skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because for ruby, asking a developer to convert not only to your language, but his whole platform as well is going to seriously hinder your adoption rates.

Not caring about adoption rates is another story altogether.
Hillegass's book is an excellent resource for someone getting started
with Cocoa Programming on OSX and one reason is that although it
doesn't "assume you're retarded", it doesn't try very hard to make
you think much. Hillegass goes over what you need to know to be a
functioning member of the Cocoa/OSX society but doesn't invite you to
question its core values.

I've only read a little of "From C++ to Objective-C"
http://ktd.club.fr/programmation/fichiers/cpp-objc-en.pdf but it seems
similar in spirit to Hillegass's book, telling you things you should
probably know about how Objective C deals with some of the same issues
C++ does. While it clearly expects you to be knowledgeable about C++, I
would say it's only slightly more sophisticated than Hillegass's
book. It doesn't really seem to force you to think much in order to
get value from it.

Having programmed for a while, the only programming books that make me
think are ones that are either

- very specific and highly technical (e.g Schneier's "Applied Cryptography")

- very general (e.g. Kernighan & Pike's "The Practice of Programming") or

- define the language (e.g. Ierusalimschy's "Programming in Lua")

it's pretty rare for me to find a good programming book that can
both challenge me to think in a useful way and also be useful in other
situations where I don't want to think. Hillegass's book is good but
sadly isn't one of them. However if such a book existed for Objective-C
I would buy it in an instant.
Just for the sake of anyone in the future who is reading this thread, two more links-

http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org

http://github.com/fidothe/dpkg-tools/tree/master
Well it had to happen sometime. But I doubt the frugal measures like removing free lunches will have a huge impact on motivation. Given that the employees have been rewarded during good times, the expectation may be that this frugality is only a short term blip.
Thank you. even if it hadnt been submitted, the article it self was very thin and hardly anything new (especially for the YC crowd).
"The conclusion that more than 16 cores makes no sense might well be a good conclusion for now, but "more than 16 cores may well be pointless" is by no means a conclusion for the long or even mid term."

From the article:
"But, to my knowledge, these die-stacking schemes are further from down the road than the production of a mass-market processor with greater than 16 cores."

The article is pretty clear that "more then 16 cores may well be pointless" is for now.
jees another painful reminder of my refusal to "team up" during uni days and instead doing things solo (slapping myself on the back of the head)!!!
I'm only eagerly awaiting it because I'm curious to see what additional awesomeness can be added in.

(Yes, yes, vim, emacs, ed, etc...)
Is cold sore virus responsible for Alzheimer's Disease?
No problem Rusty! The code is raw and I hate it. I'll be improving on it as I go along. I also have to finish tournaments this month, been putting it off for ages!
It is a little strange, when somebody who holds so much personal information about people says something like that. It is one thing to do what he is doing with MSN; but to come out and say it. I would have preferred if he had just lied.
Financing your free software with Google AdSense
the lack of S-expressions prevents me from trying out other C-like-syntax FP languages (except js and python which i knew before lisp)

i tried erlang, but really, my mind prefers thinking in lisp :(

do i miss a lot not learning other FPs?
Can someone explain the top 1, 2 or 3 benefits of FP? I just want to hear the key positives that would make an order of magnitude benefit to me. If FP would increase my productivity 5%, not really interested. If it's 50%, that's something.

