skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If downvote is like a slap in the face for you then you are taking it much much too serious.
And thank's for calling me not being worthy to be intelligent human being.

Update: I will downvote anyone with such stupidly patronizing and passive-aggressive attitude like "if you downvote me (or anyone else) then you are stupid or not worthy".
Anyone is free to downvote my comments for any reason they like:
be it disagreement, not liking the tone of it, or me being factually wrong. I'd appreciate the correcting comment in the latter case though, but by no means the lack of such I would consider an insult or "slap in the face".
I don't think there is any problem with downvoting on HN, but I guess there are problems with some egos.
It already works like that. The solution would seem to be to increase the karma cap on downvoting.
You're right about one thing. That is very unscientific. You're mainly testing your file system cache, not these programming language implementations.

E.g. perl(1) is faster than ruby(1) at printing "Hello, world!". But since you presumably had ruby hot in cache and not perl the latter seems to be almost 4 times as slow.

Here's a better benchmark, which runs each of these 500 times and takes the average: http://gist.github.com/630868

Which yields these results:

Rate clojure php emacs python ruby js perl awk lua shell C
clojure 0.844/s -- -97% -97% -98% -99% -99% -99% -99% -99% -99% -100%
php 24.6/s 2812% -- -2% -43% -75% -76% -78% -82% -82% -84% -89%
emacs 25.2/s 2882% 2% -- -41% -74% -75% -78% -81% -82% -84% -88%
python 43.0/s 4995% 75% 71% -- -56% -58% -62% -68% -69% -72% -80%
ruby 96.7/s 11361% 294% 284% 125% -- -5% -15% -28% -29% -38% -55%
js 101/s 11919% 313% 303% 136% 5% -- -11% -24% -26% -35% -53%
perl 114/s 13397% 364% 353% 165% 18% 12% -- -15% -17% -27% -47%
awk 134/s 15743% 444% 431% 211% 38% 32% 17% -- -2% -14% -38%
lua 137/s 16134% 458% 444% 219% 42% 35% 20% 2% -- -12% -36%
shell 156/s 18359% 534% 519% 262% 61% 54% 37% 17% 14% -- -28%
C 216/s 25440% 777% 756% 401% 123% 113% 89% 61% 57% 38% --

Update: Added a C program and ran the shell program in a sub-shell (since perl's system function preloads a shell). Didn't add silentbicycle's SWI Prolog and OCaml since he didn't provide the source.
You should set your prices based on the value that you are delivering to your customers and not based on how much it costs you to deliver.

To find out the perceived value, you need to get out and talk to customers.
I'm a Perl guy. If I pick Ruby just because it's more like Perl, will I wish I had chosen differently in 12 months. In other words, are there any limitations that I will hit as my skills progress?
I've never been to SV but watching through these video's gives me a sense of the sheer intensity of the energy that seems to be there with so many companies and founders focused in one place. It's intoxicating; I'm so jealous!

Thanks to all involved in the event and justin.tv for showing them. I'm probably going to go through them all again at some point - there was so much good stuff and I was too excited to write notes as I watched.
Don't take karma systems too seriously.

There are some (many?) psychopaths here that literally live off cheating karma by posting BS that best fits crowd mentality at any particular moment.
Interesting anecdote - an Israeli judge recently ruled against a club that had a "ladies' night", forcing it to charge equal price for female and male patrons, as having a different price based sex is a discrimination prohibited by law.
IE 7/8 wasn't exactly the same, just didn't have
the shadows or the rounded corners.

That's exactly the point.
Both languages (Python and Ruby) are 3GL. So you will be almost equally productive on both.
Why the revolution will be tweeted
The experience of social media in the Philippines suggests that the revolution will be tweeted, but that revolution will always be won with blood, toil, sweat and tears.
Gandi, strictly speaking they're not free. But they're my registrar and provide DNS at no extra charge - I cannot fault them.
Use http://dpaste.de/xtDj/raw/ instead of the given URL.
New languages are carried on the backs of new platforms. eg: unix & c; web & javascript.

To predict the next big language, predict the next big platform. The upcoming platforms are: smart phones & tablets; cloud computing & many-core. The cloud, being connected services, is largely language-agnostic, and many-core might end up being implemented by borrowing whatever works in the cloud.
The needs of the above seem well-met by established languages, leaving little opportunity for new languages to emerge.

