skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With the rapid growth of the community I think that the monkey patching mentality will eventually subside. More and more toes are being stepped on.
How did they fund it? (I guess grants)
Well this is rather obvious. There have been a number of attempts at MMO non-games that were solely for player interaction--but I've never seen one actually work. People play games to have fun, or at least to interact with others to do something that they wouldn't be doing in real life.

Nobody is going to bother installing a multi-gigabyte glorified chatroom.
I tried using it like 5 times in a span of 2 weeks. Each time it wouldn't connect. It's plauged with bugs, wonky UI and all sorts of things. Not something I expected from Google.
"then I could say my-variable without it mistaking a hyphen for a minus"

That's something cool. It would involve a new PEP and aggressive enforcement of PEP 8
Well... unless you want to sound really angry! Then er... Python is better?

I think I'm stretching the metaphor past its breaking point.
The CalDAV server authored by Apple and included with OS X Server is written in Python. PyObjC receives a lot of attention from Apple employees. I don't think there's much preference exhibited by Apple one way or the other.

And vice versa, there must be some Linux distros that have tools written in Ruby, right? Particularly some of the newer ones, I seem to recall hearing that their system tools were Ruby.
Reminds me of high-end Backgammon strategy theory. One or the other of two players in match play benefits from volatility, and part of the struggle will always be that player attempting to mix things up while the other player attempts to settle things down.

Microsoft probably benefits from low volatility in the market, while Apple and Linux benefit from high volatility.
In Ruby calling a method on an object basically sends a message to the object with the name of the method and the arguments. You can hook into the dispatch code and do pretty much whatever you want with that message at the class level. I don't know the internals of Python's method dispatch that well, so I can't say how it compares in that regard.
You'll notice I did say my experience :-) I'm not trying to "win" an argument here, which would require "evidence", just pointing out that there are more important things in language selection than the features/characteristics/quirks of the language itself, especially given there's not much to call between Ruby and Python.

But, y'know, you could try quantifying it if you like, by looking at the libraries available for each language, and looking at how many jobs are "Ruby" as their main skill and how many are "10 years of whatever + Python".
JustHackIt, a place for Hackers to meet other Hackers
Reckon it'd break too much existing code, but hyphens are so much nicer than underscores or interCapping. Using a language that supports that, my hands are noticeably more comfortable without needing to reach for the shift key all the time.
Photography, drawing, sports...
Recharging electrical cars as they roll down the highway?
Easy Bulletproof Serving
Actually, this is what lots of MMOs end up being anyhow. Being a leader of an alliance in Eve or a merchant, the most used tools are TeamSpeak and the chat rooms. Lots of tabletop Role Playing Games also end up being social gatherings where the primary enjoyment is the resulting laughter, and the game was just a pretext.
An open source OS built atop Java for visual artists and designers
Outspoken advocate of photo IDs gets civil rights job
Well said. For the term sheet check out Brad Feld's term sheet series: http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/term_sheet/
maybe i'm an incredible genius or something, but give me a week or two and i'm writing code at an advanced level in any language. it's pretty easy. it more or less involves making an actual project in that language, which cold turky sink or swimly requires that you know the language at least decently

i think it's mostly mentality. if you think languages are hard to learn, then they will probably seem that way because you will allow yourself too much time to play around with mere details, whereas if you recognize there isn't much to them, you can accomplish a lot in no time at all
By Example
It looks almost exactly like the dot-frame images of the Death Star in the original Star Wars films.

The more things change...
No sorry, my first comment was pre caffeine and didn't quite explain things as well as I would have liked.

I was reflecting on the original poster's comment:

"But there are so many really enthusiastic posts about Ruby and while Python has a lot of users and is very popular and successful I rarely see anyone rave about it."

