skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's fine, because a mediocre or bad relationship is costly in comparison to what little it provides. Being single doesn't ensure loneliness, and being married doesn't imply the lack thereof.

There are plenty of hedonic studies that show that married people are neither happier nor less happy, as a group, than singles, and that people with children are actually less happy when the children are young (which makes sense; young kids are annoying). This is often taken to indicate that romantic relationships have no bearing on personal happiness. That's wrong, actually. The average is flat, but individual people shift around (up, or down) a great deal.

"Expectancy" in getting married, however, is about zero. If you settle out of some desire to be married for its own sake, it's probably negative.
Why do we want "something" to be done at a governmental level? I'm purchasing a home water distillation device. Any suggestions?

My wife and I have mostly implemented Art de Vany's paleolithic diet, so a distiller will hopefully take us to 90% chemical-free.

Will look for the actual academic paper and post...
Of course the founders of Microsoft and Google had other projects: the college degree programs they dropped out of.
Your list seems to me to affirm my point. None of the things you mention strike me as boring and obvious, and I have a lot of respect for 1890. Lectures in scientific piety, not so much.

But as long as we're butting heads about this, perhaps you can clear up something I was wondering. The article says:

[Pavlov] showed that a physical connection can be created between a stimulus (the bell sound) and the following behavior (the dog's salivation) with no cognitive interaction.

My question: is that last bit - "with no cognitive interaction" - the received interpretation of Pavlov's result, or was it just added by the author?
3D Animation of LHC operation.
Maybe mice are just gamblers by nature.

Heh. Can we think of an experiment to test that?
Thanks for confirming about these message-ids with Twitter.
Flagged due to being repost from Reddit.
A Common Fallacy
So... what happens when this guy finally learns of a well designed language like python? Does his head just explode?
They will be able to control all of this (with few exceptions) once each and every move on the internet is authenticated. It will happen. All they need to do is cite terrorism and child pornography.
"After 10 years, those with a Philosophy degree out-earn those with degrees in IT, Business etc."

What are you implying? I'm a student of philosophy, and I don't take kindly to the insinuation that philosophers aren't worth the money they get paid.

A philosophy degree is one of the hardest out there.
Sounds like you aren't complaining about Python, you're complaining about coworkers who don't document their functions. Sure, Java forces you to at least declare the type of each argument, but that's a pretty lame reason to insist on static typing.
When you're passing parameters to a subroutine in Perl, all you're doing is passing a list. Not an array, but a list. The foo subroutine you posted, just wouldn't be written in Perl.

Besides, have you seen the syntax for passing arrays in PHP? Zend Framework is fugly:

protected static function _assembleRoutes()
{
$routes = array();
$routes['entry'] = new Zend_Controller_Router_Route_Regex(
"[0-9a-z._!;, \=\-%]+-(\d+)",
array(
'module' => 'default',
'controller' => 'entry',
'action' => 'view'
),
array(
'id' => 1
)
);
return $routes;
}

10 lines to create an object = foo($bar);
There are some common flaws that also need to be fixed if you take this route of action:

1) Get rid of your Facebook account. Or, setup the privacy so that your wall doesn't exist and the two girlfriends are unable to comment on the same photos of you.

2) Have a primary cell phone and a secondary phone. Give your primary girlfriend your primary cell, give the secondary/tertiary/etc'iary girlfriends the secondary number

3) I used to know a lot more, because in high school I really wanted to date 3 or 4 girls at a time (and I could, but friends talked me out of it). I had a full list of things, but I have forgotten the smaller items.
Yes, but they're rare and you usually have to steal them. (By which I mean lure them out of mediocre relationships; nothing Borat-style.)

Foreign countries are also a good idea. You won't believe it until you see it.
Not unless they're dating nerdy startup guys.
I just wish more of the intellectually stimulation women were that beautiful.
Good to see you read the article. I already have a VPS set up running django for my band website. Python is great, but Perl is great too.
Yes. I met one recently. She's beautiful, not demanding, and gives me falafels whenever I want.

