skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Lisp, I would argue, is far more about the machine than the man and that is the simple reason why it's not more popular."

Pleas do, i would love to hear your argument. I fail to see how lisp is less humane than python, when i find it to be exactly the opposite.

Edit: what i meant was that lisp is more about the human, not that python is more about the machine, i hope i don't get misunderstood.
I posted this a while ago - but as a self-post not a link so it got very little notice :)

It's in much better shape now and someone suggested I submit it again. Please jump in and help out listing startups!

(inspiration was hnstartups.com which sadly ended up full of spam)
Great information, thanks! I take it the companies using Tcl and OpenBSD failed to get acquired.

I didn't realize the technology used would deter an acquirer. This probably explains why most startups go with "safe choices".
Thank you, you are speedy.. I bookmarked your homepage and I'll keep checking.
How to Control Diabetes
"The Art of Profitability" by Adrian Slywotzky
There is also this google doc: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF90b1l1...
Exactly. I fail to understand why people are so dismissive of languages/approaches that do things slightly differently and don't implement equivalent things in the exact same way. What's so special about the rake syntax?
Because as you get older any unit of time is proportionally a smaller fraction compared to the part already behind you.
Secret US Cyber-warfare (Dominant Cyber Offensive Engagement) revealed&#8230;
I would guess the speediness was because the server was in the same building?
If they hired a young/good writer whose job it was to maintain and curate a list and profile page for each company as well as post "where are they now?" posts for the 6 month survivors who want to be profiled

Doesn't this very website serve that purpose?
Cute Babies: My First Kiss Pictures & Loving Photos of Kids
Most of the talk is very directly from the book "The Art of Profitability" by Adrian Slywotzky.

Notes here: http://sivers.org/book/ArtOfProfitability

Very highly recommended reading.
Also try Haskell if you want to do DSLs.
Just for kicks. In CoffeeScript:

get '/hi', ->
"Hello World"

You can have your cake and eat it too.
Indeed. Plus the thing about fusion power is that likely these plants will be absolutely massive, which raises issues about:
* single point of failure
* huge transmission needs
* very large start-up cost, likely banning developing countries from using it.

All of these issues are much alleviated with distributed power like solar or wind (or the mini-reactors suggested by this article), which makes me think it's preferable.
Check out http://www.reddit.com/r/hardscience That might be what you are looking for.
Because class struggle is making a comeback?

Managers set salaries. Guild professions (e.g. lawyers, doctors, accountants) set their prices and uphold the guild with cryptic languages and lengthy vetting processes.

The case where engineers (of either companies, processes, products or technology), instead, are in the position to set compensation (or more specifically, are able to profit by the fruits of their labor), are generally only available to very high ranking manager/engineer hybrids, consultants, and founders. This is probably the closest thing in the modern world, in the literal sense, to the Marxist Socialist ideal of the workers taking control of the means of production.

Other than that: ask yourself the question -- why do the bankers have all of the money?

PS: Some resources.

6% of all US income is now earned by the top 0.01% of the income bracket. This is as high as it's been since at least 1913.

The lowest earning member of thix bracket in 2005 was earning $5.9 million a year.

http://contexts.org/socimages/2009/08/18/the-percent-of-inco...

http://www.visualizingeconomics.com/category/share-of-income...

This isn't the difference between Bob down the street who went to college and Jim who didn't -- or the kid in your class who became a Harvard trained lawyer working in a big firm on wall-street versus the smartest kid in your math class who's now at Lawrence Berkeley labs. This isn't the difference between the kid who's working at some cool post series A company and one that went to Microsoft, or the student body president that went to work for a hedge fund rather than a non-profit.

This is the difference between the founders and partners of the law firm, the founders, investors, or CEO's of the startup, or the CEO's or partners or founders of the hedge fund, and A-list directors/producers/athletes/musicians/actors and nearly everyone else.
this is real dispersion !
I was actually hopeful that Perian had started supporting it, I'd guess their installed base would be much higher than XiphQT which would mean, e.g., Wikipedia content just working for many Safari users.