For instance, I would say for OO two benefits that can create an order of magnitude increase in a programmer's performance are:
- much easier to use 3rd party libraries(since most good code is OO)
- much easier to modify/debug code
Ask YC Hackers: Which Python ORM/Framework works best with Rails-conformant DB schema?
We have a successful mid-sized Rails project (about 10K lines) and have some time/resources to clean things up before starting a big and important "Version 2".<p>One of the things we wanted to do was to investigate a possible switch away from Rails, possibly to a Python-based stack, due to a number of reasons, all of them non-technical.<p>I'll be looking closely at Django, Pylons and even Merb, but decided to drop this question here to get a community advice:<p>Which Python/Ruby ORM works best on an existing DB schema created specifically for ActiveRecord? One thing we certainly don't want to do is a significant schema change and a resulting DB conversion.
CPAN strikes again, I was actually hoping someone would show me a better way when I posted that. So thanks!
I don't think hackers hate Tcl because it's "intimidating". They hate it because it's verbose, slow, and lacking in abstraction power. (Last time I used it, associative arrays weren't first-class, i.e. you can't have a list of anonymous associative arrays; is that still the case?) Also, Tcl was originally aimed at the niche that Lua now occupies — lightweight embedded scripting language — but Tcl is 720k of code while Lua is 82k, and isn't verbose, slow, or lacking in power. Finally, the libraries available for Tcl, while they do cover some pretty important stuff, are a tiny fraction of what's available for C, C++, C#, Java, Perl, Python, or even Ruby.

The article says it's "more or less as fast as ... Ruby". Well, that's pretty slow!

The string-substitution execution model is easy to explain, and it's easy to do higher-order programming with, but it's very error-prone and very difficult to implement efficiently. If you use Tcl in a disciplined way, you won't have too much trouble with this, but it is not nearly the advantage that this article makes it out to be.

Tcl does have some nice advantages: it's optimized for use as a UI with an embedded DSL, not for use as a programming language, and its support for event-driven programming and securely running untrusted code are first-rate. Yosef K. (Yossi Kreinin) recently blogged about some of this.

Oh, and you say, "# is a command that ignores its arguments". You're wrong about that; try "# [set x 3]" or "# comments do not end at semicolons; puts hello" if you don't believe me.
That puts my odds of losing the falafels at 25%.

But maybe if I can get her fired, then I can ask her out...
You know, not to flame, but this attitude is exactly why Ruby isn't where it could be.

I love Ruby, do most of my work in it now and haven't owned a Windows machine since 2001, but if Ruby's answer to Windows users is "just switch to Ubuntu" it's not surprising they decide to just choose another language.
Why not 2bn or 10bn? I wish people would understand that this money will come at the expense of someone else, probably through inflation and a greater debt burden.
The UltraSparc T2 has 8 cores and each core can run 8 concurrent threads, so you have 64 concurrent threads running "simultaneously" on a single chip: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T2
One of the techniques they use to solve the memory bandwidth problem is to have four memory controllers.
All 9000 of your misattributions are belong to Kefka.
By using DataMapper for instance I don't see why you need to change the schema, one major difference is that you need to specify the fields in the models.
I guess I'm just outpouring all the frustration and rage I've felt whenever people turn to focus on all the cool shiny technology related to a problem.... when the problem at it's core is social. For just a moment, forget protecting yourself with technology! What would have happened if the Hollings Bill had passed? http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2002/03/51275 Anyone continuing to produce "free" technology would have a heavy hammer dropped on them... and a similar bill could easily pass in the near future, probably with some explanation they need it to fight terrorism.

Yeah, we need free technologies. Guess what, we have them! What we need to do is retain the right to develop, possess, and use them! And as distasteful as is, that's a political fight. So, uh, yeah..... forgive me if I'm over reacting.... but I really don't think I am....
The "five computers" claim was a reasonable one if one presumed that the size and cost problem for computer technology was insurmountable.

In the same way "more than 16 cores is pointless" is a reasonable claim if one presumes that the technical limitations in the article are insurmountable.

Given our past experience, no technological limitation is truly insurmountable.

Therefore, I'm willing to assign as much belief in this article as I am the "five computers" claim.
I would be really suprised if functional programming caught on. Most programmers don't start in college, they start in high school. And high school people don't have the patience for functional.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking is a bad idea for the society. Rent seeking basically lets you take other people's stuff without you contributing anything - no wonder people love this, but it's very destructive behavior.
I'm surprised that a text praising an advertisement ends with the sentence 'Maybe honesty really is the best policy'.

