skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would say that python isn't a perfect tool for tackling large problems on their own, but for largely different reasons.

You'll notice that Ruby implements objects in a very nontraditional OO way, seemingly similar to python on some levels. But typical OO restrictions create anti-patterns (excuse me, 'design' patterns), instead of direct access or on the fly coding.

The consenting adult argument is compelling for nontraditional semi-encapsulated object implementations, and simply requires a different type of programmer or team to do successfully.

I've been spoon-fed OO since 13 (C++/Java) but am now seeing the good in taking away the boilerplate. Just as OO replaced procedural and (Temporarily) functional paradigms, we will see hybrid languages replacing traditional OO as time comes along (Ruby seems to be a mix of OO, functional, and imperative).
I think the project overall is great, but I don't understand the dislike of sudo. There's simply nothing wrong with sudo (or su or entering your password in the GUI). OSX is a UNIX (a certified one, in fact), and it follows the principle that some actions require elevated privileges. Installing software system wide has historically required elevated privileges (I think for good reason), and so sudo is necessary to put software into /usr/local. There's nothing bad about using sudo for this.
Yeah, that's why I said "I think ..". Your statements were in the tone of stating facts, hence my rebuttal.

Anyway, I think your dismissal of the newer languages is very premature. PHP took a long, long time to get where it is. 10 years ago you would have been saying "Perl has WON!!!"
there's a lot of potential in this arena. Some highlights I sent to MarkBao after reading this:

* Need for private+secure for families as world shifts to public+open due to real time.

* Third leg of social connection on the net: Family. Linkedin won professional, Facebook won personal. Family is still wide open.

*Less about genealogy.
I don't understand what you mean by "Exactly."

(I'm not trying to be snarky, I just seriously feel like I've missed the point)
I thought we convinced mixergy to both stop making crazy headlines and to remove the "VOTE FOR ME!" link on pages? :-\
Much better approach (assuming all your terminals use the same colors codes, you could of course use tput if not):

RED="\[\033[31;1m\]"
NORMAL="\[\033[0m\]"
PS1_INSIDE='\u@\h:\w$bad\$ '
PS1="\`
retcode=\$? ;
if [ 0 -ne \$retcode ]; then
bad=\" [\\\\\\\$?=\$retcode]\"
echo \"$RED$PS1_INSIDE$NORMAL\"
else
bad='';
echo \"$PS1_INSIDE\";
fi;
\`"
unset RED NORMAL PS1_INSIDE

Examples:

anthony@Tao:~$ true
anthony@Tao:~$ false
anthony@Tao:~ [$?=1]$ # actually in bold red
The comments section finally broke through my dense thinking by explaining why you only look to marginal cost.

http://business.theatlantic.com/2010/02/amazon_vs_publishers...
Code execution holes in iPhone OS, iPod Touch
> "Do you think a 10 year old girl searching for green shorts or a red top, should be seeing any of those images?"

No, but a 10 year-old girl searching for green shorts should have Safe Search on.
It's the same concept.You cannot use the excuse of "private property" to allow arbitrary discrimination when you are selectively serving the public.

This opens the flood gates for supermarkets, restaurants, and businesses that serve the public to discriminate based on race, religion etc. This is not a world you want to live in.

How would you feel if all the banks in your area refused to lend or deposit for you because your political views? How would you feel if you could not find a place to live or rent because the "private" housing and apartment communities decide that they don't like your race?

> I can't imagine a Muslim would be too happy about an atheist showing up at a Muslim retreat and yelling obscenities to Allah.

Why do you keep arguing about this when the people in the article weren't even picketing at the event? They were merely attending it. Please try to stay on topic.
Google just saw a spike for the GIS terms:

- green shorts

- red top

- cute girl

- orange pants

- tank top
Really? So if an ad agency told you you needed to port mycanvas.landsend.com or similar venture to HTML5+JS using the "future browser" you speak of, you couldn't see any problems with that?