But I checked the site, they only do vorbis in mkv.
I can imagine it really being a very open project with outside contributors, but I'm not sure that the exact same tools will work with other languages.

For example, I think that dealing with something like Python would require a completely different set of translations because it is mainly dictionary based.

That's not to say that doing an X to C++ converter isn't possible or a good idea, I just think that the HipHop techniques may not apply to other languages very easily.
It's cool. We call us (reddit) their R&D department.
Is the first example from the book "Influence: The power of persuasion" ?
Does anyone know someone on the translation team for the Twitter site? Not the tweet translators (which are 3rd party or theoretical) but the main page translations?
I'm one of those that purchased RubyMine. As a long time NetBeans user (for Ruby and Java), there were some features in RubyMine that just worked better. I thought the price was worth it.

However, after using it for a few months, I can say the following with confidence:

- JetBrain's idea of bug tracking/reporting is broken. How do I know? See the comments on this blog post (http://blogs.jetbrains.com/ruby/2010/01/start-2010-with-ruby...). They've been testing an alpha version of their bug tracking software...in production. Yes, that's right. So folks like me who are actually queuing up frustrating bugs to report have been unable to do so for weeks. (Note, it's up now, but I'll bet it doesn't stay up all day. I'll type quickly). When you're using open source, you sorta allow for this sort of thing...but after you've paid for a product you tend to expect more.

- The time difference for the company creates an issue. When things like the bug tracker goes down, it's usually late at night in Russia, not in the US. It can be frustrating.

- The extracting of functionality from Intellij to RubyMine (and I assume, PyCharm) breaks things in confusing ways, and Intellij doesn't prioritize fixing them quickly. So, for example, folks like me who can't live without IdeaVim end up with broken, unsupported behavior. Or, as another example, the keymap support and filtering is just completely broken (try filtering by keys in the preference dialog). I expect this to improve...hopefully sooner rather than later. Perhaps after the bug tracker stabilizes.

All in all, RubyMine feels like the product that could've been great. It still has a lot of potential. It parses projects and source better than Netbeans, and it has built-in support for haml, cucumber and rspec. But I get the impression that JetBrains isn't devoting a huge amount of resources to making it perfect. They threw it out there to say that they had a ruby IDE, but the pace of development of fixes is slow.

YMMV
It does boil down to context though. Who are you teaching? Someone who doesn't know computers at all? (Why are they learning to program then? Well, it happens). IMO a very simple command line interface where the only thing that is happening is directly what the student is doing can be helpful. The VB IDE has a ton of stuff going on, it can be intimidating. Just depends on the student.
Another CoffeeScript snippet, if you're working with Node.js or the like:

task 'name', (t) ->
# do multiline stuff
Are you saying this because you can't monkey-patch literals? Because you can very much monkey-patch everything else in Python.
Already in development, coming soon.
My take away: As a Python developer, I should really check out Ruby. It's like Python in some ways, but in other ways it may help give me an additional perspective on programming.

Thanks for the article!
Mark
Seems like a pretty crappy experiment to pit the reaction time of an ex-professional athlete against (presumably) more typical people.
That's just another reason for vicious fights besides small stakes, small differences.

Just ask the protestants and the catholics.
The more I know, the less I need: Thoughts on web design
Smart HTTP support for Git is being released soon. We'll be adding it to GitHub shortly thereafter.
By that logic then PHP itself is also assembly because someone could make a machine that executes it natively. We might as well throw all distinctions away if we go down this road.
Could you please provide some examples of incorrect errors reported by PyCharm? You can file bug reports in our issue tracker: http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/
I understand the intent, but I do not feel that it loses its incorrectness by taking it out of context.

That people even feel this comparison is appropriate is what has me depressed. It represents a fairly fundamental set of misunderstandings.
I thought that was originally said about college student government/politics...