Honesty would be not to advertise.
Absolutely. Slava Pestov on the matter:

"I'm usually a strong proponent of the rule of law, innocent until proven guilty, and so on, but I strongly believe that anybody who writes an article about functional programming where the only example given is 'factorial' (or 'fibonacci' for that matter) should be summarily executed, no exceptions."

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7h7e5/its_time_...
Can't you develop it on *nix and run it on the JRE via JRuby?
Why stack? Just make it an onion.
I have been able to do powerful things in TCL, and quickly. However, I believe it is one of the most difficult languages to debug, and its maintainability cost is extremely high. You can't underestimate the risk that this is to a project.

Part of the problem is that the language doesn't defend well against bugs. Consider what happens if you pass your index and list arguments in the wrong order to "lindex"...it silently takes the index from your list, and then includes your intended index as part of the list! This is the kind of mistake that can silently appear to work, or fail in subtle ways, and it's not worth the debugging time in my opinion.
The Poetic Lure of Python
Can some one explain to me how this is radically different?
Functional programming is more than a style. While programming in a functional style is possible in many languages it's very limited, even in a language like Scala. Regarding the hybrid languages i personally think that F# is relatively good for both functional and OOP programming. There are better functional and OOP languages than F#, but i don't feel too limited doing either. Clojure may also be a good choice but i don't have enough experience with it to give an opinion.
"they give the anecdotal hint that limitations will ALWAYS be beaten."

Don't you mean usually? I haven't seen the big break throughs in AI that were expected. I haven't seen a solution to the halting problem, etc, etc.
I think this is related to Ruby in the sense that there aren't that many Ruby coders. The whole "scratch an itch" thing is a numbers game - maybe %1 of the people who have a problem would actually contribute a patch that fixes it, so the more people use a language/project the higher the chance the original author would get some outside help.

As for newbie devs, I'm not sure I agree... as a non-newbie, I still like to get a solution that works. I might be able to dive into the code and fix it, but I don't want to do this - I prefer to focus on my app rather than figure out why certain libraries don't work.

(For some reason this view seems to be common in Ruby. A prominent example was the web server - until Passenger came along (surprising everyone) you were supposed to figure out how to deploy with lighttpd, then mongrel - instead of simply working with Apache which most of the world already knew how to install, scale and tune.)
Yes. It seems that all of the points I made in 2004 and again in 2006 (http://www.aarongreenspan.com/letter/index.html) are still relevant.
"But if you pine for the glory days of 1995, when exciting new developments in computing were being constructed primarily in your language, you will want to learn a language other than Perl."

This is exactly the sort of FUD the article seemed to be targeted at. Perl is, currently, a more powerful language than Python or Ruby in several areas.

I happen to like all three languages, and have written significant code in Python, but the Perl community is still very active and doing interesting things (as the increase in contributions to CPAN indicates). It's just a more mature community. When someone, say, writes an SMTP server in Perl, they don't freak the fuck out and post a hyperbolic blog post about how freakin' awesome it (and they) are...they merely upload it to CPAN, where it joins the dozen other projects that do the same thing in different ways. If you consider all of the catching up that's happening in the Ruby and Python worlds to be "exciting new developments"--like mature testing frameworks, coverage reporting, library packaging and management, deployment tools, Apache modules, etc.--then, yes, you'd want to be working in a language that doesn't already have excellent implementations of all of those things.

Of course, if the Perl community were content with what they currently have, and weren't always pushing forward with newer/better ways to do things, it would be just as bad. But, Moose, as the obvious (but not only) example, should make clear that that's not the case.

"Perl will need another thirty to fifty years to reach COBOL's current stage."

