skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"What use cases are you envisioning where threading will be essential?"

In 2009, my default presumption is that an emerging platform that probably won't even be viable until 2010 ought to have a concurrency story better than what we already had. If it doesn't have that, why wouldn't I use an existing language?

If it were entering a vacuum, sure, great, no problem, but it's not.

I guess this goes back to my old standard for examining the usefulness of a language: "What problem does it solve?" There ought to be a single sentence that says what problem the language solves. Python: "It's too hard to program; we need to make it easier." Perl: "Too many separate UNIX tools, we should merge them together." Haskell: "Our academic theory is great and all, but we need to come out of our ivory towers and prove it works.

Javascript on the server: "..."? "I really want to be able to use the same language on the server as the client" is a I think what it's going for, and as far as that goes it's ok, but my objection is that it isn't a very good server language. And note my objections really are about the language, not merely a lack of libraries, which is completely solvable. You can't just graft on concurrency anymore, at least not as far as I'm concerned; my standards have risen.
My personal observation is that last night I stayed up too late reading the linux kernel code. Probably won't help anyone that much.
I suspect that it doesn't, since it's made from cells taken from a live pig, and the rules are based on characteristics of the animal the meat comes from. If they could synthesize it totally artificially, it might be kosher, but if it comes from a pig, it's probably not.
Android Developer Challenge 2 Overall Winners
Yes.

A significant amount of software stinks. The enterprise vendors are almost magical in their ability to extract dollars from their customer base.

I believe that many of the one-eyed men are starting to wake up to the power of the tools in front of them and ponder how they can deliver significantly more value in small startups than they do "fixing bugs on horrible enterprise software."

While great is perhaps too strong an adjective, we are capable of great things because we deliver great software in environments where there isn't any. Who else is doing it?

There is probably a huge shake-out coming in the average programmer's world. The big vendors seem increasing irrelevant except for their stranglehold on sales channels. Once we hack that (and some on this forum have or are well on their way) . . .

Good times.
I actually agree that it might not be a problem for computer science to not have women in the field. It's really more of a problem for women who want to be in the field.

If you had asked, 40 years ago, "why is the lack of women in math, science, medicine, academia, and leadership positions a problem" this would be more obvious. Since many fields today are more equitable, it is a lot less problematic, although perhaps not for a few folks here and there.
But it's also important to realize that even if Climate Change isn't man made pollution still is and we need to do our best to reduce it.

Global Warming has been the specter hanging over our heads for the last decade telling us to clean up our act but we need to start stressing the importance of pollution cleanup and recycling outside of the climate change debate as it is hugely important in its own right.

That's rather a strange and arbitrary direction to turn the discussion. You could just as well have said:

But it's also important to realize that even if Climate Change isn't man made (Pollution | War | Starvation | IE6 | C++ | Rape | AIDS | Child Porn | Stubbed Toes) still is and we need to do our best to reduce it.
Where is CS taught like that? My understanding is that it's usually taught more like a math.
In addition to the criticisms you address in your addendum (women's perspective is important, and "works or not" is too simplistic) consider this: by creating and perpetuating environment that is unfriendly to women, we are reducing the talent pool from which we draw programmers by sightly more than 50%. Even if there was no such thing as "a woman's perspective" (depends on the woman/man in question, I suppose), it is highly inefficient to limit your pool this way. In my opinion this is NOT, in fact, self-selection, not to the degree this imbalance is getting to. I've seen multiple times in the universities I've attended the difference between how things get explained to women and men -- many instructors and TAs, for example, will quickly and subconsciously drop into condescension and use things like cooking analogies when talking to female students. I've heard programmers of all talent levels apply gender-based value judgments to women attempting to enter the field. The worst are "women are bad at logic" -- and there are many who really believe that -- but "you are a woman so you will do the UI as you must be good at visual stuff" is also sexist.
Menopuase symptoms
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Enough with the scientific exceptionalism. There is only rigorous reasoning and solid evidence, and flawed reasoning. It's the same in any human endeavor, whether we're talking phds or plumbers.

Any time people start throwing around the words "science" and "scientists" a lot I get increasingly skeptical. They don't add much to any discussion that isn't centered on appeals to authority.
I forsee a future with 3 categories of meat: Synthetic, Factory and Free Range. With free range reserved for the top 1% of the population.
I don't think node.js handles anything related to concurrency... what if you wanted to write a multithreaded raytracer in javascript?
The comment above you (well right now) indicates that women are less experienced coming into introductory classes. It makes sense that they'll have a higher failure rate, as it's difficult to compete against people who know more than you.
Why oh why wouldn't the wsj promote the commodification of news? Isn't commodification a basic economic principle? Shouldn't we start working out business models around adding value to the commodity news, you know, like wsj itself has done in recent years.
Satish Dharmaraj/Zimbra: Anatomy of a Term Sheet - Part 1
Rands has written bunch of great essays (and a book - I haven't read it yet myself) about what you're going through.