Falafel store girl is mind blowingly awesome in every way.

Maybe one day I'll even have a conversation with her. But that's unlikely, I'm too shy.
The intent of gifting the same perfume is so that you won't get caught when your gfs use their olfactory lobes.

What are the chances that they will wear the same perfume if they purchased independently?
Thanks for that perspective!

Well this other perspective stems from prior to these sites Google populated the # info. Also, prior to seeing these sites (which just started popping up) I never received such phone calls since the DoNotCall list took affect.

I just thought I'd debate this somewhat out there perspective (should have done this b4...roll eyes) ...but I see these sites have found a lucrative market with little effort!
Isn't git's porcelain mostly Perl and shell scripts?

(...which is gradually being rewritten in C, I know.)

It does appear that the signal-to-noise ratio in the talent pool declines over time, for just about any popular programming language (other than C, possibly).
Well then one will smell the others perfume. You have to initialize both the variables to be the same.
Emacs can do most of the things that TextMate is loved for, and then some:

http://platypope.org/yada/emacs-demo/
Talking about YC doesn't so much bother me, but dating advice albeit business related makes me wonder if this thread has 'jumped the shark'.

Still, I laughed. Dating more than 1 girl is especially applicable in SV although not empirically advised.
Yeah, I'm secretly a shill for the Tcl cabal, "ubernostrum".
There's a solution to all of this, rather than sitting back and waiting for the sky to fall.

We use our own operating systems and safe hardware. We develop new protocols and technologies.

We build our own infrastructure and abandon the old.
Going to the gym lowers your immunity, not by much since trained people have stronger immune systems anyway due to hotter metabolisms, but getting a cold is one of the sure signs of overtraining.
Feel free to point out any factual errors in that story, with references. The DM for all its faults is no worse than the Grauniad for only presenting one side of any story, and we post links to that all the time here.
Mexico: The Next Disaster
looks like a supermarket to me !
What things do you like better about Perl than Python? (honest question)
What kind of money do you make off the "passive" sites? Is it just icing on the cake or enough to live comfortably?
"Steal" someone, and all you get is someone who is easily stolen.
Starting (and exiting) a company at the right time is a skill (not just dumb luck)
We like our humor round here a bit more subtle than "windows users are retards haha". This isn't Slashdot either.
Looks similar if not identical to a post by Bruce Schneier on wired around the same time. Some commentary on HN at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=228458
Some people seem to be investigating Emacs, from the world that had Textmate become popular! http://nubyonrails.com/articles/emacs-emacs

I've personally jumped to Vim. Mostly beacuse I do some sysadmin and now it's much less annoying editing config files, but also so I can jump from OS X and still be able to work.
OO is easy to understand and hard to do right.

FP is moderately difficult to understand and hard to do wrong.

FP is the pwn sauce, no question. The more interesting debate (and one on which I don't have enough experience to have an authoritative opinion) is the static-vs.-dynamic controversy.
Give it a shot. You've nothing to lose.

If you're afraid of risking rejection and failure, then what are you doing on a startup board?
http://www.layeredthoughts.com

Just got started on it about a month ago...mainly tech, programming, business stuff, with some random life tossed in. I've been using MindManager to map out new posts and it has been great, makes it really easy to keep your research organized.
I blog at http://monfx.com/ and http://devgrow.com/

Nothing serious yet.
Is there more than one girl in SV? ;)
Monopoly - America's Not-so Secret Weapon
Why Failure is Good
Not updating changelogs is one thing that might be forgivable, but deliberately breaking things so that a specific platform isn't supported is pretty serious and a pretty serious alegation. Which projects are these, and how was Windows support broken?
Unlike most Rubyists, I do a fair amount of Win32 dev work on projects. I heard all the warnings about Windows being a second-class platform for Ruby, but it really hasn't played out that way for me. Things that work fine on Win32 Ruby:

* EventMachine for network I/O

* Win32API for FFI

* ActiveRecord for persistence

A lot of 3rd party Ruby libs won't work on Windows, of course, because they're build around Unixisms. But that's true of every other language too; it's just less obvious in Python because it has such a sprawling stdlib.
Yep. A lot of people will put their password in anywhere without hesitation. Everyone gives Facebook their gmail passwords and such.