My favorite line: "and if they don't, the ability can be added". Yeah, we've seen web standards move at incredible speeds. YouTube, Hulu and the ilk would be glad to hear they wouldn't have a hope in hell in your world for years.

Here's a fantastic quote: "Does anyone else remember seeing really sexy "DHTML" demos that featured full-screen animation and more? I do. You know when that was? 1998"

Let me know your plans to pull all of these techs together. I'd like to see that.
The series is essentially trying to make the case for self service advertising.

It makes sense. GAM and OpenX are good systems that will both work well for people that rely (or want to rely) mostly on ad networks and occasionally get a few direct sales enquiries.

However once you move into the realm where lots of advertisers are contacting you directly, it is much much better to have an self-service ad management system.

Think of Facebook, it makes a large majority of its revenue from self-service advertisers. Not GAM, not OpenX but Facebook Ads.
http://digital.venturebeat.com/2009/09/18/facebooks-self-ser...
That's an interesting link. Do you know if they ever figured out the root cause? Wikipedia makes it sound like it was only ever considered driver error.

Also, why is accelerating during the park->drive transition more dangerous than sudden acceleration at speed? Seems to me like the really high speed case would be deadlier to car occupants and those around them.
I actually didn't realize I used this formula for my headlines until someone pointed it out here on HN. Now that I notice it, it saves me so much time to search for an alternative.
Challenger Shuttle home video
Sure, we can rip out functionality until we have a computer that is so pretty and simple that a monkey can use it...

So now my mother is a monkey? Come on now, you're exaggerating.
You reap what you sow! ;-)
Former Apple engineers are busy working on, well, who knows what.
But I don't see why detail is bad.

Too much detail is bad because it hides the relevant knowledge. That is, there are certain paragraphs / certain images that the programmer will remember. Those are the important components. Brevity is good.
Actually this will serve as many users as your system can handle.
Six Great Ways to Ruin a Brainstorm
Authors don't have to publish via Macmillan. I honestly don't understand why so many people see Amazon as being a moral failure here.
New IP Law For Startups Blog, by Jill Hubbard Bowman
Well, yes. But an amendment is kind of a Big Deal. I have my doubts that this issue is of the type to inflame The People sufficiently that such ponderous wheels might be set in motion.

You're right, though, thanks for the correction.
Are WordPress Users at Risk?
Chrome 5 Benchmarks: 20% faster than the Fastest
YES I REALIZE THE IRONY HERE

I will admit HN is one of those rare sites with a pretty good signal to noise ratio in comments.
Doh - I missed that we were talking about the near miss between ZFS and the Mac. I was just lamenting that it's not on Linux.
I think the point is that replicating pretty much any site is trivially easy in any language if you don't have to worry about query performance, cacheing, scaling, etc.
You've introduced a new idea here by comparing FogBugz to Facebook.

Those earlier comments are comparing the strategy that Fog Creek took versus the one that Facebook has taken. The strategies are similar, and so the comparison makes sense.

It should be noted that Wasabi is a general purpose programming language. It is Turing complete (up to relatively trivial finite-memory issues, just like any other general purpose programming language). Like C, for example. It should also be noted that Wasabi is a .NET language. It has full access to the .NET Framework and all of its classes.

One could use Wasabi to write a C compiler.

[NB: I am a Fog Creek developer, working on the FogBugz team.]
I did read the article. And just because they say it will go on sale direct does not mean it will.

Does it have to be sprayed? Because that will never go on the market. But a brush on version might.
"Take ownership of /usr/local so you don't have to sudo"

Ouch!
+1 to group chat over IM for company use.

Skype has excellent group-chat, that's what we use. Much easier to adopt than IRC for non-tech types, and it's free which is a bonus.

(I didn't even know Skype had a chat feature, let alone group-chat, until I got to my current job.)
I don't know exactly what it was, but the game lost a lot of magic for me at some point. Now the aesthetic is totally different, and I just can't get back into it.
Ah, that makes sense.