Then again, programming language is a very personal choice for many, so if you insult a language, you insult the person. There aren't many polyglot programmers that are detached from their preferred language.

For me, I prefer Python, but I'm not going to blindly defend it.
> solve this problem from scratch

I'm not detracting at all, but object databases with way more advanced feature sets have been around for well over ten years (http://web.progress.com/en/objectstore/). Making a stripped down version of an object database is not exactly forging new ground. I know you weren't necessarily implying otherwise.
I saw your app before I started working on mine. You did a nice job. You set the bar pretty high!
Somebody tried making that objection but reviewer N.B. blocked his paper during peer review, citing inadequate references to existing literature. The scientist lost his funding, was denied tenure, and now lives in a van down by the river.
Its an Indo-European language, so if your native language is Indo-European, then you will encounter many familiar structures and words. (There are quite a few Persian loan words in English, btw.)

The script will likely present the greatest challenge. It is Arabic but nevertheless it is an alphabet. Beyond the letter forms, you will need to adjust to the idea of positional capitalization and joins.

Farsi/Persian also has a fairly complete coverage of various sounds, some of which may present a problem to the non-native speaker.

Finally, Iranians do have a fairly distinct partition between formal (written/official) language and the everyday conversational usage. The conversational style is much more fluid.
There are absolutely super performant in memory sql databases. You just have to pay for them.

There's also csql. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSQL
The golden age of InfoWorld covers, 1984-1985
You really want to write code only once, and compile it to two targets: One for the server, one for the client. This is really hard to do in all current mainstream languages.

To illustrate: You have some piece of state y, and you have x = f(y) that means "x is always the value of f(y), when y changes, update x." Furthermore x is shared state across many users. On the server side you want that statement to generate code for synchronizing values of x and y across users. On the client side you want to generate code for pushing and pulling Ajax/Comet updates from the others.
You have to incent repetitive, boring, skillless tasks. Altruism might work if there was some higher purpose involved, but that's hard to imaging for a survey. So you are left for paying for results.
Yep! Another must-read classic: http://sivers.org/book/Influence
What Three Years of Keyboarding Look Like (and how to clean yours)
Nods and winks: How to teach computers to make appropriate gestures
The obvious solution is to assign 1.1.1.1 to example.com
I think what we both want is proc(arg1, arg2).
my sentence parser is officially buffalo'd
The first language I was taught at school was Pascal, and thinking back, it's probably a decent choice. The school board I was in used only macs, so VB is straight out, and C/C++ is far too complex to teach at a grade 10 level.

Basic is nice, but it lacks the explicit structure that Pascal, C/C++, and other high-level languages enforce.

I'm thinking Pascal is a good choice because it's explicit enough in its constructs to force the programmer to realize what they're doing, but not so fine-grained that you need to start thinking about memory management, pointers, and other more advanced constructs.

The skills are then easily transferable to other similar languages like C/C++, Java, C#, etc.
seeing reddit in this list, i wonder to myself: at what point is a startup no longer considered a startup? when is it better to start using "startup" in past tense?
China Mulls Looser Web Rules
I can think of only four: naval craft, spacecraft, remote locations (e.g. antarctic) and when you need a neutron flux for some reason.

What are the others?

(This is intermittent renewables, wind+solar, with inexpensive and efficient energy storage. I agree if you don't have energy storage you're capacity limited.)
A Plea for Developer Unity
I've found quite the opposite; my experience with Python users has been consistently personable. If anything, the party line seems to be "this is the way we do things, if you like what you see, come on in, if not, no worries". I mean, this whole article is really just a troll post on Python by a Rube (that's what they're called, right?)
The Truth About College Plagiarism
If there's anyone that can pull some numbers out of Jason, I think it's Andrew. Look forward to the interview on Mixergy!
The only way you are going to get 10x, with roughly equivalent people is if someone is using a wholly inappropriate language (Ruby vs Forth for web apps, say), or if you can avoid writing libraries because someone has already written them.