It was a poor choice of words on my part - I meant to characterize that evangelism doesn't necessarily mean it's a better tool. I was reflecting more on his commentary about "enthusiastic posts" in my comment than any personal opinion on Ruby ( I find a bit of zealotry in the Rails people but that's neither a bad thing nor is it my place to comment on it). My preferences tend these days towards being slightly turned off by the loudly evangelised toolsets, simply from past experience of what happens to the communities when they get like that. After things calm down, and the happy masses move on to the Next Big Thing(tm), the languages, tools etc are often quietly solidified and iteratively improved (uncelebrated, in many cases) by those that stick around.

I recently came back to Perl, having joined a firm building systems in Perl, and was surprised at how much has happened in Perl in the 4 years since I stopped working with it. While so many of those that formerly evangelised about Perl moved on to Ruby and Python, the people who were forced to continue working with it every have found ways to improve it. Adding a try/catch syntax with proper exceptions, and similar constructs (albeit a bit Monkey Patch-ey) have made it much easier to work with.

It will be intresting to see what happens to Ruby when the Next Big Thing happens, and the community sheds a lot of it's more fickle members. That's not to say Ruby isn't a fantastic tool now, but I'm interested to see the maturity that comes from the difference between those who think it's really the best tool for them as opposed to the tool that everyone loves.
Rails Summit: now really for Latin America
You miss out on parties, but that's not all. Because sleeping just after dinner is unhealthy (it becomes the equivalent of the late night snack) you also have to move dinner forward to something like 5pm or 6pm. Result - you won't be able to eat with friends anymore.

When you go to bed at 10pm you don't just trade a few night hours for morning hours, your entire schedule has to shift. Don't think that's worth it.
you could just use a font that renders underscores differently (like, say, slightly stylized hyphens.) That's the correct approach, semantically--when you use an underscore, you're basically trying to say "a space, but without the syntactic meaning of one."
Currently I don't know what else I should do.

Yes, I like programming, but the day work is
sometimes really boring. Yes, it's nice to solve
problems. But most of the problems are just futile,
and therefore boring.

Compared to other jobs programming is quite nice, but
it doesn't fulfill me. Why? I would like to get more
connected with nice, intelligent and empathetic people.

Yes, most programmers are intelligent in a way, but
with most programmers I can't get connected, they just
bore me. Their behavior is so predictable.
Well, they're both foundational languages, pretty much, not in the sense of this blog, i.e. most instructional language

http://mvanier.livejournal.com/998.html

but in the sense of can you put up a significant web app in 2 or 3 days, do lots of companies use it (along with C, java, C#, javascript).

r vs. p can't be reduced to 15 bullet points, but one of the best things i remember is Alex Martelli in 2003, so he was talking about ruby 1.6 and python 2.3, i believe, but still valid

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/msg/28422d70...

and here's the last thread from May.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=157269

There's the other killer apps: Python: twisted, zope, SQLalchemy, mercurial. Ruby: rake, capistrano, rspec, adhearsion, merb, puppet, metasploit. I'm sure python has a bunch more, but i've been living in rails-land.
I believe Python's __getattr__() and __setattr__() allow you do the same thing, but I don't know enough Ruby to say for sure :-)
To be fair... blocks are not lambda's, but things would be a lot better if they were.
"I wish to meet Steve Jobs"
It's because they continued using the present tense.

Sure, I see what they mean now, but when you're looking at an article and start reading it, and get to a paragraph, written in present tense that claims something that has not been true for a few years, my brain at least labels it incorrect.

This isn't a critical reading skills exam; it's just one of the dozens of articles that crosses my feed-reader everyday and I don't consider that style to have helped the audience follow the author's point.
It's not about how it appears on screen but about the keystrokes needed to enter it. If I could I'd find a way to use only square brackets too. Ideally I'd use only ; or : and only ' or " too, and adjust my keymap accordingly.
Matz might say that, but doing functional things in Ruby is a pain in the arse as well. Blocks, Lambdas, Procs, and Methods, all which are slightly different and require transformative functions to move one into the other. That's about as far from an s-expression as you can get.