Start Here: http://www.randsinrepose.com/cat_management.html
They have a great return policy, so you could just try it and see.

I use linux on two poweredge860 without any problem.
every piece of dell rack hw supports ubuntu that i've seen for years.

(same for silicon mechanics fwiw).
The ones I just posted.

Using AppCache to launch offline, part 1: http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/04/gmail-for-mobile-html...

Using AppCache to launch offline, part 2: http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/05/gmail-for-mobile-html...

Using AppCache to launch offline, part 3: http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/05/gmail-for-mobile-html...

HTML 5 Offline Application Cache: http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/documentation/iPho...
An insightful but irrelevant comment in this situation may not be downvoted.

And even if it is, it is still ranked higher than it should be.
Thanks for posting this on Hacker News, Josh. We're pretty excited. Let me know if you have any questions or comments. I'd be glad to try to answer.
History of StarChart/StarPanel at VUMC
It seems like ever since Obama was elected, the three things Newsweek complains about most are the Iraq war, the death of civil liberties, and the fact that fiat money is about to destroy the American empire by making the dollar worthless.

If only there were some presidential candidate who had those as his top three issues before the election, I'm sure Newsweek would have been 100% behind him.

/sarcasm
EBay hit with new fine over counterfeit Louis Vuitton products
eBay has been hit with a massive €1.7 million (USD $2.55 million) fine after the company failed to adhere to an injunction that ruled the company wasn’t doing enough to block the sale of counterfeited Louis Vuitton products.
Much of CS is concerned with time and space efficiency of programs.

Hence the comparison to speed and compactness of writing in pen science.
FTA:

Some might argue that we should use Ruby 1.9 as the primary reference, but Ruby 1.9 is moving fast and its features change frequently. Once we draft the specification based on Ruby 1.9, the specification and Ruby 1.9 would get quickly out of sync.
They found that women are turned off by an environment which suggests “nerdy, techie, stay up late coding, energy drinks, no social life.… They don't frequently take showers.”

...if she had asked them to describe any other group, like black people or women, they would have refused to answer. “But describe computer science majors? No problem!” she says with a laugh

The article is caged in PC language, but it's describing nothing but intolerance of a certain group of people.

You'll note that the theory of the unwelcoming environment is easy to debunk; if true, then law and medicine should also have very few women (they were historically unwelcoming to women). Yet somehow, those fields (full of high status men) are now about 50% women.
It would make me pretty unhappy to have a legit alternative and never take it. It's not having the alternative that makes you happy, it's exercising it. If you were already happy, then the existence of the alternative wouldn't matter.
Effective shielding against cosmic radiation is possibly an even greater problem in interplanetary travel than propulsion.

The solution will probably come from materials science, but at the moment I don't think there's enough effort being concentrated on this problem to solve it in my lifetime.
I would love to read about your experiences building the site using Common Lisp. I have tinkered with CL for about a year but gradually abandoned due to (mostly) lack of effort on my side to learn how to do things idiomatically, and not just coding but communicating with the community, locating libraries and evaluating their usefulness/maturity, etc.
Ruby and Python and PHP all built their success because they were once the experimental non-normal choice.

Yes, and back when they were new, they weren't what beginners learned. When PHP was new, beginning programmers with an eye on the Web learned Perl, Java, or even C, because they had larger communities and better documentation, libraries, and books.

As a beginner it isn't your job to push the envelope of platform design. Unless your primary goal in learning programming is to tinker without necessarily shipping anything.

And, yes, bad programming habits are bad. Unfortunately, avoiding bad habits isn't as simple as choosing one language over another. You can write bad code in any language -- indeed, expressive languages let you explore the really complicated corners of the bad-code phase space -- and you will write bad code, until you've had practice. One good way to get that practice is to pick a language where there's a lot of well-written existing code and documentation and style guides and Stack Overflow comments to read over. See above.
Squareup
It takes a long time for a trademark to be accepted. Do you know when they submitted the trademark application?
I've been noticing a pattern in the free-software world. Product A becomes a flagship implementation of something. Sendmail for smtp, Apache for http and so on. These are early implementors, lots of people get behind the project, a hundred different paths are taken. In the mean-time there are lots of experimenting, tweaking, and reworking to the entire suite/stack for that something, which get rolled into the original implementation. This results in a giant, lumbering beast of an application. It contains this collective history of the entire movement. All the abortive bits, blind alleys, weird idiosyncracies must be kept, because someone, somewhere depends on it.