Or if your competitors are using the standard languages and tools, and you're using a language that provides significant abstractions on top of the standard languages and tools.

I was on board with your comments until I watched the video. Their language looks to be a jump on the order of assembly to C.
It's cool to hear about Whitepages early history. For several years Whitepages was one of the last "big" all Perl shops in Seattle. Though their recent recruiting ads are for Rails developers, so perhaps they have since re-architected.
Is there a way to lock an entry, like a bio? I could see some grumpy ex-coworkers taking their grumpyness too seriously and defacing entries.

Looks like a fun project!
Well, normally I would agree - but if its entirely abstracted away in a library (and the library is well written) then it might sort-of-kind-of-maybe be ok.

Python itself does varying degrees of bytecode optimisation depending on which version you're using.
I hope China will invest more on its Infrastructure & Irrigation projects.
On that last point, YC has no shortage of applicants. I'm not sure that I'd worry about spreading the word if I were them either.
Big fan of what the Tetuan team has done in Madrid!
If you are new to their products, one quick way to learn your way around (since so much of the app is exposed to the keyboard) is to just work through the keyboard shortcuts trying them out. I don't see the doc for PyCharm yet, but most are the same as Intellij - http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/documentation/documentation.ht...

Good ones include:
Command-w: smart expanding select
Shift-command-N: Navigate to file. Note you can use wildcards in this box
Command-p: param info
Designing for failure. Cases where 37signals can improve and git does it well
Perl One-Liners Explained, Part V: Text conversion and substitution
http://www.scribd.com/doc/26321251/Identifying-influential-s...
Thanks a lot!! :D We're thrilled to have a 2nd edition, this time in Madrid & Barcelona too!
I'm making a service for indie filmmakers to self distribute films and this has been a big pickle.

I was making an encoder for them to download using ffmpeg but then realized I may have wasted my time because of the licensing of h264.

So the problem became: do I take the cost and encode their video or do I let them send the video prencoded for me. I had assumed that if they had encoding software that they have already paid for a license. Anyways, i've added support for ogg to the service (with warnings about it's usability).

Does anyone know if sorenson squeeze has this licensing issue?
Many years ago an older friend of mine made a comment whose full truth has become clearer to me as I've grown older.

The older you are the faster time goes. The telescoping effect can be quite startling.
I'm not going to say that (eg) OpenBSD kept a company from getting acquired; terms and timing were more important. But it was continuously raised as an issue, seriously enough that the engineering team was asked to port.

Bizdev is an awful reason to choose technology, or for that matter to make any other decision about your product. I'm just refuting the statement that writing your own programming language will help you get bought.
Redis does not invent nothing new. It's 50 years ago technology mostly, at work. VM, Data structures, and so forth. Even the language it is implemented in, C, is old. But it's not an object database, and this is the point.

Databases are like languages. Does Ruby invented something new? No, but it's my preferred high level language. It's a matter of "interpretation" of already implemented concepts, not a matter of features set.

AFAIK Redis is one of the first DBs exposing basic computer science data structures as abstract types. You have sets, linked lists, a sorted type that is the equivalent of a balanced tree, and an dictionary (an hash table) on top of this.

What matters is if this interpretation of already existing technologies fit well with the needs of today. I'll leave the task of inventing new breaking things to CS departments as I'm a programmer and not a scientist, with all the limits and strengths that this implies.

As long as we, programmers, developers, hackers, computer entusiasts, don't realize that our work is an interpretation work, like architects, we will continue to be nerdy engineers that the society will continue to look at without to recognize the real value.

Do you evaluate a building based on his number of rooms, the ability to resist to forces, and so forth? I don't think so. Why you should use this meters for software?
> Neither Truman nor FDR were intellectuals.

The point was that leaders are responsible, not that those specific leaders were intellectuals.

It's interesting that you defend intellectuals against the charges of mass murder by using your definition of intellectual, but don't mention that the folks in question, while not intellectuals according to your definition, got their ideas and justifications from folks who do satisfy your definition of intellectuals. And, that went both ways - they were also supported and praised by intellectuals.