That being said, having the easy ability to create lambdas or blocks is hugely benefitial. sighs and I wish python would hop on board there, but I don't think it ever will.
GIVE US POLYWELL
I definitely did not have this effect on me. Usually when I hear comments like this it's from Java programmers. But coming from a background of already knowing several expressive dynamic languages (Python, Perl) and having a strong functional background in Lisp. I didn't really find Ruby that mind blowing.

Very cool? YES!
worth learning? Absolutely!
"changing the way I write code irrevocably? Not a chance!
Fedora servers were illegally accessed
Well, I reckon that charred toast is around about the same colour regardless of the original bread - charcoal is charcoal. So, what you need to do is take the initial colour, subtract that from 'burnt toast', and then divide the result into the 16 desired intervals...

For those of us that have discovered the joy of slightly burnt toast with Vegemite for breakfast, accompagnied by a strong coffee, the value 15 will be seeing heavy use :-)

Of course, I'm interested to hear how you're going to go about solving the non-uniformity of toasting problem - sometimes part of my toast is still white when other parts are black!
I dig: http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/06/what-does-do-when-used-a...
ScribeFire - A bloggers best friend | TechJaws
I have to agree with the other commenter. I prefer to "roll my own" here. Not because I don't like it when frameworks take care of mess for me, but because I'm constantly frustrated by how frameworks handle JS. A quick and dirty RESTful JSON api is easy enough to build in either framework, and once you're there, Ajax becomes pretty trivial (especially with any of the nice JS Frameworks)
Two new ways to location-enable your web apps
You couple those with ruby's method_missing and then you have some interesting functionality. But basically the way that Ruby handles operator overloading and function accessing is a lot cleaner than pythons. It would be pretty nice to get rid of a lot of the dunders.
Emissive light sources in general interfere with melatonin. I have a severe melatonin deficiency and I find that avoiding TV, monitors, and bright lightbulbs for an hour before bed helps tremendously in my ability to sleep, in conjunction with a synthesized melatonin medication (Rozerem). Books (and I imagine eBooks with eInk) are fine, but the laptop is not.

DSPS makes maintaining a normal 24-hour schedule painful. (Imagine having to get up one hour earlier every day! That's how a 24-hour schedule feels to me.) I have it and it takes a lot of self-discipline to hold down the 9-to-5 schedule. But it is possible with the right techniques.
More info on my experiences at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=205179 .
What was the first program you ever wrote?
I wasn't shocked. In fact I'd no idea that it had happened, or even who he was.
Why isn't eBay's Kijiji doing better in the US? They've got tons of money and resources.
How is this different from http://www.ticketwood.com I think they are the leaders in this sold out tickets market?
Two words: "French Engineering".
Obviously you've never met Haskell.

And if you hit the reply button and say that you have, then I demand to see code samples.
Yeah... sobs it's a nice band-aid, but an inelegant solution. I would much rather that they all just be Proc or all some other mythical procedure class of the future. I figure that would break the whole ruby method call chain, though I don't see any reason why blocks couldn't just become straight syntactic sugar for lambda (I would love that)
http://www.xkcd.com/448/
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOH. That's what footy is. Oh yeah, that sport is awesome.
They are not all flops. There are some MMO social environments that are huge, especially outside the US. Kids like it. Habbo.com for instance has many millions of users, mostly from Finland and the UK.
Programming is maybe (?) the only professional career at which members are doing passable work before the age of 10. So, it's often fated.
Apparently tipping is some market based form of betting. I'm guessing the whole thing is similar to betfair.
To some extent. The big difference is this: if you leave the academic career path with a PhD in ancient history or medieval basket weaving, you're pretty darn-near unemployable and will probably wind up making $35K editing crummy manuscripts for a fourth-rate publishing house (or doing three months work in Moscow for $12,000 and calling it "lucrative"). But most of the folks I know who've left the academic career path with a PhD in physics have jumped straight into obscenely highly-paid jobs in finance, management consulting, etc.
... and then I did for a while but in the end I preferred to keep my dignity.
Galactic 'spaghetti monster' powered by magnetic fields
Free PhD at http://thunderwoodcollege.com/
Not that this is even worth battling over, since it's whatever floats your boat, but it should be noted that Read It Later's online version works in all browsers (including Safari) and it has bookmarklets for those as well.

