skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Python 3 has, I believe, done away with the 0 prefix for octal and uses a consistent prefix system for different-base literals: "0x" for hex, "0o" for octal, "0b" for binary.
I just had a physical. My Dr. sees some Apple employees and mentioned that they were hyping its transformational value to him.
..which is shown to the reader as a scene with people sitting in a train, riding to their deaths, with a lengthy exposition explaining they deserve it.
What if I told you that your bank gave detailed descriptions of your purchasing activities to the federal government, while simultaneously selling that data to the advertising agencies who represent the companies you do business with? Would you find that to be evil? Because in both cases, it's true.
Product Discovery not Software Development
In Detroit, Entrepreneurs See Opportunity in Hard Times
I think the conclusion ("Apple tablet is for healthcare industry") is a bit too eager; I can imagine Apple pitching the idea to healthcare professionals as they have a clear usage pattern and apparently already use similar devices, but I find it hard to believe Apple would put these professionals above the average consumer, let alone that they would develop a product entirely for this industry. Apple is foremost a consumer-oriented company, and I can't imagine them changing course now.
Just be confidant in yourself and it shouldn't be a problem. So what if someone wants to imply that you're stupid for asking a question? Ask anyway, then you'll be learning while those who dare not ask are left behind. I guess what I'm trying to say is: Just chill out a bit and life gets easier and more fun :)
Belief in Hell makes economies grow
Or give him a screwdriver and let him take it apart :)

(hopefully that would then not be repeated on real-life creatures).
Has the Internet Changed the Way We Think?
if you're a netflix member you can get a (not so close) approximation at http://www.netflix.com/LocalFavorites
Go to his home page, this link is from 2004!

Sep 1 2004
PHP Must Die
A comparison of how different scripting languages treat their users.
Or, more generally, know what you're going to work on next, and have enough context to hit the ground running. If you get to the office / update your repo / etc. and have to spend half an hour figuring out what to work on next, you're not going to carry any momentum over.
of course it will be both a consumer and professional device, but Apple just has a sure win for the device with a part of an industry that needs to get up to speed. This puts an end to the 'the world doesn't need a tablet' talk.
In recent memory I ran in to two real bugs, the one was where a ' in a comment would cause strip_tags to malfunction:

http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=46578

Fixed within 6 days, with an email to my address about where
to get and how to apply the patch, which was a nice touch.

The other one was technically my fault but it would have been nice to see the 'expected' response from a language I've been using for such a long time.
It's not. It's a slightly more complex setup than I wrote, but the end message is the same.

The passage in question opens with this:

It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.

It then gives a list of the people on the Comet, and lists in effect their sins. It ends:

These passengers were awake; there was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas. As the train went into the tunnel, the flame of Wyatt’s Torch was the last thing they saw on earth.

So, quite explicitly, it debunks the idea that "the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible", and concludes with "There was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas."

It's not just sentencing these people to death, it's supernaturalism. It makes the claim implicitly that catastrophes only happen to people that deserve them — a claim that's repeated at several points in the novel.
I think it is a very valid point. A tablet makes sense for the medical application but they have been around for years on the consumer side and nobody really used them. Why not? Surfing hacker news is cool on a tablet in my bed, but writing this comment while I'm in my bed would be impossible with a tablet. Same thing about most of the other browsing, text input on a table it not very practical. (I used to own an HP tablet pc)

The form factor is also quite big, it's not something you're going to put in your jeans. And when you have to carry it around in a backpack, most of the people will probably just take their notebook because when it comes to serious work, emailing and actually creating content a keyboard is a lot faster.

The tablet can't be much smaller than the macbook air and even if it is, I think a lot of people would go for the MBA.

For consuming media, a tablet is great, but epaper is even better and we haven't heard any rumours about epaper being used. Now for music you already have an iPod, and just for watching movies and reading blogs in color, I think is not enough to convince people to buy another device.

Remember a tablet would completely change the way people behave, the iPod replaced the walkman, the iPhone replaced a cell phone. A tablet is neither replacing an iphone nor a notebook, so at a 1000$ price tag, I think the value it brings is not enough.
I theorized about this a while ago and reached the conclusion that if children would have 'pause' buttons most of them would not make it past their 10th birthday ;)
Certainly not everyone would still need it and be able to afford it but the fact that many people would still need their car helps to explain why so few Hyundais were returned.
I agree with you. Though I would still say, the average consumer doesn't need a tablet. The UPS guy could use a tablet, you could use a tablet for grocery shopping at the super market, a mechanic could use it to diagnose a car...

but for reading the newspaper or surfing on your couch, I doubt that it's so much of an improvement over a notebook.
Maybe, though its pretty descriptive and definitely plausible (for a dataflow language anyway).
Sample code! Sample code!

