skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You both can and can't control what your users decide to do with your application. After the community starts developing, though, your users can and most certainly do decide what YOU do with your application.

Hypothetically suppose, for the sake of argument, that the active Loopt community is currently gay men seeking companionship. If that is true, then Loopt is essentially doomed to use for any other purpose unless they excommunicate their current community and start over. If they try to rebrand themselves as, I don't know, Loopt: THE Place To Be For Tech-Savvy Entrepreneurs, then someone joining the non-existent "new" community will get contacted by the "old" community and, well, that's all she wrote for that user. Repeat for every user in the "new" community.

Similar examples of capture-by-community : Orkut can't be a global social network. Youtube can't have intelligent comments. Digg can't ever appeal to an older, femaler audience. Star Wars Galaxy can't be WoW, though they wanted to be (and promptly excommunicated both their old and new communities). etc, etc
So if the data doesn't match your expectations change it?
That's probably a good measure. YAPC::NA this year was the biggest ever, I seem to recall hearing (and I definitely remember there were more women there this year than ever before...it was commented on during the closing address as being a great milestone for the Perl community). But, YAPC is still a pretty small conference, by design, and there are multiple YAPCs each year, in places all over the world, with the goal being to be friendly to independent volunteer hackers rather than huge corporations.
Techmeme changes: Resolved: Humans are good at editing stuff
So much cleaner and more consistent. Classic classes are gone for good!

Unlike with other languages (which I won't name for fear of offense!) I think Pythonistas will actually migrate to this much improved Python (well, forgetting the 10% performance hit) especially as such focus has been put into making tools to make it easier, unlike with PHP 4->5 (oops..!)
No thanks, OpenID, I'm going to keep managing authentication myself, on the client-side, with easy-to-use browser-based credential vaults. I don't need you to manage my authentication for me, nor do I trust you to.

OpenID: a solution in search of a problem.
This official announcement and summary is a lot better than that linked from that old post. Of course, the HN comments there are worth reading nonetheless.
Your almost there. It would be cheaper to just tax the use of foil fuels so this is all about setting up a scam. You give credit's to people who are already polluting for free which has value and then let them sell those credits to people who want to start or continue to pollute and are less willing to lie.

PS: Methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas, but it's far less stable so it's less of a concern. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_oxidation_of_methane, but 2xO2 + CH4 > 2 x H20 + C02 also releases energy.
A straight tax on carbon emissions is far more transparent and less prone to political abuse and self-dealing. The tax could be totally offset by a cut in the payroll tax (as Gore proposes-- tax carbon, not work).
I could have built it for "only" nothing.
Strategy is Something You Can Learn
Actually, I don't know a lot of Perl developers who have switched to Ruby (though many have tried it--it is, after all, a very comfortable fit for Perl programmers, since it borrowed a lot of the best features of Perl). I know several PHP guys who made the switch...but, there are numerous areas where Ruby shows its immaturity and Perl is far more competent: Unicode, block scope, VM performance, concurrency, library breadth and depth, just to name a few.

I like Ruby and think it's a very fine language. I've implemented a couple of small projects in Ruby, and had fun with it. I find it as readable and writable as any language I've used. But, I'm confident I could accomplish almost any task I would ever need to accomplish faster in Perl, and the result would run faster, smaller, and more reliably. The same is true of Python, though to a lesser degree (though some of the problem features in Python are more uncomfortable for me...closures, in particular), but at least it has some Unicode support built in (or bolted on with reasonable competence), and the VM tends to be closer to the speed of Perl than Ruby.
By the same metrics, assuming you've defined any, a lot of things wouldn't exist - particularly languages less popular than Ruby now, such as Logo, ActionScript, Lisp, COBOL, Scala or Haskell.

There are tens of thousands of Ruby developers and hundreds (if not thousands) of companies making significant amounts of money, all backed by Ruby.
10 tough questions to ask yourself before raising money
So, you're suggesting that functional programs are somehow totally stateless? Otherwise, I don't really see your point. All useful programs store state somewhere. The fact that OO programs couple state and code doesn't make them procedural. Functional programs just tend to muss over this detail by using closures and anonymous functions (aka "objects") to keep track of state.

An object-oriented program is not required to be expressed in terms of a "sequence of steps" any more than is a functional program. You can instantiate objects that talk to one another, asynchronously or otherwise, to collaboratively do work.
Ruby has had some Unicode support for years. As of 1.9, it supports Unicode directly.
Is print("Hello World") really any different than print "Hello World"? The first seems more clear.
* It would be cheaper to just tax the use of foil fuels so this is all about setting up a scam.*

Agreed. Carbon credits or fuel taxes both reward efficiency.
Google Was Three Hours Away From Being Charged As A Monopolist
Just for comparison / further investigation, there's also Sinatra - http://sinatra.rubyforge.org/

It's more "DSL-y" than Ramaze.
"Has become"?? When wasn't it a hookup application?

