skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having to think about types sometimes slows you down (because you have to think about them), sometimes speeds you up (for the reasons you mention).

Sometimes the type system won't type check a perfectly valid program. One thing that I bump into with nearly every program I write in C# or F# is that I want to add a method to a generic type when the type supports some method. Suppose you have a type Bag<T>. Now if T supports an interface IValue with method ComputeValue() I want to add a ComputeValue method to Bag<T> that computes the sum of the values of the things in the Bag. Of course the method would only be available when T supports IValue. This can be done in languages with more expressive type systems, but there are (provably) other perfectly valid programs that they will reject.

Another reason against statically typed languages is that the compilers are often slow. Compile+Run takes several seconds (if you're lucky).
Rules are rules.

As a CS student many years ago we had a 10am deadline for all work - I missed it once by less than 60 seconds.

The punishment was always 20% of your mark deducted immediatly, with no excusses.

A great learning experience at an impressionable age, so now in my professional life I've never missed a deadline though my own fault.
Short Answer: Python idioms are intuitive to me, whereas many statically typed idioms are not -- so it is easier for me to learn new concepts using Python.

Long Answer: For me, part of it is syntax. I have found that using Python has enabled me to learn some programming concepts that I struggled with in .Net. .Net supported them just fine, but somehow the Python approach was intuitive for me, so once I learned it, I could abstract it to a different language. Polymorphism being the primary example with Python.

More recently, I've gravitated toward languages that provide support with both dynamic types and static types (and arguably C# has heavily moved in that direction, but still I find the syntax not intuitive). The hybrid is nice, as you can worry about the higher level algorithm more easily with the dynamic feature, and then shift over to static to take advantage of the features you cite for static.

Earlier this year, I discovered the Cobra language (http://www.cobra-language.com), which boasts a python-like syntax on top of .Net (and supports both dynamic/static typing), and is optionally more strict than standard static typed languages in that it adds the benefits of contracts, nil-checking, and embedded unit tests.
That's probably just a historic accident. Most modern languages have an interactive prompt now. For example Scala, as you mention.

Another factor might be the availability of type inferencing, which makes interactive prompts perhaps more viable, as you can for example type "1 + 1" into the prompt, and its type is automatically deduced.
Good for the brain
1) List of supplements that are good for the body (click on the right to drill down to "mental health": http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/snake-oil-supplem...
2) Exercise
3) Meditation http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/05/11/095679761037...
4) Adequate levels of Vitamin D http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080421072159.ht...
This is way Nokia sucks
Yes, but Lisp has nothing built in that does this. Unless all your data structures are lists of non-lists.
Yep, that's generally how that kind of problem are solved..Close the eyes on it!
Something that people around here seem to assume is that there's no malice in the things people post here. I think it's their inability to recognize politics when they see it. To me, if I know that Dave intentionally named an entire software project just to say "Fuck You" then his opinions don't matter.

But, everyone else will take what he says at face value, which is wrong. He has an agenda, and has had one for years. Unless people know that they can't form their own opinions.

Additionally, I already said the tests were crap in the original blog post. Not only is his opinion already biased, but he obviously didn't read the whole post. My reply was simply reconfirming what I already said, "Yes, you're right but I don't care since I wasn't testing that."

And frankly, I don't mind comments like this. They're easy to knock down and point out the flaws in their own logic. My only problem is with this community's continual belief that everything every person says has equal merit and validity, when it's obvious (as in Dave's case), it doesn't.
Sometimes they're adding the value of handling the hassle of outsourcing: firing suppliers who don't deliver, knowing those who do, planning for risks ahead of time.
Be sure to take a look at "Brain Rules" by John Medina.

http://brainrules.net/

The short version:

EXERCISE | Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power.

SURVIVAL | Rule #2: The human brain evolved, too.

WIRING | Rule #3: Every brain is wired differently.

ATTENTION | Rule #4: We don't pay attention to boring things.

SHORT-TERM MEMORY | Rule #5: Repeat to remember.

LONG-TERM MEMORY | Rule #6: Remember to repeat.

SLEEP | Rule #7: Sleep well, think well.

STRESS | Rule #8: Stressed brains don't learn the same way.

SENSORY INTEGRATION | Rule #9: Stimulate more of the senses.

VISION | Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses.

GENDER | Rule #11: Male and female brains are different.

EXPLORATION | Rule #12: We are powerful and natural explorers.
Haha, yeah I know what you mean. I just meant the instances where it became so mainstream that people around me were saying such things as "I chipped my nail. FML" which was very irritating.
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Garbage Collection Tuning in the SUN JVM
There's nothing left to save. Google has already added collaboration capability into their Documents and Buzz is what they went with for microblogging in their mail app. http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/future-of-work/google-wave-rip-4... goes into 6 reasons why killing off Wave is the right thing to do.
You are making the same economic mistake that a lot of anti-IP types do, which is that you assume that the cost of duplicating a thing has any relation to the cost of producing it in the first place. It does if you're talking about, I dunno, spoons.

