skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Meh, this is not useful.

The first thing: static typing is not static typing (yes, twice) dynamic typing is not weak typing is not strong typing. C is borderline static typing. Certainly, you have to say 'yes, this foo is an integer, this bar is a char' and the compiler will complain if you do foo = bar... but on the other hand, something like ((char)(void)(&foo)) will probably work (untested). I am not aware of these such possibilities in Haskell.

Furthermore, Haskell (for example) is statically typed, but I don't have to annotate everything with types, compared to, say, C, C# (even though this comparision is unfair, as Type inference in OOP-Languages requires exponential time). This is also a pretty big difference in 'static languages'. (In fact, Haskell and Python programs appear to converge to a certain common structure, which is very interesting).

The second thing: dynamic typing vs dynamic typing. What about weak typing vs strong typing? Python is dynamically typed, by Python is strongly typed, so an Integer is an Integer and remains an Integer unless told otherwise. In weakly typed languages, this is not the case. So just 'dynamic' is not useful either.

And then, the paradigms. Argh. Those hurt my eyes by now. OCaml is functional, and Haskell is functional. Haskell is pure, Ocaml is not. This is a gigantic major difference, let alone the functional subsets* of other languages. OOP? Hah. Just consider Icons inheritance vs Javas inheritance. Javas inheritance goes most specific towards least specific, overriding methods. Icon goes least specific towards most specific, giving the subclass implementor extension points where he can add further functionality. And don't even start to think about Common Lisps object orientation, or dylans, which is entirely different. Those terms, in my opinion, are far far too broad in order to describe a language well. Certainly, you might get a feeling what ML is, if I say "ML is functional", but overall, you know nothing about the code. (And don't even think about multi-paradigm languages).

So, overall: The table does not really tell anything, especially if you consider that major languages are missing. Even some toy example like faculty or fibonacci in each of these languages would tell everyone more than this.
Apparently it's a change in the latest nightly and not due to Boomtango.
Tig, the ncurses front-end to Git
Confusion never used the word 'wrong' actually. You might be thinking of me.
Thanks a lot. Looks quite interesting.
How would you describe the use of "it's" to mean "of it", or "its" to mean "it is"?

"Wrong" is the word I'd use, regardless of what definition you wish to give that word. What word or words would you use?
I'm learning fast, but it'll be a while before I'm really comfortable with it. Every time I think I'm getting good somebody will say something that sounds to me like a long unparsable stream of borka-borka like the swedish chef and I'll get all depressed about my progress for a couple of days. :)

Rumor has it that most of this kind of work is done in English, which would help. I haven't been able to verify that yet though.

Anyway, maybe we can help each other out. Email me if you feel like it. It's a gmail account and I'm "davesimard".
There's much lower hanging fruit than that. Just think of all the people who are conditioned by Facebook et al into believing that entering your gmail address and password to "invite all your friends" was a normal thing to do...

Without a doubt many of the same people will happily tack their CC-info into any form within any half-plausible context ("we must verify your age before we can use your gmail password to invite all your friends").
I am self employed, and 99% my clients are in UK, so I speak English all day.
When I'm at home I need to to speak English with my children so they learn some English. I have trouble finding any time to learn Swedish.
Check out http://www.arcticstartup.com/ and our index of Swedish startups http://www.arcticindex.com/companies?search[country_id]=1
Web TV is Confusing
Clear, consumer-driven expectations need to be set for Web TV to become user-friendly.
Oh for the love of god, Larry, shut your smug mouth.

It's so easy to sit back on your mega yacht and dismiss cloud as something that's always been around and always will be and blah blah blah, but for a little startup it's MANA FROM HEAVEN.

To be able to do massively compute intensive or storage intensive tasks on demand without sinking a million dollars of capital into a datacenter is the difference between success and failure for my little startup.

How many times have you heard "oh, there's a ten week lead time on that server" or "there's no more power in the cage" or "there are no more cages at the datacenter" or "i'll be up all night recovering the raid array" or any number of other hidden costs in owning or trying to own hardware?

We check our cost projections for buy vs cloud almost every week, and when the time comes we'll definitely buy, but for we couldn't be doing what we're doing without it. Sure it's overhyped, but so was the fucking web. Yes, there's weird performance stuff and not always enough boxes, but so what? Sorry if I'm missing a subtler message he had, but i had to turn off the video after about 30s because it hurt my brain.
That's a pretty good example... except that HTML5 already requires that browsers support SVG and MathML elements in HTML documents without any namespacing at all.