It's as if the writer is surprised that a location-aware gender-specific social software (with pictures!) would be used to find dates.

Um. How long have you been with this species? You know "hook up" is like, most of what we do, right? Humans make bunnies look prude by comparison.
I think the point is, that any odd idiot trying to do something, is better than someone who knows a ton about the topic but has never gotten his hands dirty with actual work.

The example of the guy with the perfect, undamaged running shoes is very fitting, and can be seen in real-life if you go to the gym. The guys (and gals) with the muscles are training; the chubby people are talking about 'workout techniques' and 'diet tips'.
I always wondered why nobody has made an Erlang-based server OS yet. It seems perfect because from what I have seen you can make code changes in realtime. That's just my opinion though and I haven't learned Erlang so I'm not gonna be doing this myself any time soon.
May be I'm;
but you are not helping with your one liner :( [for "professions that scale" google is pointing to this page]

Btw, Wikipedia seems to be more or less in agreement with my stand here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale]
"Economies of scale are the cost advantages that a firm obtains due to expansion. Diseconomies of scale are the opposite. Economies of scale may be utilized by any size firm expanding its scale of operation."

OK! It seems I missed the cost advantage part; i.e., the term "economies of scale" is used only if there is a cost advantage to be gained from expansion. Is that right?
Maybe if everyone on HN that like it bookmarks it.

I think you've highlight the core issue yourself though. You approached us and got some interest. Unless you engage with communities getting love back is unlikely.

You should be actively looking for people with this problem and giving them the solution. The more you do, the more it will spread until it's self-sustaining.
Then the solution is not to rebrand to lose the existing audience, but to rebrand to keep that audience, and re-use the software in a new product with a new audience.

Most of the "cants" you referenced were likely not really possible, given the sort of product that they created. Social networking is most interesting with proximity. User-uploaded videos are mostly stupid, and attract stupid comments. Digg is intimidating in its design, which appeals to young male geeks more than old female nongeeks. People who want what WoW offers are already spending all their time playing WoW, and the same game with different graphics won't pull them away from the characters and relationships they're invested in. etc, etc

It's not necessarily a bad thing for users to have an effect on the direction your product goes. In fact, if properly harnessed, it can be incredibly positive.
Techcrunch seems down. Hm.
Back then, most of the users were probably within a local telephone call of their mail server.
Peter Thiel's 4 Theories on the Bubble and Bust Economy [video]
Oh and to summarize the story. According to a DOJ consultant Sanford Litvack Google they were 3 hours away from filing anti-trust charges against Google when the plug was pulled on the Yahoo! deal.

Another source here: http://www.techflash.com/Report_Google_Yahoo_were_three_hour...
Interest Free Credit Cards
If only there were as many horny single straight women as there are horny single gay men.
Same with LiveJournal and fandom, I guess. And they tried to get rid of fandom to reposition themselves towards a more mainstream audience, but that just ended up pissing off most of fandom and their new audience.
Cooliris’ 3D wall gets a little more personal
There are a lot of economic reasonings behind supporting either carbon credits, a tax (known as a Pigouvian Tax), and straight up Command and Control (you will only pollute amount X).

The failure in selecting the "correct" one depends on issues with how the marginal-damage-to-the-environment curve looks like. Ideally, we want the tax equal to the amount of damage the individual is causing at a given level. But, if the marginal damage curve is very flat, ie an additional unit of pollution doesn't have a large magnitude in effect, then an incorrect tax amount can lead to a lot of "dead weight loss" (ie we're not at optimal levels).

This explanation is easier with graphs. Therefore, let me know if this is not very clear, and I'll whip up something appropriate.
Well put, as long as they are responsible system administrators Perl will live. Python/Ruby would never play well in an admin's toolbox.
larger commercial operations tended to be more successful than small ones. It's just that the big ones weren't very big by modern standards.

In your essay you predict that "large organizations will probably never again play the leading role they did up till the last quarter of the twentieth century". Are you suggesting that average company size will revert to a level lower than even 1900? Or are you saying that average company size may remain roughly the same, it's just that economic dynamism will come from startups, rather than corporate laboratories?
Remember python 3.0 is supposed to be an intermediate for migration release... not for production use. That's what 3.1 is for.

It's going to take ages for modules to get converted over... but most projects have been preparing for it for a while. However hopefully the migration scripts will get better over the 3.0 - 3.1 timeline.

For now I'm sticking with python 2.5 - since it's the best one considering it's far better module, and platform support.
back then in the good old days of 2002...