There are certainly some people (like most of the ones here) who know why you shouldn't do that sort of thing, and getting them to use your web app might be tricky. But your average Joe doesn't have the slightest clue. He thinks as long as he runs Norton Antivirus he's safe. So it largely depends on your audience.
UX Details: Hovering over a link also highlights an image
A nice little UX trick that most people don't use. Very minor CSS detail.
This article was already submitted a few days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=384637
I switched from Vista to OS X this year. I made the stupid mistake of trying to develop Rails on a Windows machine. And it was not worth the trouble at all. If you're going to devote your life and livelihood to building software on Rails, do NOT do it on Windows.

I switched to OS X and I'm happier with my computer than I ever have been in my life.

And Rails works awesome.
Find a single girl, and all you get is someone nobody else wants.

The above is flamingly, almost disgustingly, false, and I said it only to illustrate a sweeping stereotype. What you say is generally correct, but I wouldn't apply it in all cases. Anyway, by "steal", I don't mean that you should actively damage the relationship. That's evil and also quite pathetic. I mean that you become friends with the girl and wait for the relationship to find its end, which it will if the girl likes you better than her current boyfriend-- and while there are very, very few compelling women who are available and unattached, there are a hell of a lot of them dating loser men.

I generally agree with you in principle. And it's not a good thing that the vast majority of attractive women are unavailable. It's much better if you can find a shy, quirky girl who happens, against all odds, to be single and available, but while this is the gold standard, it's incredibly uncommon.
The Rationale of the Subtext

because moral superiority is unbearable without mutually assured destruction.
My blog is at http://www.peterharrington.info mostly marketing, tech and entrepreneur stuff
:-)

(I get the Whoosh award for today.)
Alas, I can't point fingers regarding things that I don't fully understand (I'm not a Windows developer or related to the projects claimed) - commentary is as good as I can do on the Windows side and I cannot quote e-mails without permission. One project that was mentioned, however, was DataMapper.

However, once I've investigated the claims, have permission, and got more of a story together, I'll be posting on Ruby Inside about it. There may or may not be a story, of course :)
From what I can see of startups, the really appropriate analogy is to pursue the same strategies as a stereotypical gold-digging "hot" chick. Keep up a glamorous appearance above all else, even if you're poor and living in a tiny space. Go to lots of parties and try to get people to talk about you. Have alliances with girls in the same situation, and "friend mode" advisors who enjoy the vicarious thrill of being near you. In one-on-one encounters, you have to have a great demo, even if it doesn't "scale" (there's no chance you would be able or willing to do that all night or every night). Use a succession of sugar daddies to pay the bills until some old rich chump who wants to look and feel young again proposes.
For what it's worth, these issues affect users of alternate implementations generally, such as JRuby.
I'm not sure that example, which doesn't do what it looks like it might do, supports your argument. Because

sub foo {
my($bar, @baz, %quux) = @_

Is just another way to declare your types:

void foo(int bar, void *baz[], hash_t quux) { ...

Or in your untyped, dynamic language du jour with my bastardized Hungarian Notation:

sub foo(Ibar, Abaz, Hquux) ...

