skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have one. Let's write a REPL in Python:

result = eval string
print result

Wow, so easy. Except it doesn't work when string contains "import foo". OK, that's fine, we can "exec" instead of "eval". Oh, but then we don't get the return value anymore.

(The Python solution to this is a flag to pass to exec to tell it to print the result to stdout. If you want to capture the object that's the result, well, too fucking bad. I did this in my Python REPL with an AST rewrite of the user's input. What the fuck!?)

In Perl, you can `eval $string' and the return value is the return value of the code you just ran. And any Perl works!

I've never written any Perl that looks like what this article uses. If I want to slurp a file, I say "my $file = read_file('path/to/file')". read_file comes from File::Slurp. If I want to do strict validation of the arguments to my function, I just use Params::Validate (or MooseX::Declare if my blood sugar is low). (Why do you care about number of arguments but not type of arguments? So you get an obscure error when you try to use "1" as a hash?) Perl has classes, Perl has exceptions. If you say it doesn't, like the author of this post, you don't know anything about Perl.

So my point is, it's easy for fanbois to hand-pick examples of why a language is bad, especially when they don't even know the language. It's all very simple in practice: to program well in a programming language, you have to learn the language. Try not doing that, and you will fail, even if that language is Python!
They've done a fine job of keeping the site responsive, but that's only a small part of what we normally demand from web apps.

I don't fault them for spam. It's a very, very difficult problem, and since I don't have a magical solution to propose, I'm not going to complain.

But there are a few areas where CL could have made major improvements at a reasonable cost, especially considering their revenue. They could have at least experimented with some of these ideas, and tossed them out later if they turned out to be bad. Here are some of the main opportunities I think CL has missed:

-Richer data, tailored to each category. CL started down this road, e.g. by adding the rent field. But there's so much more they could do in every category.

-Better searching. With the huge volume of posts to sort through--and the large number of duplicate posts--the basic search features currently implemented fall flat. Improvements in this area would probably have to tie in with the richer data set mentioned above.

-Abandon the serial model, where the database is just a chronological list of posts. This model creates an arms race to be the person who posts the most frequently without getting flagged. In other words, it incentivizes the fine art of sneaking what amounts to spam just below the radar.

The core problem, as I see it, is that CL still views their service as an extension of its original incarnation: a mailing list. In the CL model, a listing is just arbitrary text and maybe some metadata if you're lucky, and the listings simply appear in reverse chronological order. Sounds like a mailing list archive to me.

Sure, that's how CL got started, but why not grow into something better? There's clearly enough usage and revenue to justify a realignment. Rather than "sticking with what works," I think this is a case of inertia.
I don't know; why do techies have a tendency to misleadingly paraphrase someone's statement?

He didn't say that using windows was wrong, but that it is indicative about the philosophy of the company (which, I agree, it can be).
Dude, Where Is My Update?
Maybe I'm a bit out of touch with the direction AngelList is going, but I can't quite tell if this is an April Fools joke (isn't human curation part of the draw of AngelList?) or an actual feature announcement (maybe human curation can't scale any more?). Which is it?

Regardless, one thing pops into my mind: don't do actual feature/product launches on April 1.
Err, have you used Windows?
I'll check it out - thanks.
Is this another reason to laud Apple for not shipping Flash on their Macs (or iOS devices for that matter)?

Having a fully scriptable, ubiquitous environment like Flash installed systemwide just increases your attack vectors. I'm not blaming Adobe here as much as recognizing that 0-day vulnerabilities will always exist.

Microsoft office aside (if you need to use, it's going to be installed), perhaps there will now be pressure to remove and ban Flash from work environments.
I'm a cynic, but maybe yr right.
I hope you're referring to CSS Pivot :)

These are some of my favorites:

* Metafilter: http://www.csspivot.com/49KP9

* Google: http://www.csspivot.com/p950v

* Bing: http://www.csspivot.com/tUxGe

[Edit] Pro-Android peut-être: http://www.csspivot.com/fh2V1 (!)
The majority of skilled developers prefer Macs or Linux. I've been at large conferences and not seen a single Windows machine. Some developers like Windows, that's fine, but just as many hate it. It's not wrong for a developer to use Windows, but it is wrong for a company to impose it, or even to have it as the default option.