(not sure if i'm joking or serious. depends on one's perception of chance)
Maybe the good people aren't yet forced to look for new jobs yet. But cutbacks like Google's will encourage talented people to seek new opportunities.
This article alludes to the point but doesn't quite get all the way there but.. there have been so many egregious data leaks from British agencies lately that it doesn't seem to matter whether data "sharing" between agencies is legal or not. They'll do it anyway when they want to - most likely using "anti-terrorism" as a defense.

You do not have privacy in the UK. Your data is not safe in government hands. But.. we need to get used to it, because you aren't convincing them otherwise whether it's Labour or Conservative in power.

If we need to get behind something, it should be proportional representation so that we can actually have an effect by voting for new parties to get us out of this mess.
I'm surprised that the author didn't censor the faces of the Loopt users or at least the person who messaged him. People opt-in to the service but do they give away all their rights to privacy? Do people who opt-in agree not to publish the photos of other users?
I'm not going to try to sell you on Mercurial vs. git, mostly because I think that argument is pointless, but just so you're aware, Mercurial also supports reordering and combining patches via mq. And that's an area where I personally feel that Mercurial's method actually makes more sense than git's, though you're welcome to disagree.

[Edit: Oh, and: yes, that's a perfect example of where rebasing makes sense, and is exactly the kind of rebase operation Mercurial now fully supports, without any complicated patch wrangling.]
A clever idea but the implementation is far from perfect.

On the product page for V, a novel by Thomas Pynchon, I got a torrent link for the fifth installment of the Saw horror movie series.
I'd agree with that. They'll still be looking around their current salary bracket (or higher) though. The economy hasn't "bitten" enough yet for you to get good people at a discounted rate, and it probably won't get to that stage without some further significant crises.
People join big company if they are opportunistic and join a start-up if they are ambitious.
Since when did tech entrepreneurs/enthusiasts become experts on the economy?
Has anyone else noticed how suddenly a lot of the well known tech entrepreneurs/celebrities (dare I say) having been voicing really strong opinions about the economy?
this probably means that instead of trying to look for high profile deals, Google will instead spend the money acquiring some startups with a growth potential
http://sandbag.org.uk/ was founded by someone at Greenpeace. It's a way to help buy up all the slack in the emission market (by buying emissions permits) in Europe which has a regulatory cap.

The theory is that by buying the permits off companies they loose the ability to carelessly grow their emissions. At some point it's going to be more economic for them to curb the emissions than try to buy more permits from someone else in the market. Especially since Sandbag retires them and won't resell them at any price.
Read the first line of his description again:

"The following is the 500-mile email story in the form it originally appeared, in a post to sage-members on Sun, 24 Nov 2002."

The story appeared on the SAGE mailing list in 2002. It actually takes place between 1994 to 1997.

http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html
needs more buzzwords or it won't sell
Here's the link fwiw http://money.cnn.com/2008/05/09/technology/where_does_google...
I think print("hello world") is better because it is more consistent (mentally)
" In a lot of ways I think of it like the dynamic between Python and Ruby."

I see more of that in the contrast of how Ramaze (and, previously, Nitro) approaches things and how it is with Rails/Merb.

I've been trying to get my head around Merb, but it's still too Railszy to get me excited.

Ramaze is to Merb (and Rails) as Ruby is to Python.
You originally said that the idea that OO languages are imperative is "silly", and that:

Anyone who has worked with a pure OO language knows that there's nothing inherently imperative about the approach.

Can you provide some examples of how you might write "non-imperative" programs in a mainstream object-oriented language?

An object-oriented program is not required to be expressed in terms of a "sequence of steps" any more than is a functional program

A functional program is not a "sequence of steps"; in principle, it is just a mathematical expression that can be evaluated (via some means) to yield a value (think of a SQL query or a Prolog program).
The 120% Solution
Nice! You can find a lot of these by reading the Emacs info pages closely...never noticed that one.

My favorite "wish I had known about that sooner" part is iswitchb-mode -- it tremendously improves buffer switching, IMHO. (I usually filter the buffer list with iswitchb and then hold C-k to close buffers.) It makes the buffer switch prompt in the minibuffer behave like dmenu (http://www.suckless.org/programs/dmenu.html), for people who are already big fans of one or the other.

Also variously cool/vital: flyspell, keyboard macros, the mark and kill rings, abbrev, set-goal-column, C-x zzzzzz.
"Without Rails, we would not have all the other cool Ruby frameworks"

The author is delusional.
I also got the feeling that the first restaurant could have been world class and made huge dollars, but they just didn't try hard enough (or something). The second one sounds decidedly mediocre.
Right. Now view the same stats in Relative (which makes the trending more visible):

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=python,+perl,+ruby,+php...