The point of patents is, if you discover a method of doing something, you patent it, and if anyone wants to use your process, they pay you to license it. So we provide a mechanism - but not the guarantee, since no-one might be interested - for a return on an investment into R&D.

Do you really, honestly believe that a drug company would research a new drug, spend a decade shepherding it through clinical trials and FDA approval (we are talking an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars) and then a generic manufacturer sells it for a little over the price of the raw materials, having gotten all the hard work done for them for free?

Because even if they wanted to they couldn't; they'd be bankrupt.
I'm interning at a major managed DNS provider and this actually happens more often than you think. Most of the time it ends by working with telcos like level3, cogent etc, blackholing routes, sacrificing a certain geographical location in favor of keeping others alive and basically just waiting it out. It's interesting how because of the nature of the internet, DDoSes are hard to deal with.
What is the use case? looks from the website as if this is meant to be a GTD tool, but for that to work wouldn't you need notifications etc.?
FYI: Thunderbird can detach and delete attachments.
It's not necessarily the money, it's actually that it's too early in the development. Nowhere in the post did I say this was to see how fast Mongrel2 was. It was to make sure I wasn't screwing things up. To do that I don't need an EC2 cluster or some complex setup, I just need to hit the two servers on localhost and compare them.

Later I can setup a few machines and do all sorts of performance testing, but it probably wouldn't matter. Guys like Dave would always find something to criticize and usually have an agenda that means they have to criticize anything I do. I'm probably instead going to focus on making Mongrel2 do cool stuff instead of bikeshed performance to satisfy the Daves of the world.

My personal motto with Mongrel2 has kind of been, "10% slower is alright if it's 100% smarter." That's more of what I want, since there's plenty of servers out there that are fast as hell, but they're also impossible to work with in modern apps.
Teach your kids to be entrepreneurs
Bad:

- reading news, fiction books (99.99% of them are crap);

- programming in boring languages (Java);

- chatting drunk in a bar;

- watching any movies (youtube included), tv;

- blogging about nonsense (life, politics, etc);

- listening to a podcast while doing nothing (like sitting on a sofa);

- participating in any social network (livejournal, facebook);

- living in the countryside (I don't really know this, but it seems true by my observations on other people).

Good:

- living in a country where common language isn't your mother tongue;

- reading very carefully chosen books (non-mother tongue are preferred);

- regular sex;

- friends which share your interests;

- regular jogging (not on a treadmill);

- walking when you are stuck;

- programming in functional languages.
I love how the death star article is on there. Though I don't know that this qualifies as an infographic: the only info on it is title + num_edits. The relative sizes aren't informative, their locations aren't informative (horizontal or vertical, I'm sure the Jesus article is still highly edited).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars for the data. Not sure where to get the edit counts, aside from checking the history statistics.
Ear massage.

Wet your hands with cold water and twist and turn your ear with two finger (not too hard, the idea is to generate blood flow so they get warm. You are not trying to hurt yourself). It jolts my attention for about 20-30 minutes.

When I was writing this, I thought to myself if there is any science behind it. Turns out this seems like a fairly well-known thing to some people. I found this out myself. Now I will go read what causes this to happen.
WSH scripting is fairly common for Windows sysadmins I know of.
Sapir–Whorf hypothesis applied to computer languages
We can't rely on the legal system to protect us from everything. At best, the system can only react and keep us from making the same mistake twice,

To anticipate and respond to new threats and get the reaction right the first time, we need some sort of highly creative and autonomous decision engine that can quickly make decisions from the perspective of an individual.

That would be you.
What's wrong with running on a treadmill? I've found the measurability to be useful.
Also annoying are people who post 10 tweets in a row, especially if the tweets are not of general interest. These people are usually the same ones who tweet 50+ times a day.

I think people who post the kinds of statuses you discuss, as well as the overtweeters, think of social media as a way to vent or communicate with select individuals. They're not focusing on the fact that all of their followers can see their updates. It's a very self-focused, as opposed to audience-focused, approach. Which is not always wrong, but can be aggravating.
Car Fuel Could Be Produced From Air By Car Itself
I'm confused by your statement that statically typed languages are concise. Every time I program in Java, the code size ends up blowing up exponentially. However, a good 30-40% of the code is boilerplate rather than having to do with the task at hand. Now, this isn't a direct consequence of static typing BUT it looks like a very high portion of statically typed languages lean towards having a low content to code ratio.
I thought an empire is created when you occupy other countries and impose your system upon them. Like Rome was an empire because it stretched way above the borders or rome, or Mongolia, or persia, though maybe I have a wrong definition of empire.