I hope you'll remember this in two years. If it still seems likely to come true after Perl 6, I'll buy you a beer.
I don't object to the hundreds of millions of dollars he's going to make, even though Microsoft clearly overpaid for its stake out of a desperate attempt to seem "cool". (It didn't work, any more than paying $3 million for a used Kleenex-- smile, Manhattan art world-- can put a person on the Social Register.) Nor do I object to the fact that there are evidently legions of people willing to work for the guy.

But to the magazines, newspapers, and blogs out there: please stop elevating this guy as something other than a one-flash success. He's the most numerically successful member of my generation-- I'll give him that much-- but he's not very talented, and he doesn't have much to say. Let him run do what ever he wants with his company and his money, but keep his face and his name off my fucking screen. I will thank you, and Mark himself will thank you 15 years later.
This topic is disappearing, but I'd still like to address your point.

Wealth def. 3b: anything that has utility and is capable of being appropriated or exchanged.

Python and emacs fit the definition, but making decisions in a company produces nothing that can be "appropriated or exchanged". Python and emacs are wealth just as much as a screwdriver and hammer are.

Also, if 100% of people functioned as scientists or engineers, things (wealth) would still be made. Money is just a claim against the wealth of the nation; just because you can earn more money doesn't mean you've increased the collective wealth.
This is absurd. Perhaps they can also publish a 5-year plan.
Well, Tcl is faster than Ruby and now we don't use the associative arrays we use the dict instead. What version of tcl have you used?
My school has done something similar for quite some time - we don't have any AP English or Social Studies courses. Rather, we have a broad variety of electives in those areas. This works extremely well, as students can take courses they are interested in without feeling shepherded into the insanity that is absorbing the entire history of the English language in time for a single exam. We still do have APs in math and science, however.
I would give you 15 of my karma points if I could.
This is good for a number of reasons. One, because everyone agrees that this improves the curriculum and shows that standardized tests can be a handicap even among honors-level students. Scarsdale has courage to be a trend-setter
Two, it is a big challenge to CB to get their act together. Some subjects, imo, are better for APs than others. Econ, gov, math, and physics are well-suited, while the english language/lit is pretty much agreed to be the least useful in terms of actual learning. And even the subjects that are best-suited to a test format have their flaws. For instance, CB specifies no definitive textbook for the histories, so you basically need 1 good textbook and a contrasting review book to cover all the material. Even Physics B has it's flaws. Even though the test/lab format works well for the test, NO class ever gets through the last portion on nuclear particles, and there is little understanding of it come test day. Hopefully this will pressure CB to reform.

Also, this could be a good trend considering how exhausting APs are. Colleges look at how many are taken relative to those available, and a chance to be in an "honor's" course without the stress of an AP would be welcome to those feeling pressured to take as many as possible.
<blockquote>“To us, their courses don’t look any different from high-quality A.P. courses,” [College Board VP Trevor Packer] said. “Simply changing the letters on the course from A.P. to A.T. looks very cosmetic to us.”</blockquote>

I would have to agree; these students are still expected to take the AP exams. If this helps them get away from "teaching to the test," though, more power to them. At my (very good, private) high school, I took the AP English and AP Literature exams without having ever taken courses branded as "AP." In fact, my school didn't even make a distinction between honors and "regular" English; it was just a uniformly excellent program. I got a 4 on both exams. I did take a course called "AP European History," but I cannot think of one instance that I studied for the AP test curriculum the whole year.

But, hey, coming up with a dynamic curriculum that doesn't focus on rote memorization and easy-to-grade multiple-choice tests is hard, especially with class sizes larger than 15-20 like mine were.
Our projects total about 450,000 lines of Perl code. I've worked on one large Python project (SciPy), and found it similarly comfortable. I didn't feel major pains going either direction (from Perl to Python or back to Perl again).

