skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now compare your description to the program’s source code. The source code is almost certainly several times longer, less intuitive, and less descriptive.

I tried this with a short Lisp program a few years ago and found it to be false. I may have been too detailed in my descriptions with the English version, but I don't think so. Evolved[0] languages for human communication are notoriously imprecise.

The "plain English" translation of a legal document will be much shorter than the original as well. Such language isn't used in legal documents because lawyers can and will argue over the interpretation. To make programming like everyday English, the runtime would have to sort out the ambiguities. I think that would require human-like AI.

Given human-like AI, much of what we do as programmers could be done by the AI instead. A non-programmer could simply ask the AI to create the program or provide certain kinds of output. Even in a situation like that, I suspect there would still be a demand for human programmers who could more precisely communicate their intentions to computers, if only for the purpose of creating better AIs[1].

[0]That means pretty much any language people actually speak. I'm not sure if it's true for designed languages like Esperanto.

[1]It might be a good idea to restrict AIs from certain kinds of self-modification or from creating new AIs. I think we've all seen that movie.
Yes, you can buy a $29 upgrade to 10.6 if you already have 10.5. But there's also a full version of 10.6 for $129 for users that have 10.4.
Linux for Desktop: a booklet on creating a productive linux environment
I cannot believe that EWD is actually "ranked" number 18 between Larry Wall and John Resig....

btw, it is not a very good list for people interested in programming languages in general.

EDIT: grammar corrections...
Very often a lot of management posts tend to be fairly short and be very heavy on jargon. It makes it hard for those who haven't been following the field for a while to follow along.

I also like the way he actually explains the connections to other books and posts when appropriate instead of just referencing them and assuming they have been read as I've seen some other authors do.
> That's a cruel way to look at it.

I'm not trying to be cruel, I'm reminding him that his (salaried) labor is making someone else wealthy. For those of us who have well developed senses of self-esteem, this is a wholly unacceptable situation.
HTML is better than XHTML because the XHTML error handling model (refuse to render) is a poor fit for the web.
These are all great points. However, I just want to point out that reddit has had sponsored links for 10 months now, and our advertisers have been quite pleased with their conversion rates. We've also run some of our own ads in there, and had fantastic conversion.
Not a whole lot of surprises there, but I am curious why Jason Fried of 37signals is featured, and not David Heinemeier Hansson. They mention Ruby on Rails, but it was DHH that had a larger hand in it (only hand?) than Jason Fried.

Also, the Ajaxian mention is a little off: "Ajaxian teaches people about the popular javascript language, Ajax." Well, kind of close.
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

the original. so lucid I doubt it will ever be dethroned as the best. hmm, can't find an online version right now even though I know multiple sites have a plain text version. anyone have a link?

a direct answer: I personally think it's better to act high status the vast majority of the time, only acting lower status when it is absolutely required. when I started doing this people's reaction to me immensely improved (night and day difference).
You should look into Viper. And if Emacs doesn't start quickly enough for you, you should run it as "emacs --daemon" and then "start your editor" with emacsclient -t (or emacsclient -c, if you want an X window).

Once you've gone the Way Of The Emacs, there is no reason to use vim... unless you have some internal application written in vimscript, of course.
As long as he believes in those values -- and isn't just accepting them by societal default -- there's no reason he should feel guilty.

Totally agree. But these values are so often a societal default, and so often never thought about except in how to extrapolate with those values as a basis.

Making a point like this can result in one of three things: the reader already though of this, and acknowledges it as such; the reader discards the insight as irrelevant or wrong; or, the reader feels a sense of cognitive dissonance, and starts to analyze the statement in the context of their core values.

The statement itself was just matter of fact. I didn't pick up any sense of judgment; more of making the point that A implies B, and that the original commenter should make sure he's comfortable accepting both premises. I don't see anything wrong with making sure that people are consciously aware of what their values imply.
This is an excellent counter-point. I've known a lot of folks who have been unhappy, even after having changed jobs, changed fields of work, gone back to school, started companies, etc.

Depression can be a physical malady, rather than merely an emotional response to your current situation, and if it is, then altering your lifestyle might not help; physical ailments, including long-term depression, generally need medical attention. One way to possibly self-diagnose whether this is the case is if you feel trapped and wanting to escape to anywhere else, or if you feel hopeful and excited (even if a little uncertain) by the thought of doing something else.
Surprisingly, there hasn't been much talk of it in this thread, but this feeling is common enough to have a name: Mid-life crisis. You're not abnormal for looking around when you reach your late 30s or 40s and wondering, "WTF? How did I get here?" But, you're lucky enough to be introspective enough to consider the causes and solutions with care, and respond to them intellectually rather than childishly by buying a sports car, cheating on your wife with a teenager, damaging your family with irresponsible behavior, and trying to be cool like you were when you were 20.