What about the next big platform after the above? It's probably more than 10 years off, but Moore's law says smaller devices will come. If disruptive, they'll be attractive to new audiences, with different needs - perhaps along the lines of cochlear neural implants (already big business) or garage genetic-engineering. What languages do those guys happen to be using? They will be carried to success.
RoR is a framework, not a programming language, Ruby is a language.
How to protect Apple profits ahead of earnings
Thus priming you to expect large prices and pleasantly surprising you with the cheaper prices.
I wouldn't trust a vote on this. Some voters will have no clue and just vote based on gut feeling and PR. Some will know Python, like it and vote for it based on that. Others will dislike and vote for RoR, without considering what they would do when they hadn't yet learned they disliked it, etc.

Knowing what I know today, I would probably try my luck with Python, as I've too often been bitten by Ruby's lack of properly documented, stable libraries. However, I think I would miss the power of Ruby's easy metaprogramming facilities. Clojure comes to mind as a third option...
Downvoting isn't a slap in my face, but downvoting without telling me why is.

[Edit: You're right that I phrased my parent comment badly]
You should check out nookDevs
A quick hypothesis. For every comment, assume one reader downvotes if he disagrees in every 1000, and every reader can read 20 random comments per story.

There are more people around with 200+ karma than a year ago. If increase in number of comments do not match the increase in people with 200+ karma, there will be more downvotes.

And, we don't read comments random. They're displayed top to bottom with already upvoted ones on top, If people usually try to avoid disagreeing with the majority, mid to bottom comments (usually latecomer comments) will receive more and more downvotes.
Thanks for your insights.

I also have a DynDNS account for my Linksys/DD-WRT router. And I agree on having DNS configuration decoupled from my other servies - years ago I used to run my own bind server.

I don't want to sound cheap, because $30/y is totally affordable, but providers give you DNS for free (zoneedit, dnsexit, freedns, ..) - I'm trying to figure out which one is liked best on HN. But I'll note the DynDNS option, because you are right in saying that 30 bucks for a good service is next to nothing.
23:30 "Man needs something to dream about" Anna Lee Fisher.
My base web development stack today is Python2.7+Flask+Fabric. I'm loving it. I've been using a lot of Fabric to do adhoc testing, write little tasks to do little specialized things, debug using code.interact() sometimes. It's the best thing ever. Flask is also the best thing that happened to the Python web development community recently. The documentation is truly awesome and library is extremely minimalist. There are many things Flask refuses to do in order to keep simplicity. But there are plenty of recipes in the site that teach you how to integrate specialized solutions for your apps. I really like loosely coupled systems and the Python culture is aligned with it.

I've pretty much stopped using package managers tho. Sometimes I may use pip to install some library, but most of the time, I try to keep everything (full packages) cached in a "lib" subdirectory and install on-demand. Even for Flask extensions, I try to to manually copy the libraries to lib/flaskext instead of letting pip handle it for me. The benefits of this is that you're never dependent on ANY package manager to run your app, and you keep all your dependencies frozen in your project's repository. (PS.: I f_cking hate git submodules).

The other thing I've been doing is using a more Unix-y configuration style (https://gist.github.com/aa9158d559c642fed619). My Python web applications today consist of an app.py file, an app.conf file, a support.py file (which loads all dependencies isolatedly and then I just do "from support import *" in app.py), a lib/ directory with dependencies and fabfile.py. In fabfile.py, I usually have a "web" task to start the development server and many other small tasks I add as I go. It can't get any simpler than that.
"Go to your users!" PG to AirBnB
Sure you will get rid of some junk content, but when ads are devalued you will be getting rid of the good content to.
Ruby is not almost always picked with ROR, ROR is built on top of Ruby so it cant be used without it. There's an inherent flaw with comparing a framework with a language: You're removing the people that use Ruby without ROR but with other frameworks (be it because they use Merb, Sinatra, or w/e) from the voting. Also, I find Hacker News generally tips on favor of Python, I might be incorrect though.
Thank you for the kind words, T.J. I really enjoyed meeting you (and many others), too!

Median quality of atendees was also -phenomenal-

Something magical happens when you put a bunch of us in a room together: SUS = HN^n.