However, as you point out, that syntax doesn't work because non-scalars need to be passed as references. Most non-scalar types need to be passed as references in C also (I can't remember which C standard let structs be passed as value), which is perl's heritage.
Although lots of comments are about the Ruby language, I think this post can be applied to just about any open source project out there. It's always easier to complain to the maintainer than to try to fix the problem yourself and distribute the fix as a patch to others. Open source doesn't work well if there's only one person who fixes all the problems. I think it could also be a newbie developer mentality. Newbie developers are more likely to use libraries that are completely plug-and-play; if something doesn't work right, they'll complain rather than try to fix it themselves.
There's nothing exciting here at all. Except for the bit about music, it's all the same stuff Zuckerberg has been saying for months.
The three main levers in a subscription business are:

1) the premium: this is the enticement which gets people to try out your product. Most typically it is a free trial period.

2) the fees: what does the service cost the user. My experience has been that if your price point is under about $10 per month, you are better off charging a quarterly or annual subscription.

3)the features: what does the user "get" for a monthly/annual fee. The best features have a high perceived value to the user but a low delivery cost to the provider. The worst subscription business focus on the wrong features which are very high cost to deliver but have a very low perceived value to the user.

Some other things to think about:
1) You need to test like crazy on each of these levers. I have seen examples where a $14.95 price point has performed 30% better than a $15 price point. Make basic assumptions about the different elements you want to test, but make sure to let the data make decisions for you.

2) If you offer a free trial, make sure to get the credit card number up front.

3) Be very upfront with disclosures on your billing process and have a very liberal refund process. Anyone can request a charge back from their credit card company for any reason and too many charge backs will sink your income stream. Make it easier for someone to get a refund from you and you can prevent these types of issues.

4) be very focused on retention. Retaining existing users is much easier than acquiring new ones.
"I recently had an e-mail from a Windows developer in the Ruby community who pointed out how opaque many Ruby projects are regarding Windows."

I guess my response to that would be that Microsoft is quite opaque regarding Ruby. By being such a closed system, Windows doesn't do anything to help developers improve Ruby library compatibility.

Compare this to Apple. Apple builds Ruby into its operating system, contributes patches upstream, and is even supporting the development of MacRuby, which more tightly integrates Ruby into the Mac OS X operating system.

So the opaqueness goes both ways in my opinion.

Due to this, I am very impressed that Ruby even has the level of support in Windows that it currently enjoys. I would say that Windows hackers should keep up the good work and submit substantive patches as often as possible.
I can understand that but the reason given was "repost from Reddit". Is there something wrong with a good repost? Or is it the fact that the repost came from Reddit? Or is it just this particular repost?
I didn't say I liked anything in Perl better than Python. There may be a couple of things, but it would just boil down to personal taste.

Conversely, I like Python better than Perl in two major departments though:

1) The way you import stuff in Python. If you have a long namespace in Perl you have to type it out every time you instantiate an object. Example:

use Organisation::Project::App::Models::Feature;

my $feature = Organisation::Project::App::Models::Feature->new();

In Python you would do:
from organisation.project.app.models import feature;

feat = feature();

It's a small point, but when you have multiple views/actions inside a controller that all use the same model you start to get annoyed typing that namespace in Perl.

2) The native OOP system in Python is much easier than Perl. With Moose this is far less important than it used to be, but comparing core Perl to core Python it is an issue.
emacs isn't too bad, but I gave up on the multi-major-mode stuff a few years back, it just doesn't compare to TextMate. TextMate still seems to do very well if the one file contains several languages (like an html template), but emacs under MMM doesn't fare well at all.
If we had sufficient numbers, sure, that'd be a great way to go. But as it is with almost no one caring\learning about technical\political issues like those involved in this.... I just can't see it working. The problem isn't the technology... it's the people. And that's a hard problem indeed to fix.
Tcl the Misunderstood (not too new)
Good point and the 1 girl there is... she's taken.
I like the idea of learning to live within modest starting means and then getting a significant increase over time to build a luxurious retirement. Math and Philosophy would fit well with this approach, getting more relatively significant increases after a modest start.
Gordon Brown urged to keep computer hacker Gary McKinnon in UK
This advice works well in the very early stages of a startup, but focus is needed once you have done your "market research." To continue the analogy, you should not date more than one girl once you are going steady.