Why do language web sites so frequently omit samples of the language? It should be right there on the intro page, just to give me a feeling for the language.
> but for reading the newspaper or surfing on your couch, I doubt that it's so much of an improvement over a notebook.

Reading on my Kindle DX is completely different and way better than reading on my 15" MacBook Pro.
Ask HN: What languages used to write computer languages?
In the discusson on the Anic language http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1042122, drhowarddrfine asks "Is every language claiming to be faster than C now?"

The trivial answer is "Yes", but that answer raises two non-trivial and more interesting questions:

1) If the language is faster than C, why cross compile the language in C rather than natively compiling it (the acid test of a C compiler is if it can compile itself).

2) What computer languages are used to write computer languages?

Please expand and correct the list...

* C/C++: C

* Python: C, but also Java and C#

* Ruby: C, but also Java

* Perl: C

* Ada: C (gnat), it seems like there are Ada-based Ada compilers, but I am not sure

* Forth: essential words in assembly (sometimes C) and the bulk of it in Forth

* APL: C (?)

* Smalltalk: ?

* Fortran: Originally assembly? Fortran? C for GCC-based GNU Fortran
It doesn't matter, however the OP asked "Is every language claiming to be faster than C now?" which struck me as rather snarky.

The trivial answer is "Yes", but that answer raises two non-trivial and more interesting questions

1) If the language is faster than C, why write the compiler in C rather than natively compiling it (the acid test of a C compiler is if it can compile itself).

2) What computer languages are used to write computer languages?

I've created a "Ask HN" question for discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1042398.
This reminds me of that old joke:

"Doctor, doctor, every time I lift my arm it hurts! What should I do?"

Doctor: "Don't lift your arm."

Instead:

"Every time I get lazy and expect Language <x> to catch my problems, it doesn't respond the way I think it should. What should I do?"

Don't be so lazy. Code it right in the first place.
Tablets have long since been marketed 'vertically', there are even tablets out there today that have been modified to better function for some applications.

For instance (but certainly not limited to), insurance appraisers, real estate brokers, delivery services,restaurants and yes, the medical industry.

But not in all cases were these successful.

Apple has become very much a mass market producer, I fail to see why they would want to specifically target a niche with their product.

More likely than not it will simply be a general consumer device that gets 'adopted' by verticals.

Another big issue with using a consumer device for a vertical market is theft, there had better be a very solid way to make sure that those tablets laying around in hospitals don't grow little legs all by themselves.

Anything in a hospital that is of pocket size, valuable, not nailed down and guarded by a rotweiler tends to walk out.
> It's a status game, and I luckily started to notice it while very young.

You see this often when engineers meet. If the group is new, and haven't established a status hierarchy already, they will quickly start throwing jargon around at each other, to show who is more knowledgeable and try to make others look stupid. That quickly establishes who is who on the status ladder and then the meeting or discussion proceeds on. I think of apes beating their chests and throwing sticks around to show their might.

Once you become aware of it, it is quite amusing to watch. I started chuckling during a meeting we had with 2 new consultants, and everyone started looking at me strange...

But there is an upside to it. To a certain extent it is necessary to establish a hierarchy, because a senior engineer's opinion is worth listening to a lot more than a junior's engineers opinion. Time is money. If Joe is a senior engineer and we have all as a group accept it, we will drill down and explore his suggestions, if Steve, a junior engineer proposes something, we won't consider it as seriously. For us to consider Steve's suggestions, he'll have to prove himself.

I think it is necessary to emphasize that this extends to professional domain knowledge. It is absolutely unacceptable to put anyone down because of their religion, sex orientation, skin color, or body shape. Otherwise, at least were I work, we have no qualms telling people they are full of shit, when it comes to domain knowledge.
I write Perl daily - and sometimes I'd rather deal with PHP...
I agree. I looked on http://haxe.org/doc and it took some searching to finally find "Code Snippets" http://haxe.org/doc/snip and then go to that page... which still has no code, but is just a list of examples, each on their own page. So, finally, yet another click later, http://haxe.org/doc/snip/hello is the Hello World, and you can see the rest on the snippets page.
I thought they fought the first point in court, and you didn't mention that the data selling is anonymous. Seems like a pretty conscientious way to do evil...
There are 'bootstrap' languages that are mostly written 'in themselves', Forth (in your list already) and Lisp come to mind but there are plenty of others.

For performance reasons usually some of the more frequently used constructs will be re-written in a lower level language but there is no strict requirement to do so.

You could write any language in any other language, provided the first one is 'Turing complete'.

The only reasons people will pick a certain language to do their (language writing) work in is because of constraints.

edit:

Another common technique is the 'DSL', or domain specific language. Some programming languages (again, such as forth and lisp) lend themselves better to this technique than others. Basically the idea is to extend the language within the accepted syntax with new words that add the required functionality.