I didn't really see this article as being interesting from the "oh look, a reddit!" angle. I thought it was a good article in that it showed how to do a lot of things in Clojure: Java interop, a basic Compojure use case, and deployment with Leinengen.
I dislike sudo because I want my user-installed stuff to be installed in my damn home directory, not mixed in with system software. I want to me able to install things on a multi-user system without affecting anyone else.

Every other non-language-specific package manager blithely assumes that it's the only one on the system, so they assume that nothing is already present, and don't even think about the possibility of independent unprivileged use.
PHP is "easy" because anyone can grab some code snippets, rewrite some mysql_query's and have a terrible little my first dynamic website doing in a couple of hours.

Developing something on a large scale or even developing something of a normal size while maintaining good programming techniques and structure can be difficult.
Impressive interview, very inspiring. Mixergy is an awesome site.
Texting Underground Can Save Lives And Caves (Teenager develops low-freq radio)
I've had all these same complaints about Python, and this summarizes them quite eloquently.

Python sorta kinds tries to be half way include objects and functional programming, but not really. I especially agree that having to type "self." for every single member instance reference anywhere in your program is just as annoying as much of the boiler plate Java requires. I tried using objects in Python for a while, but found that it just made things more verbose than writing procedurally.
Wonder what changed to allow them to do this. I can't believe the omission of multitouch from the original release was just down to oversight..
It's not just comments but every modern communication channel (twitter, fb, etc etc) which is totally overrun.
I really don't care how much it costs THEM. I care how much it costs ME.

I've been reading books from the Gutenburg Project on my PDA for a few years. Someone recently recommended a book to me that was released about 10 years ago. I go to buy it in electronic format and it's $24.99. I pass. I end up borrowing it from someone I know instead.

For me, I must provide the storage medium, electricity, and data connection. On top of that I must pay 10.00 - 30.00 for a small file that possibly contains some kind of DRM that would leave me unable to transfer the file to another device. What did I buy?

However, what if I was able to buy 50 ebooks for $25. Well, I would probably go for something like that. Right now, it's simply not worth the time, energy and money to buy what's on the market.
Yeah, that sounds quite similar. A side effect of typing this way is that changing keyboard layouts didn't change my typing speed at all after I had learned the keys. Which annoyed me initially, because I was hoping for an easy way to increase speed.
This is the comment which uses a popular fighting video game reference to break the chain of the thread.
That's this inane blogspam tutorial's idea, not Homebrew's
I wouldn't make a blanket assumption based on a graph like that. The number of PHP installations are higher for 2 useless reasons:

1. It is trivial to see if PHP is installed on a webserver. It is not so trivial to see if Python or Ruby is.

2. PHP has a strong presence in shared hosting, which is popular for hobbyist or low traffic websites.

When you take into account that big websites like Youtube, Reddit, and FriendFeed are written in Python, these graphs are downright useless.
HipHop is a static compiler, though. That part of LLVM seems to have been heavily exercised by GCC and Clang.
Exactly! I work for a large k-12 school district, and our content-filtering system blocks any Google image search that does not have safe-search enabled. Not fool-proof, but certainly cuts down on 99% of these kind of results.
Slightly on topic:

How would you attack the "query performance, cacheing, scaling, etc" problems?
"However, these libraries are inherently static. This means that if the library doesn't do what you want it to, you are screwed. There is no diagnosing or fixing errors in the library. If they happen, pack up and try a different language."

Ermmm.... I think someone misinformed him. In Python, not only can you use the standard library, but you can also use third party libraries as well. And Python's got a ton of those.

Personally, I think the author can make a case that he doesn't like python, but I don't see anything here that makes Python bad. Different strokes for different folks.
I think for people looking for outsourcing to it probably comes down to price, on average it's going to be cheaper to get get some php that works that get some python that works.

Just look at rentacoder and the like, most of those people don't care how it's written or think about how much trouble the code base could give them in the future as long as it get's done and works.
For me the key point was this:

Of course this can be resolved with the use of intermediate or temporary tables.

Other than waving his hands he didn't really give an downsides to this approach. And in my past experience intermediate tables are a great way to go.
"For your sake I hope Zed Shaw misses this one."