For a company to say "at our company, we use Windows" is to say "We don't give a shit about developers". The issue isn't Windows, the issue is a workplace culture that places the preferences of management over the preferences of developers. Life is too short to work for people who don't respect you, especially when you've got one of the most valuable skills in the world.
As a female founder, the idea of a challenge that separates the women from the girls resonates deeply with me. There are women in my life who've shown such courage and strength and selflessness that I know I could not of as a child, and I hope to be be capable of too someday. The ways in which women can be strong, especially for their family, remind me in many ways of the challenges of running a company -- a family in a way of its own.
Hey. That's me! (The one that isn't Joel)
Finally, a service that supports RFC 1149. Will it work on IPv6 per RFC 6214, though?
Is there any authority under which DHS or the Department of Commerce can condemn as unsafe-for-human-habitation the entire Adobe product line? Just red-tag the whole vulnerability-infested infrastructure?
Color Updates Its iPhone App
An adaptation of RFC 1149 (IP over Avian Carriers) for IPv6: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6214
Would it be illegal for Apple to ban the practice of cross-selling? (ie, take down apps and devs where it's clear that this is happening)

I think this would solve most of the problems. It's clear this is a burgeoning market, and it's smacks of blackhat-SEO tactics (artificial rank improvement by deceit).
"// "Polynomial-time" means it returns "yes" in polynomial time when
// the answer should be "yes", and runs forever when it is "no"."

That's an odd definition of polynomial time.
> are actually dealers in disguise. I found this out the hard way after driving an hour to see a car at what turned out to be some kind of sketchball dealership.

before driving you should have run the search for their number. Serial postings for various cars is definitely not FSBO.
The majority of skilled developers prefer Macs or Linux.

You don't know that, and I seriously doubt you can prove it. Please don't offer conjecture as fact.

(Spoken as someone who does prefer Macs and Linux)
Why Paying Bribes Should Be Legal
Knuth on email
The Google one is broken for me, shouldn't it be five characters?
Interesting. It has been quite a while since i have done an interview for an office job, but I will start doing so soon. I worked in the restaurant industry as my last non-entrepreneurial career.

Seeing the developing on Windows and deploying on Linux as a big flag sounds analogous to noticing a dirty walk-in fridge, burnt-out light in the dining area, or a deer in the headlights look and lack of smiles in a busy line-cook.

Is it common for the interviewee to ask as many questions about the employer as the employer asks of the interviewee? In most business dealings or past job interviews, I have taken it as a red flag if this was not the case.

Were you able to ask why they used Windows or was it expected that you were to just answer their questions?
From the top answer:

"if I'm looking to rent an apartment, it would be nice not to see the same listing reposted every day, and having to re-read it and figure out if I've called them before. It might be even nicer to view them on a map, or god forbid have new and relevant listing emailed to me."

Is that not broken? Sure sounds it to me.

I had my first experience of using AirBNB today. From start to finish it was an absolute pleasure; a real example of using some of theis "web 2.0" tech to provide a better experience to the user, and ultimately connect buyer to seller more efficiently. Excellent search experience, great integration with maps, ajax where it made sense, crowd sourcing was useful (feedback).

I don't know too much about the space but by the popularity of airbnb it certainly seems like it is disrupting at least one part of the space craigslist has historically occupied.
On the othe hand, some one recently (maybe Zed Shaw? Or dzubia?) had a great rant about the idiocy of developing on MacOSX when you need to deploy on Linux. Im not sure I completely agree with the rant (being one of e many MacBook toting Linux deployers myself), but there were at least a few points that had me nodding my head in agreement.