Anyway, I'm not saying the advice in all the other comments aren't right, and that you shouldn't change jobs, start a company, give the finger to the establishment, etc. I am saying that you should do so only if that is actually what you want, and not merely jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. I am of the opinion that entrepreneurship and being ones own boss is a more fulfilling lifestyle than most others I can think of, but I'm pretty sure it's not for everyone. The risk and stress is much higher, the discomfort level in the early days (which sometimes take years; I'm three years into my current company, and it's just now starting to make me a decent living; it took five with my previous company) can be too much for folks accustomed to being able to buy new things (like clothes, TVs, entertainment, cars, etc.) with regularity. But, if it's what you've always known you wanted to do, but never did, then maybe this little bout of feeling lost will be enough to send you in the right direction.
I disagree. Bending over backwards to recuse myself would distract from the content of the comments. I've pretty much only stated facts here anyway.

If I start saying an opinion like Facebook is better than X, then I think you're right.
Pirate-busting 'stinger' device for ships launched
Creative destruction!
Congress
Congress UPA Election Campaign Manifesto 2009 India. Vote for congress, vote for a better India.
SPDY: A 2x Faster Web (by Google)
That was my take as well. If someone wants to pay cash to play a game, even one I might think is silly, it's none of my business. What TC was after were misleading offers that can end up costing players a lot.
I agree - not a very good list at all. Jeff Atwood and no Alan Turing or Donald Knuth? Really?
Just a note: don't rely on my code to get a taste of language, because, obviously, it was "hacked together while learning a language" instead of "programmed". There are sources for packages on Go website http://golang.org/pkg/ that are written clearly.
A 2X Faster Web (Announcing Google SPDY)
...and this kind of shallow 1 page article which tells us nothing we already know is a prime example of why old media is failing. It's a great story idea, since the political and economic impact of the internet have surpassed the wildest dreams of the early 90s (ie when the web was created).

And Newsweek still has plenty of skilled writers on staff, plus enough readership that they could have interviewed anyone they wanted for this story, from Bill Gates or Al Gore to...well, anyone. They're read by millions of ordinary Americans, and have decades of experience in telling complex, multidimensional stories and making them accessible for a broad audience. Instead, a a 500 word essay which was apparently written by Captain Obvious. I know 'review of the year/decade/century' articles are superficial by nature, but this reads like a sidebar in an 8th grade social studies book.

I preferred the 'decade in seven minutes' video at this page: http://2010.newsweek.com/essay/one-dazing-decade.html not really my preferred media style, but at least it has a high signal to noise ratio.
s/ but not using valgrind all the time//.
"is better than Go in perhaps every measurable way"

speed of execution, speed of compilation.
I have particular qualms with this in technical documentation. For example, I'll often be talking about a string or command and put it inside quotes to make clear what is part of the string or command. If that's at the end of the sentence, the rules dictate my period should go inside the quotes as well. I can never bring myself to obey that.
I've tried tiling window managers multiple times, and each time find issues with them that frustrate me until I switch back to Gnome:

- No simple way to keep a small IM status window open in the corner of a workspace

- Limited support for resolution-dependent windows, such as videos, games or remote desktops

- No notification bar for status apps to utilize, such as pidgin or network-manager

- No integration with modern desktop environment features or tools, such as media keys for rhythmbox, launchers like gnome-do, network-manager, automatic disk mounting, screen lock, etc

Gnome and compiz have solved a lot of problems that actually make a Linux desktop usable in modern contexts.
I have to wonder how badly it would suck to bail from an airliner going 120+ knots. That's about the slowest most heavies can go without falling out of the sky.
I think the opium trade may have had something to do with that (and with the wealth of Macao as well).
The question is not about the price, 29$ or 129$ it is still a bonus. Apple's business is about Macs, not Mac OS licences.
IHNJ, IJLS spanking platform
Consilience: The Path to Innovation
First is first, quit coming to HN for a month. As you say you have high karma but with an un-satisfying job. That is not a good mix. When you read about all the start-ups hitting it big, some 25 year olds who solved a real world problem and are 'rock stars now' ..that might make you feel like you have not accomplished much. Every person makes their own destiny, different strokes for different folks. As fred said: find a middle ground. if you've written books you should not have a problem landing a job close to home that is somewhat satisfying.
Is this basically an RFC for HTTP version 2?
As far as farting simulation applications go, iFart was top notch.
Pluto being a planet we've only seen as pinpoints and pixelated images, I'm looking forward to pictures and data from this mission.
Second Market - Canary In The Coal Mine?
The whitepaper has more information: http://dev.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-whitepaper

Interesting parts:

- "...make SSL the underlying transport protocol, for better security and compatibility with existing network infrastructure." Won't this break many caching models?