After that these additions can be used like any other language primitive, even if they sometimes will run a little slower because of internal overhead.

edit: Being programming 'in itself' is a sort of coming of age ritual for languages, it means you can now face the world entirely on your own terms instead of standing on top of the scaffolding provided by another language.

But not all languages are very well suited to this, the more specific to solving a particular problem a language is the less likely it is to be bootstrappable. And plenty of times it just isn't worth it, if you get adequate portability and performance from being written in C then that's fine too.
J and K both came out of APL ... except they use the normal ASCII character set for their built-in functions. It still seems like magic to me when I saw one line of K execute really quickly and return what takes me dozens of lines of code in another language. Look at the APL/J/K solutions on some of the Project Euler problems. The longest ones are maybe two lines long.
You're doing it wrong.
It is absolutely unacceptable to put anyone down because of their religion

Wait, I can't make fun of Scientologists?
A good deal of higher-level languages are completely bootstrapping. C#, Nemerle, a good number of Scheme implementations, etc all compile themselves. You of course have to write your initial implementation in something else, but once that's done many compliers bootstrap themselves completely. In fact, when I design a language I write the smallest implementation possible before bootstrapping up (as I'm doing with Dynemerle, a reboot of the Nemerle project).
What's my intel? My Dad plays golf with Cedas-Sanai hospital execs, who say they have been getting frequent visits from Apple about a new device in the last 6 weeks

So? How on earth do you conclude it's being "developed for healthcare the industry" from this? It may be developed with the industry in mind, as surely any tablet/PDA/smartphone in the past decade has, but that doesn't even remotely imply priority.
People make mistakes. Computers don't. So people program computers to catch their mistakes, before those mistakes become problems like "crashing" or "losing money".

If you give the compiler invalid input, a subtly-broken program should not be the output. The output should be an error pointing you to your mistake.
Dan, thanks for tracking that down. It's ironic (given the subject matter) that I didn't go to primary sources myself; I just went with the Picasso-attributed version from memory :)
this is the big 'IF' with whether or not the tablet will succeed. One of the main reasons to go ftw with healthcare
I moonlight in health care while I bootstrap my startup, and I've heard people touting tablet PC's for this industry for years. The few inroads that I've seen that form factor make has been in our glucometers which are essentially modified Palm Pilots, and our lab technicians are now using a similar gadget to receive lab orders and scan bar codes on patient wrists while drawing lab specimens.

I was in a supervisory role last winter, and I really tried to make a tablet PC work for me. In theory, the idea would be great. I could have access to all the info on all the patients and all the individual units while I wandered around. The killers were lack of battery life, spottiness of wireless connectivity and weight of the tablet.

Our hospital just built a new $200 million facility, and even though the wireless connectivity is much better, we now have PC's at every bedside. (and we still generate reams of paper charts on each patient). And, our supervisors still walk around with a clipboard full of paper.

I'm not buying the whole tablet PC in health care idea. Even if Apple developed it, I don't think the industry would buy it.
Windows Live Hotmail
"... If you’re playing the hero, or if you have a hero on your team, it’s probably time for a serious talk with your coworkers and manager. ..."

Manager?

"... You shouldn’t be getting paged at all hours. Sure, you might need to do some occasional planned after-hours maintenance, or some very occasional unplanned-but-process-driven disaster recovery, but you shouldn’t need a hero. ..."

When you hear this you know your working in an established business or corporate land. I know this is what you should aim for, but I've yet to work or see a Startup that works so well it doesn't require this kind of intervention.
How much of that is the form factor vs. the display?
As one of my favourite friends (also a programmer) once said:

"languages are like women; if you dont treat them in ways they like then prepare for unpredictability"

:)

EDIT: replaced "designed" with "like" - much better phrasing
OT: For a site called Style Guidance, it's pretty hard on the eyes. Maybe softer colors would be better.
You can, but do it in your own time, not at work.
Well, once the anic compiler is complete, it would perhaps be a good idea to rewrite it in ANI itself and have it be self hosting, but to get to that stage, you have to write it in another language first. What language? Any at all - whatever you're most familiar in is probably a good choice (and probably why a lot of them are written in C).
PHP's yacc grammar is a good read, just as an example of how not to implement a yacc grammar. Changing one constant, for example, would make PHP's parse error messages about 1000x easier to understand and resolve. (I sent a patch for this many years ago, but it apparently never made it in.)