The other problem with adding namespaces to HTML for machine metadata is that HTML5 already supports arbitrary opaque content in attributes whose names begin with "data-". Sure, it doesn't solve the extensibility problem as thoroughly as namespaces would, but it takes a good bite out of Microsoft's use-cases, and maybe the 80% solution is Good Enough.
Biggest, Tallest Tree Photo Ever
Dojo's grid is a very nice grid as well. AsyncQueue is a nice api for command chaining. Dojo has dojo.connect which can be used to accomplish the same pattern with a little work but it is not out of the box. I am not sure if dojo has an equivalent to AsyncQueue.

But back to the point of the original question there is no reason that you cannot use JQuery for task x and y and YUI for task z many of the frameworks play nice together so it may not be a matter of learning one over the other but rather using the pieces of the bigger frameworks with your existing framework.
Amen. For my little start-up in London to be able to unleash the computing power available on AWS has been amazing. We essentially buy desktop machines for the engineers and outsource everything else.

All our critical business apps are on Google and we can test and scale our software on AWS.

It's funny because the last company I founded (Electric Cloud) was specifically doing distributed computing stuff and we had to buy and install tons of servers just to be able to test our code. Today, founding that company would be totally different... we'd probably buy a few servers for some in house testing of key performance critical elements and then give our credit card to Amazon and buy what we needed as we needed it.
George Carlin had enough money to have stuff. I have shit.
Maybe he just needs to visit the Oracle Cloud Computing Center:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/cloud/index.html
Prolog has a logic core but also some imperative features. Programmes can be specified in a purely declarative manner.
> Does anyone know if Google has a Java style guide?

It's essentially very similar to the official Java Style Guide with some minor extra bits but, to get a flavour, you can just browse the source of any Google open-source Java project (e.g. http://code.google.com/p/gdata-java-client/source/browse/#sv...).
He's not criticizing cloud computing, he's saying "cloud computing" is an idiotic idiom. And it is. "Cloud computing" is just distributed computing. It has been around for decades. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing)

But, it's the latest tech word-soup. Like in 2005 when everything Javascript became "Ajax", everything distributed becomes "Cloud".
What are you doing in your startup that demands sinking a million dollars into a datacenter?
If your main business consists of selling very expensive licenses on a per-node or per-cpu basis of a relational database then it makes perfect sense to speak these words. That doesn't make them true though.

The cloud is a real game changer, even though we are still working out exactly what it will do for us and how to deal with lots of issues (privacy, responsibility, reliability) it's got the established software businesses that came to power in the 80's and 90's quaking in their boots.

This will change the landscape of computing more than anything since '95, but it isn't going to happen overnight.

For every CTO that holds off a little longer based on Ellisons words the cash registers may ring one more time.

Key-value storage engines combined with cloud facilities go right at the heart of Oracles core business. What else is he supposed to say ?
Strong and weak typing isn't a very useful designation. most people take string typing as what my favorite languages have and weak typing as everything else. By the most common definition, strong typing seems to mean that you can never have implicit type casts, while with weak typing you can.

Again, by common definitions, static typing is when the compiler always knows the types (either through type declarations or type inference) and dynamic typing the types are not known until runtime.

Going by these definitions, C uses weak static typing. OCaml uses strong static typing. Python uses weak dynamic typing.

By these definitions, haskell IS statically typed because it uses type inference, but the compiler still knows the type at compile time.

Paradigms is messy because there are more paradigms that listed in the table and many more hybrids.. I guess its useful as a quick guideline, but I certainly wouldn't base.. well, anything, on this.

So, in the end, I have to agree. The table is interesting and fun, but not useful.
Notice that in the "care less" example, it is the phrase that has changed, whilst the surrounding language has remained the same, whilst in the "board" example the phrase has remained the same, whilst the surrounding language has changed.

I used room and board for the sake of argument because I felt it was easy to understand. It may be true that the meaning of could care less has changed, but Pinker’s analysis is that it has not — it always meant the opposite of its literal interpretation.

You really can’t imagine some kid intoning in a sickly sarcastic voice to their parents, ‘Oh, I could SO care less!’? You must realize the kind of massive influence youth subcultures have on the language, and from there it’s really not a big leap to image how a usage could enter the language that means the opposite of its literal interpretation.

"Room and board" is not in popular usage whilst "I could care less" is (as far as I understand). Thus the potential for confusion is greater.

Completely disagree. A quick look at the number of hits in Google’s index shows that they’re both in common use:

2,220,000 for "could care less”
1,960,000 for "room and board"

Anecdotal, but telling. If you really wanted me to, I could do a corpus search in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, but I expect the results would be about the same.

"Room and board" has a long established use. The use of "could care less" is much more recent.

I checked the OED and could care less seems to have been in use since the 1960s. Therefore, both phrases have been in use since well before I was born. So, for me, and most people who aren’t really old, they’re both completely established.

If you found the phrase confused you, I'd comply.