At one point, I just stood in the middle of the courtyard during a break, closed my eyes, and picked up random bits of conversation:

- we had to load the source code...
- our MVP was a little too minimal...
- we may pivot again...
- we made it to 100,000 uniques...
- try a different framework...
- finding another audience...
and my favorite:
- we're gonna change the world...

I love it when you guys talk dirty.
I do that with some of my other domains - that's probably the best option, because when your hoster/registrar goes down, there's simply no need for DNS.

But Swiss .ch and .li domains are registered through switch - and they don't offer own DNS servers.
Ruby on Rails is a web framework, Ruby is a language.

Previous threads about learning Python vs Ruby:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=741257

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=682101

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1258099

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1078628

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1311586

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1463425
The reason the arrays index from 1 is that Lua is designed to pare down to a data description & configuration language for non-programmers, and they felt that starting arrays from zero would be confusing. I don't like it it either, but in practice it's a minor issue.

People who write off Lua because of indexing from 1, Python because of the significant whitespace, Lisp for its pares, etc. probably haven't gotten to the really interesting stuff yet.
Ask HN: Java FUD
I want to use Jersey (JAX-RS) to write a web app in the static files+AJAX fashion. I also want to use Java because otherwise I can always keep blaming tools and documentation for things not working out.

So I go over to Java land, and the feeling is that I need to, to get things running, get to know about Tomcat, Hibernate, Maven and JBoss just to get started.

Now, having used Python+Django, I use to favor simpler solutions over complex ones.

What do you advise me to do? Is this just FUD? Should I try a non-EE Java solution (Lightweight java?), or just embrace the 3-letter acronyms?
I know it's been touted before. But Python is a programming language, and Rails is a framework on top of Ruby.

You can compare Ruby with Python, or Rails with Django.

There are quite a few web frameworks for Ruby now as well (Sinatra -> Padrino, Merb, Nitro, Waves) ..

I think it's useful to know both languages. And pick whichever framework fits the problem domain best. Django is obviously really good for publishing. Rails is great for B2C. If you intend to market a SaaS API to businesses, and you expect lots of traffic, maybe even a framework in another language will be a better fit.

Ruby and Python are more alike than any other pair of languages I know. The frameworks however, can be quite contrasting.
In every large group of people there will be a few that can't adapt to the tone and level of the conversation around them.

Usually these people will go away again. On HN the only way they can express their negative attitude (once they've received enough upvotes for snarky comments) is by hitting the downvote button.

Normally the situation corrects itself, for the few cases where it doesn't the advice is to simply ignore it, most old hands will highlight a downvoted comment anyway just to see what it says. Come back in two weeks to the same comment and it will be sitting at '1' or higher.

Possibly it's time for PG to raise the downvote karma cap, make it a fraction of the alltime high for any comment so that the cap scales as the site grows without manual adjustment.
I made a comment in a thread the other week suggesting that Wired's UK editor was hurting his ability to cover Facebook by not using the service, and it was downvoted, and I couldn't figure out why:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1726192

Granted, it was a little bombastic and was written in a sarcastic way, but there was a good point in there and it was actually upvoted significantly before someone else made a response criticizing what I said.

I didn't understand why it was downvoted. As someone in the journalism field, I found it to be surprising that he could continue to make good points in articles about Facebook without using the service.
In my philosophy 101 class in college I don't recall any epistemological theorem suggesting that comments that are downvoted are less impressive or correct than comments that get upvoted. Don't use your karma to prop up your ego. Upvote and downvote others liberally, and try not to care too much if you yourself get downvoted as long as you're right.
Father and son send iPhone into space
Disabling JavaScript: Asking the wrong question
was looking for recommendation from experience ..
No, I will not elaborate. But you can read my other comments in thread in question.

Market for devices below Apple price point is big enough to feed many companies and software vendors.

What game? Apple will not monopolise mobile computing. Phones, tablets, netbooks and other, not yet invented, products. The more solutions on the market the better for the consumer. You and me too.

This not so good for software vendors beacuse of market fragementation, but the cat is out of the bag.