- "...provides an advanced feature, server-initiated streams. Server-initiated streams can be used to deliver content to the client without the client needing to ask for it." Nice, push without comet-style hacks.

EDIT: more items that stand out

- "SPDY implements request priorities: the client can request as many items as it wants from the server, and assign a priority to each request"

From the protocol document: http://dev.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-protocol

- "Content-length is not a valid header"

- "Clients are assumed to support Accept-Encoding: gzip. Clients that do not specify any body encodings receive gzip-encoded data from the server."

- "The 'host' header is ignored. The host:port portion of the HTTP URL is the definitive host." I guess this supplants the need for SNI support. Edit: No it doesn't since SPDY sits above SSL. The host isn't known until the secure link has already been established.
There are a whole lot of "in-crowd" people there, but I generally miss real contributors to the area of programming languages. I particularly miss (in no particular order!) Alain Colmeraurer, John MacCarthy, Guy Steele, Alan Kay, Niklaus Wirth, Luca Cardelli, Barbara Liskov, David Parnas, Ole-Johann Dahl, Kristen Nygaard, Tony Hoare, etc. (I could go on and on, but really have no motivation to do so now...)
What is Jeff Atwood's contribution towards the web?
I've had great experiences advertising through AdWords, so I don't know how your bad experience with admob is going to fit in well at Google.

I've done some advertising through admob as well for an iphone app, and I got it to work fine, but I think the traffic was crap.

I'm still doing in app advertising but now through adwords, and I still don't think the quality of traffic is any good, but at an average of 4 cents per click I'm fine with it. I think they're going to make some big improvements in mobile advertising, and who knows what new possibilities will come of it.
It's mostly a session framework on top of SSL but under HTTP.

From http://dev.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-whitepaper

Q: Is SPDY a replacement for HTTP?

A: No. SPDY replaces some parts of HTTP, but mostly augments it. At the highest level of the application layer, the request-response protocol remains the same. SPDY still uses HTTP methods, headers, and other semantics. But SPDY overrides other parts of the protocol, such as connection management and data transfer formats.
Not a problem. Just something that should be consciously acknowledged and accepted as best against alternatives, not something that is unconsciously drifted into due to inertia, familial/societal expectations, or anything else that removes the individual from a sense of responsibility for their decisions.
I'm a native speaker/writer of both Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. Let me know if I can help!
What you are describing is the ideal model teacher: Someone that adapts to exactly the highest level of understanding that the recipient is capable of thereby reducing the amount of information that needs to be transferred to a minimum (fastest learning) while still ensuring that the message arrives intact.

In comparison with a 3 year old as the subject (instead of a computer) the difference seems to be all in the ability of the recipient to absorb and apply contextual information.
Bill Gates: Executive pay is 'often too high'
I wanted to check out the source of the program, but getting to the source on that site is just too much trouble.
this is absolutely a great post.

Not only because what lostsheep posted, but the quality of the responses people on here(HN) are replying back with.

Just unreal. I'm so that lostsheep posted this.
It is possible, yeah. Lots of VCs overweight signals from other investor's behavior. Not all of them.
The argument that they are making is that people are starting to choose dynamic languages because of "clumsy type systems". Since every relationship has to be spelled out in excruciating detail you spend a ton of time changing and tweaking these relationships. Implicit interfaces, in theory, address this problem.
There is a PL/I plug in for eclipse and there are people working on a compiler, I wouldn't count it out just yet.
Cygwin makes life bearable on Windows.
Yes, you are perhaps right about speed of compilation. I do my Haskell hacking in the REPL, so the number of times I actually compile my projects is minimal. I have never thought, "this is taking way too long, what a drag".

There may also be a factor of 2 execution speed advantage for a few things that Go lets you directly write in a CPU-friendly way. But the slow part of a Twitter client is waiting for Twitter. In fact, even Twitter isn't written in Go or Haskell or C, and it still works fine.
My thoughts exactly.

Somehow the creator of Wordpress is listed as #2. And Jason Fried/Jeff Atwood?

A better name would be "somewhat famous internet people, most of whom are programmers of some sort".
Office Space was a movie. A good movie, but a movie, nonetheless. It taps into human fantasies about being trapped in a cubicle, turning the tables, lashing out at our oppressors, etc. But it doesn't represent reality. Working for someone else is a voluntary association, not slavery or imprisonment.