That's why I like Read It Later, it has the same features as the other services (Instapaper, Laterloop) but it's Firefox extension has a lot of awesome features for when you are in Firefox.
No one has to eat the early-bird special because they get a good night's sleep. Listen to your individual body, not the generalized recommendations of others.

A normal 10pm bedtime does not preclude late nights now and then, anyhow.
This makes sense more to artists and musicians. When you "steal" a riff or a lick and make it your own, the person you "stole" it from still has it. I think he means stealing in this sense.
I stood first in mathematics at my college and my parents advised me to go for CS.
Both Bussard and his most likely competitor, Eric Lerner, have done presentations on Google Tech Talks, you can find them on Google video. Bussard died the other day unfortunately. Lerner's technology, Focus Fusion, seemed a more likely candidate anyway, in his talk he briefly mentions how much closer he is than Bussard to achieving fusion.
FLOSS Weekly 36: CouchDB
I used to have projects organized in a root, but I found that I spend so much time visiting specific ones that it's easier to have them directly in home.

So now I have, e.g. ~/ProjADev instead of ~/Development/ProjectA. It's much nicer for quickly reaching them in new shells.

Under the project I typically have one subdirectory ("svn") to represent the checkout, so there's "svn/trunk", etc. This allows me to easily add project-related scrap files that clearly aren't meant to be checked in.

As for organizing what is checked in, my approach is not typical. :) For instance, I don't believe in separating headers and source files...I find it extremely inconvenient to have them in different places, so I dump them in one place.
I think it is more likely that you do not recognize your own flaws. It takes a real genius to be able to learn the little things about C++ in a week or two.

A language is not just the syntax of the language itself, it's also the code style, the convention, the best practise, the language specific stuff, the API of the libraries available, the best way of doing things with libraries.

If you use python to write simple number crunching console applications, then switch to ruby, that is an easy switch.

But if you're writing a Web application using Python and Django and you switch to writing DirectSound using C++, and you tell me you can do this in a week, then you are a genius.

The syntax of languages are trivial, but that's like saying you can discover the colors used in a painting. That's the easy part. The difficult part is knowing how it works. Let me list a few examples of technologies that I think differ strongly from each other that make it difficult to switch

- MFC with C++

- Django with Python

- DirectShow with C++

- VHDL

- ASM

- Javascript with JQuery

- CSS with HTML

- Helix Framework with C++

- Quicktime API with C++

- OpenGL with .NET

- LISP

Have you ever had to switch between things on that level? Or are you talking more of a python to ruby switch?
I can't not be a programmer. Even if I were to leave the profession I love the practice and theory too much to give it up.

I love solving problems and thinking logically. Breaking down a situation into its constituent parts and solving them one by one is an immensely satisfying activity. Programming is the embodiment of that act.

There's something magical about programming. I give the right incantations based on a fundamental understanding of both the computer and the problem at hand, and the code does something. The fact that a program has... a will and personality and actually performs an activity is still astonishing to me. I know I'm anthropomorphizing but the idea that I can write all these little workers which go out and change the world (even if just in small ways) is fantastic.
A little off-topic, and I apologise to everyone for our exercise in bikeshedding, but... :-)

The problem is that Ruby blocks were designed to imitate the behaviour of C-like blocks, while lambdas are true closures. (Don't get me started on why procs are just like lambdas only different).

The difference between a block and a lambda is most clearly seen by asking what the return keyword does in a block vs. what it does in a lambda.