Classic, and accurate. Zed would be justified in his rant here I think.
What I meant to say is that it's a simple problem, and should be about 90 lines of code.
Hence the shoes geared towards barefoot running.
Vibram FiveFingers, Feelmax, Nike Free, etc.
Another Apple Tablet? More Mac Than iPhone.
Not true: the following is from mxcl's github README (http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/) -

But… don't sudo!

Homebrew can be used with or without sudo, but, OS X was designed to minimise sudo use, you only need it occasionally. For example, as long as your user is in the admin group, this just works:

cpan -i MP3::Info

Using sudo all the time is annoying, but far worse — it conditions you to type in your root password without thinking about it. Homebrew compliments OS X so you are unlikely to install anything that really needs to be chown:root. Let this be your last sudo for some time:

sudo chown -R `whoami` /usr/local

NOTE: If you already installed, eg. MySQL into /usr/local then the recursive chown may break it. Fixing MySQL should be as simple as:

sudo chown -R mysql:mysql /usr/local/mysql

Also 'inane blogspam' seems a bit much, no?
The first 2 maybe... the rest though are pretty nitpicky. Surely there are more important criteria for selecting a language than minor syntax issues.
This discussion reminds me of Fred Wilson's article about bit.ly "That's only Ten Lines of Code"

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/03/thats-only-ten-lines-of-code...

Sure, you can replicate lots of sites but to me Reddit wasn't great because of the tech, it was because they had built something really zeitgeisty that people liked.
I don't know if you need to change much Andrew -- there is nothing factually incorrect or misleading about your headlines. Perhaps the same "unfunded startup makes it big anyway" formula is overused but its a damn good formula and there's a reason it works so well. And its not like your headlines are like Mashable -- the quality of your content is consistently very high and very thoughtfully done.

Though your interviews are unlike other interviews in traditional media, they are totally helpful and inspiring for those of us slogging away who haven't quite crossed the line yet. I'm a big fan, especially of the fact that you don't let go of questions very easily and that you do nice things like provide transcripts or make your interview videos embeddable.
Google to boot Blogger laggards off FTP publishing
FWIW, the title really puts me off. Similar titles that put me off:

"How I built a startup in N hours"

"How I built a business with just $N"

where N is designed to be small to increase click through.

In society we're all looking for too many short cuts. Too many easy fixes. Fat? Nah - don't exercise and eat healthily, get a diet pill!

Also the whole rags to riches story is a really tiresome angle to take on things IMHO. I'd say that most startups are built by people without any money :/

(Having said that I do really like the interviews you do. Very interesting).
"HipHop for PHP isn't technically a compiler itself."

...

"HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++"

Sounds like a compiler to me. Compilers don't have to target machine code.
The semi-colon is on the home row on qwerty.
Having worked for ad agencies, I would never do that again.

But anyway, Flash doesn't work on the iPad at all. So if you want your site to show up there, you have HTML 5 and JavaScript at your disposal; a Flash site is not even an option. Adobe isn't going to convince Apple to change their mind, but they can release a tool allowing Flash developers to migrate to HTML + JavaScript. With this in place, they don't need to maintain the Flash plugin anymore, except perhaps for IE users.

YouTube, Hulu and the ilk would be glad to hear they wouldn't have a hope in hell in your world for years.

So hostile. I'm not the one releasing devices that don't support Flash but do support HTML and JavaScript.

YouTube is already doing what I describe. They tell IE users to stop using it, and they develop their own web browser. Flash will not be YouTube's default player for much longer.
Ask HN: Review my website, TalkFest
http://jilion.com/sublime/video -- a Video player for these approaching Dark Ages
I've used homebrew a bunch (and even contributed a few formulae) after I heard Al3x tweet about it.