If you're just coding higher level stuff in php or python or perl, you're unlikely to get bitten by MaaOS/Linux differences, but the same can be said for (an appropriately set up) Windows development machine.

If you're tuning databases or hacking middleware or performance tuning your NoSQL backend or in memory cache, you really need to be doing that on the closest you can get to the deployment platform.

One big plus to doing web app development on Windows is not having to switch out of MacoS (or Linux) to do Internet Explorer testing...
Trust me, this is pure! I was getting something in my bookmarks when I saw that link. I wanted to share this marvelous piece of animation!
"Your only bottleneck in a web app should be: the databases, the workers. There are no excuses for the page generation to be slow. In the web speed is scalability because every web server is conceptually a parallel computation unit. So if the web page generation takes 10 ms instead of 100 ms I can server everything with just 10% of the hardware."

If the database is the bottleneck then the speed of web page matters much less. A page with a single 50 ms query will take %40 of the hardware (60 ms versus 150 ms).

This is even much less of an issue if you take into account how long it took for his test. PHP served 1500 requests per second vs Ruby's 250 requests per second which is equal to 0.7 ms per page and 4 ms per page. Assuming again you have a single 50 ms database query you are looking at 50.7 ms vs 54 ms which means you will need ~94% as much hardware. This is assuming that the database and webserver are on the same machine.

If one puts them on separate machines then the time of execution does not matter as long as the time it takes to query the database is less than the time it takes to render the page. Now this is bad in terms of page load as 50 ms + 49ms for page rendering is much more than 50 ms + 0.1 ms but in both cases you will be able to serve the same number of requests per second. This of course assumes that this is running in a multi threaded environment which allows one thread to sleep and other threads to start while waiting for a response from the database.
I like http://hotpads.com quite a bit
Atlanta, GA. USA - .NET craftsman/woman http://www.opv.com/pio/jobDetails.jsp?site=daxko&jobId=a...

I'm a dev team lead looking for an agile .NET craftsman/woman to join my elite product team!

We collaborate, are learning to be more agile, and work do deliver value to our customers and rewarding careers to our team members! Come join me and my small team in Dunwoody as we make great software.

Learn more about the fun, fine folks at Daxko at http://daxkonation.com
"I hope you're referring to CSS Pivot :)"

Absolutely, and congratulations are in order. Don't spend it all in one place :-)
It is indeed an extension of the "Website optimization for the search engine" or SEO as they call it. To a search engine developer, SEO means to improve the search engine for better output.

The fight against spam is a constantly evolving one and though some of the techniques from "web" search engine could be applied to the App store, there are unique differences between the two - e.g. the rating, download rankings are not directly analogous to page rank. So Google does seem to have some advantage, but the App store problem will need a fresh research approach.
Great point. I think this concept of "disruption" is out of place anyway when the existing site is mostly free and works fine on mobile devices. You might be able to steal traffic bit by bit by doing a better job, but there's nothing to really disrupt in a dramatic way.
Write fast by just tilting an iPhone
You may vote me down but this reminds me a great deal of how things started to feel right before the last dot.com crash circa 2001. I imagine most of you are too young to recall it, but before we hit the end programmers were worth more than gold. You'd get kids who didn't even finish this CS degree looking for stock options, aeron chairs and other perks (...and do you have a sushi chef on site?). And small companies gladly did this because even getting a warm body was better than not.

And then it hit. First one company and then the next. Each week you'd read about another 100 people being laid off. You knew that even if 1 in 10 razorfish employees were decent that 90 amazing people were now hitting the streets. Our guilty pleasured was reading f*ckedcompany -- a website that just covered the daily implosions.

I hope that history won't repeat itself on that scale, but that said this point in time feels like that point in time. I see other signs too: For example a German car company just opened up a VC fund. I know that Facebook could be the next Google, yet I was recently shocked to see a content farm go public. With any luck the rest of the economy will recover to buffer an industry stumble, but you never know.
Search for "recursion" for a real egg :)
I didn't see any real explanation of the tech, but it seems like a (slow) synchronized clipboard that has nothing to do with your body at all. At best, confusing, at worst... an anecdote:

I remember when I had to convince my grandma that closing the browser wouldn't make her email disappear.