But it seems that wikepedia agrees with me:

"Politically, an empire is a geographically extensive group of states and peoples (ethnic groups) united and ruled either by a monarch (emperor, empress) or an oligarchy. Geopolitically, the term empire has denoted very different, territorially-extreme states"
What about gmail? I haven't got any spam for years...
Just for perspective,

I think code reuse was the panacea of the last batch of "business BS". Tests driving development is more the latest batch.

It's to the credit of software gurus like Robert Martin that Object Orientation is no longer really sold as a way to magically get software components to use on your other projects, that inclusion is preferred over inheritance etc.

Today, the idea that you can substitute writing tests for design is the "BS", the excessive paradigm touting, of today.

Which is to say that it's an unbalance presentation of new, useful tools. Tests are great but don't let you get by without high-level design unless your application is so simple it wouldn't need it.

But objects were and are great too. They just don't magically morph a class declaration into good code or reusable code. You still have to put effort into that part of things.
Start a software company or work in a bar?
Ask HN: please review SmartPeople
Hi everyone,

I made a website that allows you to 'follow' any hacker-newser. I think such a service is needed, because this kind of great website is 'comment' centered.

The principle: you get an e-mail with the comment of your idol everytime he comments on HN (with a slight delay because I don't want to request the site too much). This will personally help me a lot to follow patio11 :)

Thanks for reviewing SmartPeople, and If in the near future you are still using it, you'll find out that I'm adding reddit and some other boards you may belong to.

Please allow a 30 min/one hour delay between the comment crawlings.

Site : http://nasr.ath.cx

Edit: my english...
I think that after a short amount of time (perhaps 10 years after being registered) all patents should be released.

This period would allow the innovator time to bring their product to market and begin profiting from their ideas. It would prevent patents being seen as a way to unfairly limit competition. Innovation would be encouraged. It might also reduce the desirability of patent-trading.
Java is not the only statically typed language, and some statically typed languages are almost phenomenally concise.
What do you think about the libraries, documentation, and sample code available for Scala or F#? I think they might have a better chance than Haskell or OCaml, no?
Why would anyone read that far into the article. Here's how you comment on one of my articles if you want to karma whore with the neckbeard crew:

1. Skim through my post to see if there's any inflamatory headings, if there are stop there and just complain about that. Especially if there's a curse word. Extra points if you can demand I be banned for cursing.

2. Jump to the end where I have a little conclusion, and take it out of context, then come here and say my conclusion is wrong. Extra points if you mention "latency" or "cache lines" or that it would all be better if written in Haskell or Clojure.

3. Now start reading, but only read to find the first thing you can take out of context and say is wrong. Doesn't matter if I say it's wrong, or have a reason for doing it, all that matters is the sweet quote you can pump into a comment here for no real feedback value. Extra points if this comment mixes #1 and #2.

4. If all else fails, call me an asshole, cock, bile spewing turd, or many other things I have never called you. Usually there's a cabal of people who hate me and will get their pants tight over that so you'll have friends.

Interestingly enough, I write my articles so people who do these things look like idiots. For example, I know someone is going to scan through looking for a juicy quote that proves I was testing on localhost (like that's some unforgivable sin). That's why I put several comments about how I didn't care and was just confirming I didn't break anything after that quote. Or I make headlines that are inflammatory so people who don't read get caught commenting on how that's all the blog is. Or I make my conclusions hard to disconnect from the main article.

It's really just a huge game really, so have fun with it. I know I do. :-)
And, dammit, it's spelled Brasil.
Yeh, that might be because there have been record numbers of applications to university this year and some 100,000 students are not going to get a place at any university so many probably rightly thought getting a distance degree while working might be a good alternative.

But we would need much more than an increase in percentage to make any judgement. What are they studying, how many get to graduate by age group, how many enrol by each age group...
No wonder most of my sites were down or not functioning very well this morning. Hope they get everything operational soon, DNSMadeEasy is a great provider.
30 best iphones apps so far this year by Alex Ahlund AppVee
The Entrepreneur Corner
Some very interesting entrepreneurship articles, tips, lists, videos and more. Totally recommended
Documentation cannot really replace first-hand experience with code. That said, code without good documentation can puzzle even those who wrote it in the first place.
Maybe it's personal, but looking on the screen (while running) with a dumb simulation of the nature makes me feel blue.
Miniature Art on the Tip of Pencil by Dalton Ghetti
7 secrets of writing a book that sells
Programming languages and the Singularity OS
Something that people around here seem to assume is that there's no malice in the things people post here.