If you want to read more about this shifting from a broad to a narrow focus, I highly recommend Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore.

http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Chasm-Marketing-High-Tech-Mai...
FYI... Didn't find it subtle at all.
Hence the saying only Perl can parse Perl. Which is fine for 100-line scripts but for 50,000 line projects written by many people over many years (these exist!) it means you get basically zero tool support. Both Python and Tcl scale much more cleanly from small one-off scripts to larger applications (as well as any weakly dynamically typed language can, anyway).
Keep It Simple¡ it's the feature that I want.
I think that the main point is not what you should use today but the direction that software as a trend is going in the long term. That, in my view, is why the article is so well worth reading.
Yes, if you want to write C this sort of thing is the least of your problems. Perl is certainly simpler and easier to learn than C. I'd also agree that Perl's declaration syntax is simpler than Java's, but what isn't simpler than Java's type system at this point? ;)

The simple syntax works in multiple Perl alternatives: PHP and Ruby are the ones I know about. Both languages have intelligent defaults to eliminate the need, in many cases, for newbs to think hard about what they're doing. (By default, PHP passes an array of arguments, by value -- with hidden optimizations to avoid the overhead of excess copying. The PHP argument array may include entire arrays as arguments. Meanwhile, in Ruby everything is an object, so Ruby passes an array of object references.) These are the languages which constitute Perl's competition, today. (Along with Python, of course, which I am unfairly leaving out of my argument because but I don't know how Python handles arguments! But I'm sure the answer is "with reasonable intelligence".)
- sniff sniff Is that Elizabeth Dior No. 5 on your shirt?

- Yes, I love it when you wear that perfume I gave you.

- I know. So I ran out of it a month ago.

- Uhhh, I havn't had time to do my laundry lately.
garbage bomb explodes in office :)
It's great that you have people that watch over you in case you would consume the 'wrong' information... Now let's hope their definition of 'wrong' matches yours.

Is there anybody in the UK challenging this stuff ?
of course, most adult women probably have more than one bottle of perfume, and they probably wouldn't wear it every single time they would be with the person in question, unless they really liked the scent. I think I have around five I use frequently and even more stashed, sometimes I'll just stick with one and other times I'll layer a couple of perfumes. Depends on the mood I'm in that day, as well as the weather and occasion.

the better advice, if you can get away with it: be truthful. some people are open to open relationships and maybe even polyamory. having been in a position where I was the "other girl" (love makes one do funny things), the whole being secretive and sneaking around thing, as well as the ensuing fights, was painful..and the other woman doesn't even know the whole story still.
More online journalists are jailed worldwide today than journalists in other mediums
We're getting down to personal choices here. What you think is readable depends on how well you understand the language. Some people don't like sigils, which Perl uses in abundance.

Taking a look at your PHP example, you have:

function foo($bar, $baz, $quux = array('quux' => "default")) {

What is $baz supposed to be here? I have no way of knowing that it's supposed to be a scalar, array or associative array.

The strength of sigils for readability is revealed in the equivalent Perl code:

my ($bar, @baz, %quux) = @_;

Here I know instantly, without reading any further documentation, that this subroutine expects a scalar (which in OOP would be the current object instance), an array and then a hash. It took a while, but I find this readable.

What PHP has over Perl, and indeed every other language right now is lowest-barrier-to-entry for web development. Out of all the other languages, it's the only one designed for the web.

On top of that, developing Perl ,Python or Ruby on a Windows machine is NOT fun and it's not easy. You want to play with PHP? Wampserver or Xampp can get you up and running on XP and Vista in seconds. Even if you manage to set up a Perl environment, you've still got CGI and DBI to install before it matches what PHP does out the box. Already I've installed Strawberry Perl, Apache, mod_perl and standard CPAN modules and all I wanted to do is a simple contact me form on my website!

That's why PHP is such a success.
It certainly looks cool. Another language in my "To play around with" list :D