Apple financial results are the least concern of mine. Yours too, I suppose. But Aplle financially will be fine, their marketing is outstanding.
A social network designed for the wants and needs of developers
This was already posted a few days ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1750517
Maybe just ask the question you want to ask? Modern stacks can handle hundreds of thousands of connections these days, so this concern may be outdated. Then you could have a conversation about if there's enough CPU, is there enough RAM to handle the connections, network bandwidth, how you handle replication, failover, structuring software to handle lots of connections, etc, all of which indicate someone may actually know something, but you'll never get to that point because of the magic formula. Often these problems are used as a proxy for something else when you can actually talk about at that something else. Sometimes I think it's just because most people are covering for not knowing about that something else.
Does anybody have a good solution for the "Sharing Coroutine State Sucks"-problem? I've thought a very long time about this (in my case, using continuations in FP instead of coroutines in Lua), but I still can't seem to come up with a good answer.

I guess one way to deal with it is by mechanically transforming the co-routines into a FSM. This is very similar to defunctionalization. However, I don't know of a language that does this well. Any suggestions?
Look, you can call this a problem with my ego or whatever. I happen to think that there are certain minimum standards of politeness that should be upheld online as well as offline. And for me that includes using words to explain any disagreement instead of just acting in some ambiguous way that can be interpreted as hostile.
"lack of properly documented, stable libraries"

o_O, example?

I've often turned to Ruby due to it's awesome documentation and actively developed gems.
Bangaloreans can watch "each other" on streets using gov-installed cameras.
This kinda just freaked me out :). http://www.btis.in/ you can click on the checkmark that says camera. And watch fairly recent snapshots of the various junctions in Bangalore... How cool/weird/scary is that? Does your city provide this? Does it freak you out?
I am relatively new on HN.
so, does it really mean that it only takes group of 5-6 people to manipulate HN news/comments any ways they want? shocking, considering HN's influence.
Use Grails - http://grails.org.

You will need to know Java/Groovy. Groovy can be considered a superset of Java (not 100% technically true, but easy enough to think of that way to get started).

> grails run-app

will run grails in dev mode on its own tomcat.

> grails prod run-app

will run grails in production mode on its own tomcat.

You can proxy Apache on port 80 to the tomcat port (default 8080).

Grails uses Hibernate under the hood, but hides it pretty darn well - you generally won't need to know much about it, or even touch any XML config files - to get started.

You can slowly add more Java libraries as required.

http://www.grails.org/plugin/jaxrs - this is a JAX-RS plugin for Grails which lets you use Jersey as the implementation if you want to ("At the moment, plugin users may choose between Jersey and Restlet as JAX-RS implementations").

The "Play!" framework might be interesting to you too, if you already know some Java, but I prefer Grails overall.
clickable: http://www.btis.in
the most senceless benchmark ever.
If I had to pick a new language today (I know both languages and I slightly prefer Ruby over Python) and I didn't already know Javascript, that would be it. Javascript is the new popstar right now. The language I want to try right now is Haskell, sadly I don't have a project for it right now. Anyways, my vote is for Ruby here so I'll vote ROR :)
That was my reaction as well. At first I thought the examples were going to be a few random, unrelated comments, but instead they were all anti-Apple comments. No matter how high-minded your community is, you have to expect this kind of behavior from Apple fanboys. But it certainly doesn't mean the community as a whole is rotting.
Enhancing human QA with code coverage
several things come to my mind watching the site:

1. i could not figure out, what exactly the site is about. please write a short sentence or paragraph, on what users can expect.

...i just saw that you have this information in the title tag. put it in the header somewhere . your users will thank you.

2. you use caps for the main navigation and have 13 nav items. the nav items are very hard to read (and there´s no space between the text and the borders). capitalizing only the first letters would help a lot. regarding that there are many items (and subitems) perhaps it would be better to put the navigation in a left sidebar.

3. you use tahoma for text and content. serif fonts are hard to read (on screens). if you wanna have serif fonts, use them for headlines and serifless fonts for content. again you users will thank you.

4. there is the date in the top right. most users will know which is today´s. so it will distract many users from the real content.

5. in the top top navigation there are options for font size, background color,... i´d remove all of these and carefully set typography and colors that they fit most users needs.