Now I'll have to convince people that washing their hands won't wipe away the bits.
Every developer I've met in person prefers Mac/nix for any situation in which Windows development isn't mandatory.

Am I looking at a biased sample? Maybe, maybe not. I mostly operate in the web development world, but I know developers of all stripes. And none of them prefers Windows.

That being said, there are developers and companies who prefer to develop for MS platforms as a business decision. I.e. they want to target that market. But that doesn't mean they actually prefer developing on Windows. It just means Windows is imposed on them by their business choice. Analogously, I don't care much for Xcode or Objective-C, but I still write IOS apps because it's an important market.
I think it is unwise to send a letter with this tone to someone you've turned down. I say this as someone who used to do exactly the same thing. You think you're being honest, but to be on the receiving side of this it comes off badly.

Especially as a new grad, it's not really your place to lecture someone about how Unix embodies the essence of good software engineering when they have probably been doing this a lot longer than you and have their own ideas about what good software design is.

You could have given the same feedback in a way that is much less likely to come off badly by simply saying "I've really a UNIX kind of guy and a Windows shop probably isn't the best fit for me."
Knuth wrote this six years ago and the war has already been won.

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all use "email" and if you Google for "e-mail" it says "Did you mean email?" and "e-mail" returns 3.2bn results in Google vs 5.9bn for "email".

I still use the "old" style though, mostly out of habit. But really old people I know still have the same old fashioned handwriting and language habits they picked up in the 1950s. It's not necessary to keep changing, though if you're a business, you need to stay on top of this if only for your customers' sakes.
Amazon Blaze, a 4.3" Mirasol (color e-ink kind of) Android phone in August. WANT
Microsoft agrees to deliver all their APIs via Mashape
I agree.

When my company is hiring, and we lose a candidate like this, I often send emails that are similar, "Sorry to hear you're not accepting our offer. Can I ask why you didn't choose us?" This is actually the potential hire's chance to pay me a compliment, give a small amount of feedback, and keep the door open for the future in case their other "better" option falls through.

I think this blog shows a terribly self absorbed reply. My response to receiving this would be to forward the reply to my team and say, "Glad that didn't work out for us... Blessing in disguise. See below."

Know your audience. Remember, the person you're emailing works there, so you're essentially telling them that their job and work environment sucks when you write something like this.
> Am I the only person that doesn't want logging to block or buffer?

If it's an error that you're logging the moment before you crash, then you probably want it to block.

At Google LOG(ERROR) blocks but LOG(INFO) doesn't, for this reason.
I agree with you 100%, but i think this was meant as an April Fools' joke. (Or if it's not, i'm going to pretend it is for my own sanity)
> Your claim "But although the grain effect is available for digital photos, it is seldom seen." is a fallacy.

Yet it's factually true.

> I was rebutting the claim that shooting film on celluloid would 'go away'

Perhaps I did not choose the best words.

It will not disappear from the face of the Earth, of course. But it will be relegated to "retro" or nostalgic movies, etc.

It depends on how quickly the new, less limited technologies are adopted by the big names in cinema, and of course by how quickly the old generation, accustomed to the old way a film "is supposed to look", will retrain their taste or die off. :)
I'd argue that is largely based on the type of conferences you go to. At Google I/O or WWDC, I'd agree with you in a heartbeat. If you go to a .NET conference, I'd guess you wouldn't see too many macbooks actually running OS X.

Windows developers are out there, they're just probably not attending the same talks as you are and probably not reading many of the same blogs.
Never understood why people looking to hire someone would use a throwaway account. Just makes you look a little shady
Chris calls out Tapjoy as a means to buy your way to the top 25; however, that's not entirely fair, imo. Increasing App Store ranking is a side effect of any promotion/advertising service. While the incentivized nature of Tapjoy brings into question the quality of these acquisitions, it's ultimately a fair and honest method to promote your app.