So in Ruby you can write something like:

def which_answer_is_correct(*answers)
answers.each_with_index do |answer, index|
return index + 1 if answer.to_s == '42'
end
return 'none of the above'
end

which_answer_is_correct('black','white',42,:symbolic_logic)
=> 3

If blocks were syntactic sugar for lambdas, this method would always return 'none of the above'. Of course, there is another, very elegant way to write this method that doesn't rely on the return keyword or the semantics of blocks, and one can easily argue that this would be an improvement.
This article is from 1999, but everything I've read recently suggests that the situation has only gotten worse. For a while I seriously considered getting a Ph.D. in philosophy or psychology, but various articles like this one convinced my of the insanity of that idea.
The virtual world thing will work, but these are half-baked non-functional attempts. These are the wright brother prototypes.

But the 3D world is coming, and it will replace our textual web. Many of us here will never change, but the new generation will switch.
hello world in pascal!
nay, not Haskell. F# though (using it right now on a small app that i plan on selling, hopefully it makes me enough money to support my starbucks addiction.) actually i've been meaning to play around with Haskell because it has a lot of succinct thingies with currying and whatnot, and i plan on making an experimental language or two eventually. generally though, strongly typed languages are painful for me. that is, painful to use, not painful to learn :)

one paradigm i've yet to try out is the "goal-oriented" languages a la Prolog. i'll get to them

my point isn't about me though, despite how great i am. i just think that thinking about languages as if they were huge monoliths isn't the best way of thinking about them, because it will hurt your ability to try out new languages and perspectives. they are things that you should revel in, not keep away from because they seem daunting
Concrete example: The Ruby community is very focussed on the Web, so there's Rails but they aren't really interested in scientific computing so there isn't a real equivalent to NumPy.

I'd mod this up more if I could, because this is the best answer to the original question.

The important thing is the community, not the language. Decide what your problem is, find the people who are working on that problem, and use whatever they use.

The importance of community is the reason why the number of people who praise Lisp as a language is so much larger than the number who use Lisp every day: The Lisp community is small, unfocused, and arguably broken. Meanwhile, I work as a professional Drupal developer and am (god help me) gradually becoming an expert on PHP, but that has nothing to do with my nigh-nonexistent respect for PHP as a language. I do it because the Drupal community is large and growing larger, it includes as many noncoders as coders, and it's focused on building websites rather than obsessing over tools. The result seems to be that customers like using Drupal for their sites. Rails and the like are focused on making programmers feel empowered, but Drupal is focused on making site admins feel empowered.
Seth Godin Advocates Click Fraud
First class symbols are the big one, I think. Of course, we all know about Python's brain-damaged function literals.
10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10

Same as everyone else I reckon :-)
I am in bed by 10 PM and asleep before midnight. The delay is waiting for my girlfriend to wind down.
The difference is that until 3 years ago I lived in NZ and finished work at 6PM at the latest. I then commuted home in 30 minutes, and had dinner by 7:30PM.
Most of my friends and colleagues did the same.
I am still in that routine, except that dinner has been pushed back later, as my girl does not get home until 7:30 at the earliest from work.
Her reason for this is that she works for a US company that does not seem to start it's day until 10:30 AM.
I can still be home from work on time, because like in NZ my colleagues and I all start around 9 AM.

So I get the feeling that our sleeping habits are becoming driven more from work than social lifes.... especially as you get older.

Currently I am on the East Coast working, yet am still mentally on West Coast time... so I wake up at 3:30 AM and got to bed at 7 PM.
And have a headache because of it.
Gmail exploit more than just Gmail. Should it be released?
Get help immediately. Your life is too short and precious to be wasted on something unfulfilling. I don't know who you've met in this field, but my experience suggest that if you find them boring and predictable it is because you find the field boring.

I don't mean this as criticism, but when discussing programming you probably find yourself boring as well. If you aren't passionate about it... what is there that could hold your interest?

Please get some help finding something meaningful or finding meaning in what you are doing.
I think that a lot of the popularity of Ruby came not so much from Ruby itself, but Rails. I think that with the emerging popularity of Django, you are likely to begin noticing a similar influx of Python enthusiasm...