Yes! Absolutely true, and one of the best things about HN. Comments are generally judged for their content, rather than by who posted them.

I think it's their inability to recognize politics when they see it.

I'm able to recognize politics when I'm looking for it. But again, I enjoy participating in a community where I generally don't have to care about politics. There's generally very little drama on HN.

Honestly, I think the experiments you're doing with poll/epoll are really quite interesting and I enjoy reading about them. But the associated drama/agenda/conspiracy-theory stuff? I could do without having to trawl through that.
Yes, we use Atombox for doing GTD, along with Google Calendar. I also keep a lot of small reference and support atoms in there, too (like the size of the tires on my car and wines I like).

We do have some ideas about notifications that we might implement in the future but it's not necessary to have notifications to do GTD. Access to your lists wherever you are is the linchpin for that use case.

Thanks for your comment.
I've also done a lot reading in this area and the overall topic is really interesting to me.

I met a guy at Hackers and Founders (SF) and the topic of Vitamin D came up. We discussed some of the research that I've found lately about how much good it can do you in terms of general health/brain health/immune health, etc., and how more-than-likely most hackers are deficient because they stay out of the sun during the hours when your body produces
Vitamin D (generally thought to be 10am - 3pm).

Then we got on the topic of how it would be cool to have some kind of Health for Hackers meetup to discuss this and other things hackers can do to have optimal brain and general health.

jonbischke (or others with an interest in this topic), if you're interested in putting on something like this with me in the Bay Area shoot me an email (see my bio). I'm curious if this would be of interest to anybody else who is in the area. Send feedback if anybody's interested in attending or help put on something like this.

Edited for clarity
TUTOR TUITION FOR ENGINEERING MATHS BE/ SAT GRE GMAT
http://projecteuler.net/ is a good way to go through and learn a new language. Focus is on programming, algorithms and the mathematical tricks associated with paring down the number of things you should be searching through.
Right, social media isn't the best way to have private conversations: that's what email is for! If it's something private, like where I'm meeting someone, I switch to email rather than have my whereabouts posted on social media for all to see.
Gödel, Escher, Bach is one of the most beautifully bizarre, transcendent creations I have ever come across. I wish every computer programmer that I ever heard say something silly like "I don't like art", or "I don't read that much" could be exposed to it. There is nothing so humbling as getting your ass kicked by 800 pages of a guy trying to explain an idea in the simplest terms he can.

The only things that I can compare it to are more literary, but "Breakfast of Champions", "Foucalts Pendulum" or "Infinite Jest", aren't out of order.

They are all products of brilliant, obsessive, minds making a concerted effort to explain what they can see above the clouds.

As much intellectual ego that gets bandied about between computer programmers, its nice to keep a humbling base where you can actually see that no matter how smart you think you are, that there are people who are way way way smarter than you and actually have the dedication, skill and expertise to try to help you understand what they have spent their life learning.
I still dont see how much of this has anything to do with dynamic vs. static. You seem to primarily be addressing off topic points which have nothing to do with why do you choose dynamic over static.
> The point of patents is, if you discover a method of doing something, you patent it, and if anyone wants to use your process, they pay you to license it. So we provide a mechanism - but not the guarantee, since no-one might be interested - for a return on an investment into R&D.

That is not the point of the patent system, that is the means by which the actual goal is obtained. The goal of the patent system is make the information public so all of mankind can benefit from it and the knowledge doesn't die with the inventor. Buying off the inventor with a limited monopoly on the idea is merely a means to an end.
I wrote about limiting patents to 7 years: http://entrepreneur.venturebeat.com/2010/03/04/in-favor-of-s... (note that the title isn't mine, the title I had proposed was "the 7-year patent").

That's the best compromise I could come up with. I'm not interested in hearing from people who have a 100% ideological position. I'm interested in finding a solution, which implies a compromise from both sides. "Patents are evil" is not a solution.
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4068478/Mentor-EVE-s...
What are the best blogs about data?
Serendipity: Success in business increasingly depends on chance encounters
"If the Excel team's compiler and widgets were so much better, why wasn't the rest of MS re-using theirs instead?"

Because Microsoft has cultivated a combative internal environment in which different projects fight for resources and maintaining a library for other silos to use would only serve as a liability. Source control (which, big surprise, MS handles via many in-house tools) would also become even more of a nightmare than it is already.
This is how people take advantage of you I'm afraid. There's a class of member of every community that knows you try to take each comment and person at their face value, and then uses that against you to shape your opinion.

I know this, because I also did it for years, and sometimes even professionally. If you aren't careful and check what people say or check on who they are, you can get conned into believing something that's not true.

So, fact check what people say, even me. Don't believe things I say just because you see my articles on here all the time. The actual quality of the person and their hidden agendas and biases matter much more than what they actually say.