On the other hand, services like http://appmagenta.com and http://gtekna.com are downright shady. With enough money, you can buy enough fake downloads to reach the #1 spot in the App Store
Facebook running Google AdSense Ads to gain users
It's not a matter of "it's wrong to use X". It's a matter of "I don't want to spend my time working in Windows and dealing with all of the headaches and banging my head against a wall with the differing OS paradigms."

True story. At my previous company, it wasn't made clear during the interview that Windows was the ONLY thing allowed on the network. Despite the fact that all of the servers were running Linux (this was a major financial institution), we were forced to use Windows XPSP3 and we couldn't even use VMware (that changed a month or so after I got there luckily).

Neglecting to mention that was a CONSCIOUS decision by the people doing the hiring because it cost them employees. Not only did it cost them employees who turned down the job based on that fact, they had people LEAVE once they found out about it (developers and operations folks alike).

Talented and skilled people can get a job anywhere. They don't have to put up with stupid bullshit illogicals like "You have to use Windows even though we trust the financial records of customers of EVERY MAJOR CREDIT CARD COMPANY to live on and be processed by Linux servers".
Thanks, is updated!
I collected a few thoughts about that from friends who do touch apps for a living:

http://carlos.bueno.org/2010/05/wysiwyt.html
A postmodernist would reply that everything is purely conventional. Others may disagree. But that's an entirely different can of worms.
Zimbabwe got rid of their local currency 2 years ago. Clearly since it does not exist their money was not converted to it.
Python has Perl beat on the REPL loop out-of-the-box: http://docs.python.org/library/code.html#

Python 2.7.1 (r271:86832, Mar 14 2011, 00:19:31) ...
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import code
>>> code.interact()
Python 2.7.1 (r271:86832, Mar 14 2011, 00:19:31)
[GCC 4.4.4] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
(InteractiveConsole)
>>> import this
The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
...

And there are a variety of ways to extend it with various input and output. Much easier and more flexible than anything Perl will offer without a CPAN module. Which is probably out there.

That said, while I agree with this guy's conclusion his arguments are mixed in quality, trending towards poor. I like Python better, but my professional coding is primarily Perl and has been for nearly a decade now. Many Perl code snippets I looked at had a fatal flaw in it that made Perl look worse than it actually is, or the putative improvement that Python has is a judgment call rather than a good reason. And the reasons I actually like Python better are mostly not to be seen, except for the "classes" one.

(Reasons: The "double underscore" methods may have notoriously bad names, but they work better and more reliably over the last decade than Perl overloading has for me, you can't do more than badly fake Python iterators in Perl 5 last I knew, trivial and across-the-board ability to use arbitrary objects as dict keys, more sensible Unicode handling in Python 3. __str__ and __repr__; Dumper/say is no replacement. And for all the putative benefits of Perl's various syntaxes and sigils and for all that I've programmed in Perl about an order of magnitude more than I've programmed in Perl it's Python features I miss in Perl and never vice-versa. Locally everything in Perl makes sense, yet somehow the global combination of all these locally-slightly-better things does not produce a better language, just a larger one. But Perl's still on the short list of languages I can stand to use.)
The 3DS Takes Its Place in Nintendo’s Handheld History
"OK, pretty strange looking if you aren't used to Perl. Or even if you are used to Perl."

Yep.
> Know your audience. Remember, the person you're emailing works there, so you're essentially telling them that their job and work environment sucks when you write something like this.

What's the point in asking a question and waiting for a meaningless (but diplomatic) response?
What's your target market? - $1/click seems high to me, the only ad network I'm pay that amount for is on LinkedIn.

I'm currently writing a series of articles about advertising on Facebook and the first one is about CTR/CPC rates, I'll probably be posting it sometime next week. Just check my twitter (@imranghory) mid-week and it should be up on there.