The whole point of being an intellectual is that words have consequences.

I'm not saying that a leadership's intellectual advisors and supporters are as responsible for the purges as the leadership, but it's absurd to claim that they had no responsibility. That claim is especially absurd coming from someone who tried to argue that the leadership was far less responsible than the folks who carried out their bidding.
Good Sportsmanship: Do nice guys finish last?
There's very little practical difference between a space rocket program and an ICBM program. Fore example, during the Cold War, the Japanese Space Agency's most advanced rocket was basically a direct copy of the United States' MX missile.
Yep, it is. Great anecdote from an awesome book.
By that criteria you should consider COBOL as well.
Ask HN: : How do I get a streaming deal and legality of MP3 blogs?
I created CurrentHipHop.com, which allows streams/downloads of hip-hop music. 90% is free music (covers, freestyles, free mixtapes), but a small portion is still copyrighted (leaks, promotions).

I built it as a better version of HotNewHipHop.com, which gets more than 300k unique visitors a month and is run by a prominent DJ in the hiphop community (working with guys from Lil Wayne's group + others). He's been at it for two years and has steered clear of legal issues. How?

I do want to go the completely legal route and somehow score a licensing deal for the 10% of music on my website. I am completely lost on how to go about it.
As a non lisp programmer, it is hard for me to automatically see what is going on in a lisp program because of mismatched " ' " and a lot of parenthesis. I believe this is one of his points. When I was learning python, or ruby, for that matter ( I use both! ) I never felt like I had no idea what was going on in the code even before I learned the languages.
Bradley Kuhn: I Think I Just Got Patented
Was HostBaby included in the deal for CdBaby?
the party line seems to be "this is the way we do
things, if you like what you see, come on in, if not,
no worries"

That is absolutely not the case; Python is the anti-TMTOWTDI. The Python community is very vocal and explicit about the conventions developers are expected to follow, more so than any other language I'm aware of: PEP 8, Zen of Python, non-stop critiques about whether some code is "pythonic" enough.
I've read quite a few books from your recommended reading list and to be honest, it would have saved me a ton of time to just read your reviews. It seems like the reviews cover most (or all) of the important content from the books. (Which is great!)
Paula Hunter Named Executive Director of the CodePlex Foundation
Guidelines, Tools and Resources For Web Wireframing
Seems to be only speaking of drivers (the /drivers/android directory, to be specific), which by nature don't need to be part of the kernel itself, hence there is no apparent fork. That's my understanding, anyway.

Not that a fork is really a bad thing, the term has gotten a bad reputation for undeserved reasons.

At any rate, gaining acceptance into the main kernel tree can be a big deal for a driver project, but I don't think this is a problem for Android.

[edit: looks like I may have read just enough to be dangerous]
I can't tell if you're joking or not ... are you? Given the context it seems odd that you should interpret the anecdotes as being entirely serious and make such a serious comment, but perhaps I'm just having a sarcasm-detect failure ...
There's a difference between "why aren't you using Python?" and "why aren't you following standard Python coding conventions?".
Wait? What? Which engineers are getting paid $200K?

If that's the ballpark I must have been playing a different sport for the last 6 years.

Anyhow, I've also had a swig of the kool-aid over those years and is now the basis of my new-found freedom and upstart dreams... time will tell if that investment paid off however.
The people who push for anonymity are those who don't understand the Internet (or anything else, quite often), usually politicians - the antithesis to the scientist or engineer.
Reddit was acquired by Conde Nast - I would suggest that this means the company has graduated from startup status?
Gmail: A Symbol Of Everything That Is Wrong With Google
"If you’re interested in rock climbing or knitting, Digg aims to have in-depth news for you to vote up or down on a separate home page."

So, they are going to become another Squidoo / Mahalo type site? Sad. I haven't been to Digg in at least a year and I don't see anything on the horizon that might bring me back.