The crux, though, is that it would still be in the language. Just because you stop producing it doesn’t mean it’s been wiped from existence. If someone came up to you and used it, you couldn’t help but understand what they just said to you. More importantly, though, there’s no reason why you should stop using perfectly legitimate language just because someone else says it doesn’t make sense, but when it’s obvious that it does make sense, because everyone understands you when you say it.
The combination of (for example) cloud + Hadoop is a giant slayer. So maybe he feels threatened. But the irony is that EMC, Larry's recent purchase, is making money hand over fist from cloud as it ramps up.
People usually don't have a problem with switching to English if there are non-Swedes present, but otherwise Swedish is used. Some people have difficulty sticking to English but a helpful reminder usually does the trick.
Valerie Aurora articles have gotten good reviews here before eg http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=735982

An SSD is already like a raid 0. This is a Samsung block diagram of what's going on inside http://www.pcper.com/images/reviews/766/SSD-Samsung.png
Where did the things I need to know to do my job come from?

Mom, Dad, & family 10%
kindergarden 5%
elementary school 1%
middle school 1%
high school 1%
college (B.S. math) 1%
college fraternity 5%
business school (MBA) 1%
my first mentor 5%
my second mentor 10%
my users over the years 10%
my employers & customers 10%
reading 5%
other programmers 5%
doing on my own 30%
-----
100%
Start a business in 24 hours? Interesting... does that actually work for people?

Anyway, thanks for the links!
Venture Capital: An Entrepreneur's Manual
The presence of the apostrophe is an orthographic convention and has nothing to do with language in the least. There’s no apostrophe in it’s when people pronounce it.
The thing to remember is that there are two sides to a web-app. The client and the server. The web-app I'm currently working on uses very little CPU client side, but on the server side the number of simultaneous users I can handle scales more or less linearly with the number of cores the server has (assuming enough memory). So personally multiple cores (and using the correctly) makes huge difference to me and the web-app I'm working on.
He said people were lazy and ignorant for using could care less. I’d consider that equivalent to calling them wrong. You’re just nit-picking.
I thought this was going to be about startups whose owners had grown to love the tyrannical VC funders who were ruining their lives.
I don't really agree about Hadoop. MapReduce is interesting for some applications but it's not the only thing out there. We did extensive analysis of MapReduce at my new company and it clearly wasn't suitable for our needs.

However, the idea of moving code near to the data is a good one since moving data tends to be the slow part. But that's hardly a new concept, just look at Teradata.
Sorry guys if I have offended you. Is there anyway I can delete this?
Spotify R&D is in Stockholm, they have users and are in the headlines, I hear they use Debian in their backend, and they let paying customers access their DRM service using third-party clients too. Draw your own conclusions.
Ask HN: Ethernet 3G modem-router?
Why do you think no one is interested in developing a 3G (hsdpa, hspa, etc) modem-router?
Something with a html admin interface (like all standard routers) and USB just for power (no kernel extensions and proprietary apps).
Ask HN: Whom Do You Use for New Hire Background Checks?
My last Q about this hire is can he stay out of serious trouble and manage his own finances. I've Googled 'background check' and the vendors all look sleazy to me.

So HN - Whom do you use for background checks?

EDIT: I have signed permission from the prospect to do the check.]
Yeah, people build a first version of their app, not a whole business in the 24 hours. I participated in the first iteration as well, which was back in January. Check out the list of projects after the informal vote: http://www.24hourbusinesscamp.com/2009/01/vote-for-your-favo...
To Code With Or Without Music That Is The Question
H1N1 has saved 383 lives in New Zealand
10 of the Most Beautiful iPhone & iPod Touch Apps | Cult of Mac
Key-value storage engines combined with cloud facilities go right at the heart of Oracles core business.

Really? It seems to me that key-value systems are more of a problem for MySQL databases than Oracle ones. Pop quiz: how many people implementing key-value storage ever seriously considered buying an Oracle database?

I'm guessing very few.

I think what Ellison is saying is that cloud computing is nothing new. It's just a new name for distributed computing and we've had that for years. In fact, if you go back far enough we had SaaS on time-sharing systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing
"Next time: The Best Fast Food Receipt In The World" - from the end of the post (and i suspect it would still be about Japan)
It seems to me that what Larry's saying is that the idea of software as an on-demand service is nothing new. What he's objecting to is the hype around the "cloud" buzzword - as if it were some new invention and not simply internet-based, on-demand computing.
Not sure I understand your question.

I use a CTR-350 from http://www.cradlepoint.com frequently when I travel, and I think it is doing more or less exactly what you describe.
Sign in to Yahoo India
Hmm, I'm intrigued by your assertion that orthography has nothing to do with language, but indeed you're right that this is an issue which relates to spoken language, so I'll ask a different question:

How would you describe the use of "isn't" where "am not" is generally considered grammatical?

