companies have paid millions and millions to build or acquire.
Some sloppy reasoning here:

> For example, the newspaper industry is quickly crumbling - they lost $7.5 billion in ad revenue in 2008. The public gets irate at the mention of paying for online news.

Traditional media and online media alike are based on advertising revenue, not on readers/viewers paying for the news. People won't pay for news online for the same reason they wouldn't pay for news on TV or even in print. Subscription charges for newspapers and magazines, like TV cable/satellite bills, pay for content distribution, not content creation.

Given that readers/viewers already pay the distribution charges for their internet connection, they balk at paying again for the creation of content that they're long accustomed to getting for free.
More details: http://eventgel.com/about/

This will help you coordinate what you'd like to do this weekend around Startup School. We made a related posting about this a few days ago http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=883731, received great feedback and incorporated most.

This is our startup (icey, kirubakaran). Please use it and tell us what you think.

[p.s. I'm going to be offline for a while. Flying to Berkeley]
The extension for Haskell-documention is `.lhs'. But you can compile it to a `.ps' or `.pdf' with LaTeX if you want to.
Thanks, Patrick, for your unceasing dedication to A/B testing for web signup interfaces. Why--if you hadn't actually bothered to track how well users that don't see buttons convert, well, let's just say I don't think anyone else would have done it. [knowingly. :)]

Thanks for taking one for the team. Many dollars died to get this information.
There's really no excuse for not testing in all browsers but I can understand the impulse to "get the change out the door" too.

For myself I tend to iplement a change in a separate file and leave the old page in place. Then as I test each browser I use the browser ID to redirect people to the changed page as I test their browser. Then when I'm done I replace the old page and remove the redirect.

It sounds strange but I've found it's a good way to get changes out as soon as possible while not risking what happen to the author here.
Looks nice - well layed out, well designed, well thought out.I didn't try it at the service level but if I was looking for this type of app I certainly would feel comfortable trying it. Good job
Ouch. I sympathize with the author -- various CSS quirks have cost me an awful lot of time and money over the years.

I'm currently solving this with two approaches:

First, use crossbrowsertesting.com -- they are really great people, I was among their first users, they keep improving their site and service, it's easy, and for the money it's absolutely worth it. Every time I make changes to my libraries which might even possibly be handled differently by different browsers, I log in to CBT and test the browsers. (I've found the best order to be FF -> Safari -> Chrome -> IE 8 -> IE 7 -> IE 6; usually by the time I get to IE 6, everything's working OK.)

Second, stop using CSS for (fancy) layout. It wasn't really intended to do it, and I don't expect CSS3 support to fix the usual problems I have with CSS2. So, one of my more recent projects is a simplified layout language parsed in JavaScript that makes certain things very easy. It's also very fast.
The Genuine Value
It reminds me of Sinatra. The HTTP paramater/object binding is similar, for example: http://www.playframework.org/documentation/1.0/5things

A difference is that the routes, model, controller and template/renderer are in separate directories. It's a bit awkward for the simple project of the one in the video, but essential for more complicated projects.

It even includes a captcha generator, and their examples seem to be of real (though very simple) applications - as opposed to toy academic ones. I get the feeling that its developers are very familiar with the real needs and problems of actual web development.

It almost makes me want to get into web development! The only thing is that combining HTML, Groovy templating, Javascript and JQuery looks a little complex - but they're probably very straightforward for common tasks.
Group Theory - J.S. Milne
when I play around with Gambit (gsi) I often end up with bus errors. This implies the word: 'half-assed' to me. So that is directly annoying and will guaranteed put new users off. Crashing is never good.
In my experience breaking everything down into a bunch of uncoupled services, ala SOA, adds a significant amount of performance overhead making all these web service calls to build up a semi-complex page. Performing all the logic within a single process/JVM is MUCH more efficient.

And that's with LAN based WS calls. I can't imaging doing that over the internet. You have a page that has 20 independent dynamic blocks, you really want to make 20 HTTP request/response calls over a 60+ ms latency connection? You really want your server cluster to have to handle 20 connections instead of one?

Maybe for a simple and/or low traffic site, but for a moderately complex website/webapp, you're better off serving out a single page.
Neither is an IPhone app, but I can guarantee you that most of the logic I use for my "Web Application" will be reused by my IPhone application. With the exception of my templating, work-flow and UI specific logic, so it begs the question why am I implementing my templating, workflow UI specific logic, in my "Web Application" (it's not reusable). Unless it really is a web UI to my enterprise application in which my UI should be worried about its concern? I see so many new companies fall into this trap and then have to do major rewrites when they realize they have boxed themselves into a "Web Application"
Perhaps in bullet points?
Silence isn’t Golden
oh, you've figured me out.... I was nerd and got beat up in school. That made me want to start companies and work until the break of day..... I've never felt any true love.... booooo hooooo for me....

whatever.

There is no "one theory" of personality when it comes to success and motivation. Motivation is very layered and complicated. People are motivated by competition, by the love of the actual act, by pride and by a higher calling--and some can experience these things to various level simultaneously.

While I do think many successful entrepreneurs are more focused/less "balanced" (whatever that word means), it is absurd to say you can't be happy, productive, driven and competitive and still be a cool, happy and content person.

Anyway, Z obviously hit a nerve.... let's all go to two therapy sessions this week and get back to work. Right now I've got to get Mahalo in to the top 100 sites on Quantcast or I'm going to jump off Santa MOnica pier and end it.

jcal
Java's threads are managed in kernel space, not at the VM level and are definitely not "lightweight".

They are faster than forking processes though, but Java applications (because they share state between threads) are less scalable.
People like to watch train wrecks too, but that doesn't mean they want to be in one.
Beautiful site and the app looks great. Very friendly. Haven't had a chance to try it yet but will check it out later.
If you pick as JVM language as suggested, why would you need to throw out any code?

When I worked at ITA Software which writes much of their stuff in Lisp (not the web stuff though), there was often worry that it meant new programmers would have to learn the language and so wouldn't be productive at first. But learning the code base takes a lot longer than learning the language, at least enough of the language to get significant stuff done.

If you have 10 years worth of legacy code written by 12,000 employees, I assume you're in the same boat.
I haven't done any real dev with those frameworks you list so I'm wondering how do you manage session state? user profile, shopping cart, breadcrumbs, multi-request flows, etc...

Do you write/read all that into the db/memcached for each request?
Imagine if you instead could loan/lease the books to your e-reader for the duration of the course and only pay for the relevant pages.

I imagine that as soon as physical textbooks were out of availability the cost of "only the relevant pages" would climb drastically. Without an active market in used textbooks, and with DRM preventing any reselling of the content you purchased, I have little doubt that the captive student market would be exploited as hard and as often as possible.
Given that the Magic Mouse was released this week, I doubt people have had a chance to clog them up. Apple removed the part of the mouse that would get clogged up, replacing the functionality with nifty touchy gesture thingies.
No one said that they have to be micro services. One should provide composite services that provide all of the data for a work-flow. Then use a pub-sub event based model to notify the UI of available data. This way components stay loosely coupled and are only listening for an event that injects the relevant data that they need. This results in a single call to a composite service yet the micro services are available should a different UI need a more microscopic flow or data load (for example, limited memory on a mobile device).

As well another common mistake I see is services calling services to build a composite service. If at all possible services should be the facade into the system with logic wrapped up in a jar, DLL, etc. All services if possible should rely on said library and not rely on loosely coupled services for composting, inter-system communication is different than disparate system communication.
Posted about 4 hours ago and killed:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=898559

I guess people don't think this is Hacker News - certainly I don't.