The number of things that work by coincidence, like support for octal numbers, is shocking. It's clear that PHP is optimized for something other than correctness.
Can you please restore the word "Explaining" to the front of the title? It appears to appeal to a different audience without that word.
The iPhone is a cellphone. It didn't replace anything that wasn't there before.
Arc: MzScheme core, then Arc.
Not only that, but anything released by Apple or Google is omg awesome and fantastic, and anything released by Microsoft is another me-too product, no matter how innovative it actually is.
Just like MS developed Vista for healthcare? See this link from 2004:

http://tabletpcnursing.blogspot.com/2004/09/longhorn-in-heal...
The Sport of Business
It should only require that kind of intervention once (per type of incident), and if it's a regular thing then it points to a more fundamental problem.
A natively compiled language can be written in whatever language you feel is easiest to write the compiler in, so either the language you are most comfortable in or the language with the best parser/code gen libraries.

Once you can compile your languages source code, you could reimplement the compiler in your language, so that it is self hosted. Of course, you can't do this until you can compile your code, hence doing it in another language first.

If your language is interpreted or JIT compiled, running on some kind of VM, then obviously you won't be self hosting, so you need to use a lnaguage which is suitable for executing your language. Most people seem to choose C, I guess because its low level and they want to reduce overhead.

I myself find Python to be nice to write parsers and such in (and it plays nice with ANTLR), though my most successful code generator toy project was written in Clojure.
His point is Google can't really make any stand about the justness of the law; they have to follow it to the letter (and, yes, help lobby for change if they want - but that is a separate issue).

His point was simple and very clear: if your doing something the law considers illegal you should be taking more care to cover your tracks, don't blame Google.

:)
Lua and Awk are written in C. Scheme is often written in another Lisp or C, and many Prologs are written in C or Lisp (or other Prologs). Erlang's VM is written in C, though it was originally prototyped in Prolog. It's not unusual to write scaffolding for a language (i.e., an interpreter or a VM) in C, and then to write most of the rest of the language in itself. It can be a reality check on the expressiveness of the language.

If you want to learn how to implement a language, I'd suggest starting with a subset of Scheme or Forth. If you leave the advanced features (e.g. continuations) for later, they're really not that complicated. You're better off using a language with garbage collection and good string support, such as Python (though if you're already comfortable with them, OCaml and SML are particularly appropriate.) Mainly, you don't want to have to figure out garbage collection, complex parsing, etc. on top of everything else. Also, don't worry too much about efficiency when you're still feeling out a language's overall design.

There's a great explanation of a Forth here (http://www.annexia.org/forth), and pedagogical Scheme texts aren't hard to find. Christian Queinnec's _Lisp in Small Pieces_ is particularly good.

Also, claiming to be "faster than C" is one thing, but claiming to be "a faster way to get things done than C" is another. The difference is significant, particularly when you can prototype your ideas in something flexible, get hard data from a profiler, and then just move the hotspots out to C. C has its strengths, but exploratory programming is not one of them.
> gave detailed descriptions of your purchasing activities to the federal government,

They would have to do this if made to, same as Google.

> selling that data to the advertising agencies who represent the companies you do business with?

Are Google doing this? What data? Evidence? EDIT: I mean the identifiable stuff... anonymous doesn't personally bother me. But you linked it to point #1 which is identifiable data
If PHP is to be improved, the new language must be easy enough a 13 year old can do it and web oriented.

These are I think its two strongest points.
Before the iPhone, there were no paid fart apps.
If he's right, it does seem to be a major medical emergency, and so forth, as you describe. But it's not a sudden catastrophe, like an earthquake. He's surely held these same beliefs for at least a few months, right?

Maybe I should be more specific. Calling sugar a poison is a good example. It may be true, in a sense, but it's definitely not true in the conventional usage. For example, if you call Poison Control and say you have eaten some sugar, they would not help you. That's what I'd call inflammatory.

On the other hand, maybe it's just me. It's possible that I find dispassionate argument more convincing than most people.
That and the ease of deployment, which is possibly the strongest factor. Most hosting companies will provide you with PHP on apache even if you don't ask for it.
I thought you weren't a real celebrity without both fame and money anyway.
As someone who never "hated" MS in the first place I am amused to see the recent spate of anti-Google posting.

I think... people have fads and at the moment Google is getting to be on certain individuals radars. I have to say I will just continue using products I think are cool and useful and keep an eye on their practices (without getting too excitable about certain, umm, things).
I suspect the availability of yacc/flex/bison and the free (as in freedom) Gnu Compiler Collection are also a pretty big influence. They give a (monetary) low cost of entry and a substantial amount of utility - I suspect a language inventor would prefer to invent the language and have the lexing, parsing, and code generation already taken care of by someone else.
Faster than C. That is a bold claim.
You're talking about reality; he's talking about politics. If somebody succeeds in blowing up another plane, the political fallout will be much, much worse than what comes of armed confrontation with the Islamic world--which, after all, happens practically every day.
Totally agree here, they need to link the tutorial front and center. After that it all makes sense.