I also spent some time with a large Tcl project (OpenACS) and found it very painful. But, I've never learned Tcl with as much enthusiasm as I learned Perl or Python, so I might be wrong. Actually maybe it's just CMS that really suck. I hated spelunking in Zope, and I hate working with Joomla (for different, but no less strongly held, reasons).
maybe the tone in multi-paradigm languages

to me python seems emphasizing more on OO than FP; lisp is the reverse
Wanted: Multi-author analytics for Wordpress
I fell in love with an assassin
Most Underhyped Apps of 2008
when i first read only the title, I thought it was some guy trying to be funny. Not shortly after I began reading the article did I realise the macabre tone that was being set.

Quite heart rending. Whod have thunk it. I suppose this is not the first or last of its kind, but does make one wonder.
# [set x 3]
set x
can't read "x": no such variable
# puts hello
--nothing happens--

What are you talking about?
Thanks. It's sad that it's taken this long for people to believe that I'm speaking plainly and honestly, as opposed to bitterly, when I've pointed out (for much of the past four years) that there was something inconsistent about "the greatest internet company ever" being run by someone like Mark, but now that people have woken up to reality, I can't complain.

And even if you can't give me points, you can still buy my book. :) http://www.thinkpress.com/authoritas/index.html
Any time you try to compare college applicants by looking at their high school records, which is something college admission offices have to do every admission season, you run into the problem of high school courses not being particularly comparable. That has been true even with the brand name labels "AP" and "IB." The Advanced Placement program caught on not because of school districts like Scarsdale, but because of school districts elsewhere around the United States whose students had trouble making the case that they were ready for tough colleges. Some families, including homeschooling families like mine, really appreciate an opportunity for bright young people to test in what is somewhat like a British A-level system to show what they know.

(Historically, the Advanced Placement program began in the 1950s when prep school students no longer automatically were placed in the same small group of elite colleges. Some prep school students went to pretty good, but not tip-top, colleges and found out they were repeating in college work that they had already done in high school. The AP tests, which began in such subjects as French and chemistry, gave such students a chance to get placed into higher-level college courses that wouldn't repeat what they already learned in high school.)

I'm all for pluralism, so it's fine by me if one school district or another either decides to offer AP courses or decides to NOT offer AP courses. Note that the policy of the College Board is to make AP tests available to homeschoolers and self-studiers of all kinds, so, as the linked article notes, some students in high schools without AP courses still take AP tests.

What would a school district like that say if federal curriculum guidelines became more comprehensive and specified, say, high school level science education standards in much greater detail?
I think there are only 10 philosophy grads per year, and the Paul Graham data point heavily skewed the mean salary. :)
Top 3 benefits (IMHO):

1. Concurrency done right -- take a look at Erlang or Clojure to get an idea of multi-threaded programming without the nightmare of locks and deadlocks. This feature will become increasingly important as CPUs are scaled by integrating more and more cores.

2. Testability -- immutable variable bindings and carefully sequestered state changes means your code is vastly better suited for testability.

3. Distributed Computing -- this maybe a controversial claim, but in my experience building distributed systems in Java, Common Lisp and finally Erlang (on separate projects of course), Erlang stood out as the most robust and understandable distributed model of all.

In so far as 3rd party libraries go, a lot of newer FP languages are built on top of existing VM platforms (e.g, Clojure on JVM, F# on .NET), and are able to leverage all their available libraries. Bear in mind, that while these libraries may help build your application slightly more quickly, you end up sacrificing the benefits of FP by integrating their non-FP code.

Check out http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/fp.html for a much better overview of FP (don't miss the "Benefits" section about a third of the way in).
> The Greens, pro-business Free Democrats and socialist Left party members oppose the laws, fearing they endanger civil liberties.

Germany has a five-party democracy. It's always interesting when parties from diametrically opposite wings agree on an issue, and the two big supposedly moderate parties take the opposite stance.
Op-Ed: The real generation X
I would guess that having a high speed cache on chip would be a better use of real-estate.

Going with multiple mem controllers means that performance would still probably be pretty variable, depending on how the mem controllers are mapped to your physical addresses + how your data is laid out.
Wow thats great! Thanks for that! Great code!