6. like this buttons: the images are cut out from a white background, so there are those little white pixels left on the edges. though this is a very smallish issue it gives the users the impression that this is an unprofessional site. i guess you don´t want that :)

7. using adwords is ok, but putting ads (and no content) in the very center looks like you wanna make a quick buck and are not at all interested in providing real information/benefit. users immediately sense that and i guess about 90% of your visitors will leave the site.
if you wanna make money out of this, you should get more creative. (extra tipp: making money from adwords works quite bad today)

8. generally read some articles on design and best practices. this will help you improve your site(s) more than you might think.

martin
Lessons on How to Treat People
I'm really excited that children are growing up in an age where direct manipulation interfaces are so mainstream.
I'd call it lack of belief in success and lack of belief in value of success even if it is achieved.
Great 5 part series about inovation, ideas & money
Thank you for pointing out Robotium.

Can you elaborate more about your test setup?

TIA
> No, I will not elaborate. But you can read my other
> comments in thread in question.

So those devices don't exist yet, ok. Not sure how will you know the price points then, so far Android phones are not that much cheaper than iPhone.

> What game? Apple will not monopolise mobile computing

I was not aware that Apple was in the game of monopolizing mobile computing…

> But Aplle financially will be fine, their marketing is outstanding.

Their products are outstanding too. No marketing would help if your product is crap. And Apple does not have the biggest marketing budget, by the way. MS markegint budget for Vista was as large as Apple's for all products.
You're assuming that said person frequents the Internet.
Does this apply to upvoting too? Is upvoting without the comment also the slap in the face?
What we're essentially measuring here is runtime startup and (in some cases) byte-compiling.

Rate python swipl ruby perl lua luac bash ocaml awk subshell ocamlopt c py_pyc shell
python 46.3/s -- -17% -56% -70% -76% -78% -78% -79% -83% -87% -88% -88% -90% -92%
swipl 55.9/s 21% -- -46% -63% -70% -73% -73% -74% -80% -84% -85% -86% -88% -90%
ruby 104/s 125% 86% -- -31% -45% -49% -51% -52% -62% -71% -72% -74% -79% -82%
perl 152/s 229% 172% 46% -- -20% -26% -28% -30% -44% -57% -60% -61% -69% -74%
lua 189/s 309% 239% 82% 25% -- -8% -10% -13% -31% -47% -50% -52% -61% -67%
luac 206/s 345% 268% 98% 35% 9% -- -2% -6% -25% -42% -46% -48% -58% -64%
bash 211/s 356% 277% 103% 39% 11% 3% -- -3% -23% -41% -44% -46% -57% -63%
ocaml 218/s 372% 290% 110% 44% 15% 6% 3% -- -20% -39% -42% -45% -55% -62%
awk 273/s 491% 389% 162% 80% 44% 33% 30% 25% -- -23% -28% -31% -44% -52%
subshell 357/s 672% 539% 243% 135% 89% 74% 69% 64% 31% -- -6% -9% -26% -38%
ocamlopt 379/s 719% 577% 264% 149% 100% 84% 80% 73% 39% 6% -- -4% -22% -34%
c 394/s 751% 604% 278% 159% 108% 91% 87% 80% 44% 10% 4% -- -19% -31%
py_pyc 485/s 950% 768% 366% 219% 156% 136% 130% 122% 78% 36% 28% 23% -- -16%
shell 575/s 1143% 928% 452% 278% 203% 179% 172% 163% 110% 61% 52% 46% 18% --

I added hello world programs for C, SWI Prolog, and OCaml (byte and native compilers). Timings on OpenBSD/amd64.

Edit: Since you can precompile Lua, I added that as 'luac'. It's not usually done, since Lua compiles VERY quickly, and the source is more portable. It's a data point, though. I also added a .pyc for Python - Python byte-compiles more slowly. There's little difference between lua and luac, but the difference between python and py_pyc is huge.

I also added shell with a new subshell, both sh and bash. And, source, as requested.

OCaml:

let _ = print_string "Hello world.\n"

Compile with "ocamlc -o ochello foo.ml" for bytecode, "ocamlopt -o ochello.opt foo.ml" for native.

SWI Prolog:

swipl => sub { system qq[swipl -g "write('Hello world.\n')." -t "halt."] },

luac:

print "Hello, world."

And then compile with "luac hellow.lua", run as "lua luac.out".