There is so much less friction than using macports or fink that I dropped them immediately. Definitely check it out.
I never got the argument about one-line lambdas... Every time I needed a lambda, it was either one line, or deserved a new function (even if nested). Are there some serious cases where it's not enough?
People need to chill-out their self-righteous and frequently hypocritical disgustometer. If you're gonna have a worldwide open discussion you're gonna have some trolls. How about thinking about how amazing it is? How about not having your emotions triggered by the trolls. There are things to learn on all sides.
Assuming Apple asked them not to do multitouch, probably just a decision that the rewards outweigh the risks.
I don't know, but a lot of you seem to disagree with him.

However, this is actually a decent idea in my opinion. He makes an "okay" case in the post except that he ends it with some reasoning that Google should care about their image (pun not intended). He should have ended it by pointing out that it would then finally be "safe" to link to Google Images without having to worry (too much) about the results that might appear for the user (you don't know if they have safe search on or off).

Hell, I can think if valid reasons for why I could have wanted to link to a Google Image resultset and not doing it because of what might pop up for the user.

This might also have the added benefit of porn-sites playing the search rankings less. At least for innocent words.
Fair enough, but there are two separate questions here:

1. Where do you want the software?
2. Are elevated privileges required to put the software where you want?

If you want to load all your software into $HOME/bin, then more power to you and no sudo is required. However, /usr/local serves an important and valid purpose (to provide packages system-wide), and it should not be available without elevated privileges. (By the way, 'not mixed in with system software' is misleading, since OSX ships with an empty /usr/local. Nothing you put in /usr/local mixes with anything.)

Homebrew's official README suggests changing the ownership of /usr/local, and I think that's a terrible idea for multi-user machines. (Having said that, I suppose that many people have single-user machines, and in that case the issue is largely moot.)

Finally, a simple way to put software into your $HOME without ever needing sudo is available in most cases:

./configure --prefix=$HOME
I think the real genius of Homebrew is in integrating it with git & Github and in turn making it something social. In my experience, sometimes a formula wasn't available in the main repository and I could easily merge in another Github fork's changes.
> Strictly speaking it would be more impressive if I created two designs, one with an aesthetically pleasing design and the call to action below the fold and one with the same design but the call to action above the fold, then A/B tested them against each other.

Your graphic doesn't seem to show much of anything about the effect of the fold. What is obvious to me is that your users seemed to click on buttons that were big and relevant.
The idea of writing swap to a tape (or some other kind of "dump") both scares and intrigues me, in terms of its implications for how long some processes would have to stay running for this to be at all useful to them.
The Nexus One Just Got Multi-Touch
How is it self-righteous to turn off a feature on your site that you feel is currently causing more harm than doing good? Are they in some way obligated to give the trolls a place to troll?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology

""Low-end disruption" occurs when the rate at which products improve exceeds the rate at which customers can adopt the new performance. Therefore, at some point the performance of the product overshoots the needs of certain customer segments. At this point, a disruptive technology may enter the market and provide a product which has lower performance than the incumbent but which exceeds the requirements of certain segments, thereby gaining a foothold in the market.
In low-end disruption, the disruptor is focused initially on serving the least profitable customer, who is happy with a good enough product. This type of customer is not willing to pay premium for enhancements in product functionality. Once the disruptor has gained foot hold in this customer segment, it seeks to improve its profit margin. To get higher profit margins, the disruptor needs to enter the segment where the customer is willing to pay a little more for higher quality. To ensure this quality in its product, the disruptor needs to innovate. The incumbent will not do much to retain its share in a not so profitable segment, and will move up-market and focus on its more attractive customers. After a number of such encounters, the incumbent is squeezed into smaller markets than it was previously serving. And then finally the disruptive technology meets the demands of the most profitable segment and drives the established company out of the market."
Nexus One gets a software update, enables multitouch
Any idea if this is for all Android (2.x) phones? Is the Moto Droid included?
The spray on version would probably have to be used by people in full hazmat suits with breathing apparatus. I can't see this being approved for the general public.
And it's not even correct. Python's lambda can contain an arbitrary number of lines, as long as they're a single expression. Considering that lambda is "borrowed" from functional languages, which are inherently single-expression, I've never seen what anybody's problem is with them.