For example "I isn't a liar" rather than "I am not a liar".
They haven't considered buying an Oracle database when they're small, but when they grow now they don't have to either.

And bigger players are looking at switching from their expensive-software-on-big-iron to the cloud as well, and as a consequence will evaluate key-value storage systems vs rdbms, and some of them will switch.
Background checks sound pretty sleazy in any case - what business is it of yours if someone once had financial problems (such a record will never tell you the why only the what).

Call the last employer but one for an honest assessment of the reasons your prospective employee left and how easy they are to get one with - you already know they have the knowledge required for the job - you tested for that before and during the interviews - right?

If you still feel a little uneasy then it's a "No Hire" - end of story.
You not hear? You can use an implied did now!
Craving for chatting
When you begin chatting, you can take a look at the various free chat rooms which will give you an idea about the whole thing. Free chat rooms are good for beginners. Most of the chat rooms feature a number of topics. Once you choose one particular topic, you will be invited to a chat room where you will find other people who share the same interest or likingsIf you enjoy chatting with others, you should restrict yourself to two to three hours everyday.
Part of our difficulty to understand each other may be that "wrong" is often used to imply some sort of value judgment. I should stress I'm not using it in that way, just as a statement of fact.

I would strongly assert that X years ago, when "I couldn't care less" was the only popularly used version, saying "I could care less" was both lazy and ignorant: lazy because it's dropping a syllable for the ease of the speaker despite making it more difficult for the listener; ignorant because the speaker doesn't realise they're doing it.

Whether it's lazy and ignorant now is a harder question to answer. I'm not familiar with North American usage of the phrase.
Would code downloaded and run by the browser be code that is run by Apple's builtin interpreter?
Nice. It's doing most of what I described indeed.
Still I was thinking more of a integrated modem with cellphone battery king of thing.
Just insert SIM card kind of solution.
A little bit of everything I guess. I'm a developer for sure, but I'm a generalist at heart which is why a small start-up sounds appealing to me.

As for specific skills, lately I've been defaulting to Python. I've been going through all the SICP lectures too which is re-exciting me about lisp, but I'm not too optimistic about finding a job using that.

As for business areas, I'm feeling pretty open-minded right now.
You really don't need to speak a scandinavian language in scandinavia. People speak english almost as well as the dutch, and they don't mind switching to english at all.
We know it's turing-complete. that's a pretty low bar to set. The real question is, is it a good language to program in?
Sure, those languages are better, but the point is making programming more accessible to more people (something Python has done quite well too, indeed).
This is nice. Though I think http://www.openculture.com/ is more comprehensive and Dan Colman's been doing this for quite a while now, with no signs of stopping :-)
Crunchgear linkjacking Hackaday linkjacking http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2009/09/redwoods.html?s...
You probably want to turn hinting off.

Hinting follows the Windows philosophy of moving the letters about so that they fit the pixel grid better. Apple tries to leave them where they would be on a fictional perfectly hi-res display (or printer) and applies anti-aliasing where it doesn't fit the grid.

The former is sharper but not true to the actual shapes, position and kerning of letters and words, the latter is considered blurry by some, though less so as the DPI increases to iPhone levels.

Compare these Windows, OS X and Ubuntu screenshots I found on the internet:

http://rewind.themasterplan.in/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/sn...

http://rewind.themasterplan.in/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/sn...

http://rewind.themasterplan.in/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/sn...

From this article:

http://rewind.themasterplan.in/2007/07/15/sexy-smooth-fonts-...
Hacker News is (partly) an experiment to see how big a specialist community can get without becoming generalist. We've even had occasional population-control events - Erlang spam - to keep out the riffraff, because it looks like HN is hovering really close to the edge for a while now. It may be time to implement harsher forms of moderation than just a flag & a downvote.
VentureIQ - Stack Overflow for startups and entrepreneurs
You may want to get in electronics hacking ...

Look at some of this stuff for inspiration :
http://www.ladyada.net/make/

I prefer not to hack just for hacking's sake, but to build something I need. For example, ATM I'm looking into building a bedside alarm light - an alarm clock that wakes you up with light. I would love one. The commercial models are stupidly expensive (169$ for a nice Philips model [1]). The electronics are pretty easy to replicate, I'm having difficulty with the case. Philips did an awesome job with theirs - great design and build. Actually, most DIY electronics suffer from the same problem : cases suck, because we just do not have the means of extruding plastic and the such. Maybe 3D printers will help.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002CGSYPS
Just an example of something which benefits from inexpensive computing scale. Pretty narrow applicability. But it seems like there are plenty of other problems which also benefit.