All the old timers think this is the bee's knees. Everyone else however gets sick of the giant, and you get exim or nginx, in a hundred varieties that perform better for certain common (or uncommon) subsets of use. These better performing "lightweight" versions shed the cruft and are widely adopted by those who no longer care about say, http servers, and instead just want a simple strut.

Anyway my point is: is it at all surprising that FreeSWITCH has come in to do fill the Asterisk role as a voip strut?
While I agree that they know about robots.txt and are trolling, these are not your average trolls. They are able to get serious traction because they control a lot of the more traditional venues for information, it's a little more important to call them out.

While a bunch of people at HN saying "robots.txt, duh" will not directly communicate the idea to said CEO, perhaps at some point someone doing research on the topic will go searching for information on the topic. The more counter-FUD we put out there, the better.
> In my mind, the real problem is that we do not account for the value of natural resources and the environment in our economics.

Couldn't agree more. We're not going to get anywhere by turning the issue into a polemic "debate". We should be focusing on central tenets so obvious they're impossible to disagree with: wealth is derived from the underlying ecosystem of nature, and securing the long-term health of that system is in everyone's best interest.

"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."
Congrats on the launch of the new product. It looks like it is going to be an awesome resource
The climate is an enormously complex thing with so many variables that it's difficult to analyze. If you do not believe the claims for Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) I suggest you consider the Precautionary Principle:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle

In the context of the environment it essentially states that if there is a reasonable chance that AGW can be true then since the risks are so great we must take action as if it were true.

This is what leads me, a hard core skeptic (and trained but very long ago lapsed climatologist) to support reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. We can not afford to be wrong.
I meant, how do you stop the black hole from hitting the spaceship, moving around, falling out the back, etc?
I disagree that Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture is an excellent book. I found it to be poorly written and appallingly edited. (Martin Fowler is capable of much better.) More importantly, the patterns themselves give an impression of coherence and well-understoodness to a space that is in fact incoherent and poorly understood. This results in people thinking and talking more about patterns than about the problems they're actually trying to solve with software. In other words, the whole enterprise (pun intended) is premature optimization at a meta level.

Refactoring is better because it's on a smaller scale and thus able to deliver roughly what it promises.

As far as the enterprise-OO space goes, though, the best book by far IMO is Eric Evans' Domain Driven Design. One reason it's better (apart from being superbly written) is that it's much more exploratory: it doesn't pretend to have figured things out, but rather offers principles you can use to figure things out. Also, the principles, though deep, are easy to understand (as opposed to "enterprise application architecture patterns" which get more confusing the more you try to understand them). In fact, the only weak spots in DDD are the points at which it veers closer to the PEAA approach.

(Disclosure: I worked with Eric for several years. But my high opinion of his book was not caused by this; it was the other way around.)
If he were only paid $100k/yr for basketball, LeBron would certainly become a football player. c.f. http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=4194437
If they had any sense of humor it would have been 99.
But then again it's the Pentagon.
I assume you're talking about Ron Paul.

Much of what Ron Paul said sounds great to armchair economists, armchair social scientists, armchair international political scientists, and so on. Nearly all of his proposals were simple solutions to exceedingly complex problems, and in practice, complex problems more often require complex solutions.

(Disclaimer: I liked Ron Paul a whole lot during the early stages of the primaries, but on later reflection concluded that an RP presidency more likely would have been disastrous.)
In a similar fashion, many highly talented individuals would remain in the same industry for less pay (e.g. many highly-paid programmers). Because their skills are in demand, they can work in a satisfying ("fun") career and still be amply compensated, similar to LeBron. In fact, there is much more going on here than mere compensation: individuals doing creative work do better when they are happier. Hence, it is often in an employer's long-term interest to create an environment in which their employees are happy.
It's one counter example of many, though (indeed you neglected a second in the original comment). Most people don't enjoy their jobs, but many do, and in a huge variety of fields. People that aren't happy shouldn't be told that there is no other way, as Adams suggests.
Indeed, I am working on technology to reconceptualize sales channels.

http://customerfind.posterous.com/do-you-sell-a-product-or-s...
Ask HN: Give me your thoughts on this product
For the past year during my spare time I have been retooling/rethinking controlc.com - A neglected site I launched ~2 years ago which archived your clipboard contents to the cloud.