Note that at the end of the movie, the people in the movie have grown up a little bit, and realized that all the stuff they did was unnecessary. They can do anything they want with their lives, because the world is full of possibility. So, sure, watch Office Space, but take away that ending message rather than an insane plan for wreaking havoc on your boss and coworkers.
I'm impressed that they're able to get such good performance (and latency) while still running the traffic over SSL. For example, average page load time over SSL is 1899 ms ("SPDY basic single-domain / SSL"), compared to 3112 ms for plain HTTP -- they don't show HTTPS, but presumably that would be even slower.
I think all the problems with your code are Go problems, not problems with how you used it. Things like Twitter clients always look ugly in low-level languages, however.
I've added a link to zip archive to the home page.
Justin.tv Fingerprinting Technology Goes Live this Week
> or, the reader feels a sense of cognitive dissonance, and starts to analyze the statement in the context of their core values.

This is a good way of looking at it - it's a form of self-delusion, if you ask me.
I can only assume that this is a joke.

Several of the people on the list don't really have anything to do with programming at all.

There are some high-profile academics certainly worthy of recognition who aren't there.

There are some who have created programming languages and libraries that are high profile today, but some of them are very much more popular than others.

There are some bloggers, whose influence reflects their self-promotional abilities more than any real contribution. People might read them, but I'm not sure how many people are influenced by them!

Ultimately, the list is very focussed on people who are visible in specific parts of the industry today, but ignores many of the pioneers whose work reverberates throughout the industry to this day.
Absolutely, +1
Check out Viktor Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning (it's a slim volume) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27s_Search_for_Meaning
Awesome simple tutorial.
One imagines djb envisioning a single roundtrip for encrypted HTTP, built on top of DNSCurve.

You have the public key via DNS, you send an encrypted request and receive a verifiable encrypted response that includes content and begins the multiplexed channel.
Austrian vendor leaks Radeon HD 5970
Austrian hardware vendor geizhals.at has confirmed the existence of the Sapphire Radeon HD 5970, a dual-slot GPU with two cores sourced from the Radeon HD 5870.
Good point,bbg--it struck me as a bit like Robert Burns writing "The Devil Away with the Excise Man".

I believe that the line is close to being a translation from a line in one of Tyrtaeus's poems. I definitely vote with telemachos on this one.
Bill Gates says Wall Street pay too high
"But the slow part of a Twitter client is waiting for Twitter."

Undoubtedly. But if we're going from the position of systems programming languages speed of execution is inevitably going to be a factor. And you did say every measurable way... so what other measurable ways did you have in mind?
Excellent post. Also clearly explains why 2 is the ideal number, and why you need history with your co-founder.
Starcraft AI competition
Sure, but pawing through an unfamiliar template that's crowded with tables and presentation is a horrible experience.

Maintainability and readability in my opinion are strongly linked and readability really suffers when markup and presentation are combined. Pure CSS layouts go a long way toward making both the markup and the presentation rules easily readable.

And if anyone argues 'But it's only going to be me making the changes, and I'm already familiar with the code.' If you haven't looked at the code for a year, it's like looking at the code for the first time. And you know what they say:

'Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.' - Rick Osborne
This is a cross-post from Slashdot. Nonetheless, this is VERY cool. For those of you who missed the very interesting Mario competition, you have a while on this one.
If the choice were between a big house and a modest house, expensive clothes and cheap clothes, private school and public school, I'd probably make some major life changes too. But here's the thing. I already live with two kids in a small 2br house in an unfashionable corner of an expensive city (San Francisco). I already buy my clothes at relatively inexpensive stores, and expensive private schools are already out of the question. My family depends heavily on my income, and while I'm not struggling and wouldn't call myself impoverished under any circumstances, there isn't a lot of room on that ladder to step down.

I'm not as accomplished as the OP, but he may be in a similar financial state. Another big difference is that I don't have a difficult boss, and my commute and working hours do allow me a couple hours with my kids in the evening, along with weekends mostly free. So I'm definitely, definitely, definitely not saying he shouldn't feel this way, or suggesting that he's complaining. I'm just saying, I get it, I understand why his situation is a very difficult one.
First, feel a little good about yourself. From what I can imagine from your profile, you are definitely in top 1% in the world and have no reason whatsoever to have sleepless nights.

If I was you I would do the following :
- Take a short vacation. A change will help you think fresh. No matter what you decide to do with your life, take a vacation first.

- Quit your job. You certainly don't like the way things are, probably tired of being taken advantage of. Show your company the finger and see how things start falling in line. You will be surprised to see how they propose things getting better at your company. You may then decide to stay back.

You may also choose to go into Freelance/Consulting mode, but with a family to support that may be a bit hard.
See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=938367
How To Get Into Y Combinator
That $1.25 Billion Settlement With AMD? It’s About 12 Days Of Revenue For Intel.
Google's New Language: Go (thoughts of a Google engineer)
I could be completely wrong of course, and the timing is convenient. I guess it depends on when these changes were pushed in, but then it's hard to tell when a possibly fake timestamp was made...
Good point. I have yet to encounter a browser that actually sticks to that rule though...
Finding a commit on one day doesn't mean the commit happened on that day.