The new version of the app is entirely local and not reliant on a web service. It runs its own web server listening for local connections and stores all your copied data in a sqlite encrypted DB. The interface is entirely handled in the browser. Some features it has is Local RSS, Search, Themes, Blacklist, Starring and more

Windows installer: http://harknesslabs.com/setupcontrolc.exe

I plan to make the application free and possibly open source. It will be released for mac/nix/win

Please let me know any features or changes you think of, As this is more targeted towards technically minded people vs novices.
Would as much code get written if the industry was more socially mainstream? Would it be less but better or just less? There's no denying that the lone geek (male or female) staying up late gets an awful lot done.
Top Banks Suffering from Multiple Vulnerabilities
The Best Antivirus for Removing Malware | TechJaws.com
America's priorities, on the whole, have shifted in recent decades from embracing risk and ingenuity to seeking safety and security at any cost. For much of the population, education is less important than faith, and "freedom" has been twisted perversely into something that actually means "safety".

Those trends began America's downfall as an empire. It was inevitable, all empires come to an end eventually, supplanted by a new one, full of people willing to explore and take great risks.
Validating a datapoint as useless/useful is a later step and does not disqualify the collection of data either case.
What 50 Cent Can Teach You About Connecting with Your Audience
I'm actually trying to spearhead an effort to win this and donate the money to Livestrong (http://10loons.com, http://twitter.com/10loons). My feeling is that raw data mining techniques are going to win this thing, but we'll see.
I've fallen in love with gerrit for code reviews. Gerrit lets me set up an automerge to the "main trunk" of the development if one person claims it works and two people eyeball the code. It's not a setup for everyone, but for my teams it's been absolutely brilliant.

If you supported auto-merging based on review criteria (preferably a functional test in addition to a code review requirement) I would switch in a heartbeat. Without that, I'll never even look at it.
They are many of the same arguments we see everywhere else. Most of them are true-but-irrelevant (the 2% number given early in the article is essentially meaningless, as it's a percentage of one component of a derivative in a complex system). He's at least smart enough to leave out transparent falsehood.

The basic problem is that the Wall Street Journal is a newspaper. You can't address scientific questions in a newspaper. You just can't. It's a tightly-controlled broadcast medium, in which all arguments must be kept simple enough for the average reader to understand without being a professional in a related field. All three of those factors (control, broadcast, simplicity) actively work against science.

What scientists need to do is find ways to address these kinds of oversimplifications in ways that the average reader can understand. It's hard, yes, but someone's going to need to do it if the public discourse is ever going to get onto the right track.
Crashing FF seems fairly unacceptable, you'd think it would just render it incorrectly.
I am less sanguine on the efficiency issue. You have also thrown away very useful tissues comprising things like a functioning immune system and the circulatory system (gas and nutrient exchange and waste removal/filtration).

I would expect "lab meat" to demand much more purified, processed and energy intensive inputs than traditional farming. Laboratory cell culture is a hard and very expensive enterprise.
I'm not sure what your point is! Your original comment about x86 doesn't even make sense -- most people don't know x86 assembler! However, all web designers know CSS. Nearly all web developers know CSS. That's what makes it universal! It's not about how low-level it is.

We recently had to fire a design team and are in the process of moving to a different team. If all the styles were in SASS, I'd have a much bigger problem.

Even something like LessCSS has a much smaller learning curve because it looks like CSS. You can use it much more minimally (using only variables, for example) and get a small benefit with a small learning curve. Think of how many of those 50 other languages look like C.
It's quirky in Chrome, but I'm still impressed. While I agree with some others regarding how easily Flash or Silverlight could do this, I think there is something to be said that this is (hopefully) going to be a standard that doesn't require plugins. Yes, the flash install base is massive and yes jQuery's usage is growing rapdily, but it's going to be nice to be able to do some of the more trivial things directly in HTML and CSS. Especially if those few trivial UI elements are the only thing you would have included flasy or jQuery for.
That was actually a much more detailed and thorough comparison than I had expected when I clicked the link.
I'm dubious that any campaign of this sort could be anything other than marginally effective. The real holdouts that I'm worried about aren't staying with IE6 out of ignorance, it's a matter of financial necessity. Internal and business-specific apps are holding back a lot of these upgrades. If you have to choose between a $50,000+ development investment and staying on an outdated browser, most IT departments are going to maintain the status quo.

This is why I think Chrome Frame is such a good solution- you get all the benefits of a modern browser, without having to immediately invest in updates to essential apps. Of course this also runs the risk of being (understandably) stymied by Microsoft marketing FUD.

::sigh::
Found the original article by Paul Graham :

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html