The numbers say what most people know: that set of four languages contains 1 that is mature and 3 that are growing. One of them is growing fairly rapidly relative to where it was when the data set started out.
This rant comes from a narrow view point, but I wonder how much Python is going to slip on maintaining things... I've already been using the older Python 2.5 just for PIL (Python Imaging Library) to do pixel by pixel operations on images... I would use PyMedia but it only supports up to 2.3! There might be a better or newer options but I've yet to find them(nor really have the time\skill to update them), so Python 3000 is probably a no-go for me.
If you push a piece of information into the public sphere, it's public information. The only way it would be private is if they made every Loopt user sign an NDA, or something similar, about never disclosing anything they see while using the service.
$500 million is a hell of a lot for something like Twitter, even if it is stock, not cash.
You might want to check out ido mode, which is like iswitchb mode but for buffers, files, symbols, anything.

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs-en/InteractivelyDoThings
> Remember python 3.0 is supposed to be an intermediate for migration release... not for production use. That's what 3.1 is for.

From the release page (http://www.python.org/download/releases/3.0/):
This is a production release; we currently support these formats: ...

That said, I also plan to keep my core projects on 2.x for a few more months till django, ipython, debian repos etc. move to 3.x. But I do plan to play with 3.x some.
I think the other piece that's missing is that the role of corporations in society has changed drastically. I don't think they're fundamentally for the same thing as startups in the modern world. Paul's essay mentions large companies being less successful in the immediate future, but I don't think they're playing by the same rules, fundamentally.

Perhaps the closest example I can think of here is the transformation that happened in both Christianity and Islam with the rises of the Catholic church and the Caliphate, respectively. At a certain point their religious function became incidental. They were by and large instruments which brokered in power and influence.

You can see a similar pattern in governments founded through populist revolutions based on ideologies as they've transformed into world powers. Liberty, as such, has for quite a while ceased to be the primary function of the US or French governments.

In the same sense, I believe that the modern trans-national corporation has ceased to be an entity that exists primarily for the propagation of products and services: they are also brokers of power and influence. There was a first colonial phase starting at the middle of the last century where corporations became powerful political influence outside of their own home territories and since the 70s or 80s they've extended to becoming powerful forces even within the machines of the modern super-powers. Drawing another analogy, what I believe the modern renewal of small companies is effectively a reformation akin to what's been seen in religious institutions, where there's a sense of things getting back to the ideals. I feel like it's still too early in history to see if this will be a fundamentally disruptive change, or merely a blip in the growth pattern. Again, history provides some examples there for example in the Wycliffe-ian or Hussite movements, which preceded the more dramatic changes of the reformation and counter-reformation (and before those movements themselves began creeping towards instruments of power). The real reformation may still be yet to come.
But it was $500 mill giving FB a $15B valuation.. If you assume FB is worth $3B - then it was only a $100 mil offer. (Still nothing to be sneezed at)
Doesn't Python make a distinction between some_method and some_method(), where the first is a direct reference to a Method object (more or less) and the second actually invokes that method?
What makes you think there aren't?
Harvard isn't a trust fund. It is a hedge fund. One of the larger ones. The hedge fund has reported 15-20% returns for five years running.

The hedge fund also has a PR arm with a $700 million a year operating budget, whose main objective is continuing to convince the relevant politicians to continue keeping the hedge fund tax-free.

I hear the PR arm runs a school or something.
The latter. Big companies might get a bit smaller, but more because automation means you no longer need armies of workers than because of the shift in power to startups.
mmm... Anyone thought he skimped on the details a bit? I think it would be much more useful if it went in depth about the problems rather than just saying "I was too arrogant".
I remember a few years ago, Yahoo Aussie hired penetration testing IT consultant to do the "test". As many have pointed out, it's expensive. I forgot the name of the company but you can google it for "penetration test". dguido said a few cheaper solutions too.
Twitter has a great reputation in small tech circles.
My mum is on facebook.

There is still a significant difference in user bases..

On the flipside - our lovely PM has a twitter account: http://twitter.com/KevinRuddPM So perhaps this is changing..
You're right. Why just last night I read some python code and actually understood it!
Not so sure about that.

Twitter has about a million users (most of whom seem to be part of the tech crowd). Facebook has 100+ million users.

Facebook's features includes basically all of Twitter's features, and a whole lot more. And Facebook doesn't experience nearly as much downtime, despite having 100x as many users and way more functionality.
In other words, the way programming languages are marketed matters.
> It's going to take ages for modules to get converted over...

You underestimate the power of the ... wait a sec. :)

Anyway, there's broad support and excitement in the community about this release. I think you'll see modules being updated more quickly than you suspect.
I'll miss __coerce__. :(
Um, VB and Delphi are more popular in the general world. The world you're interested in is but a niche.
Success: The Difference Between What You’re Willing to Do and What You Have to Do
I think this would help focus the discussion: Can you give me an example of any specific sentence or passage in the essay that you believe is false?
This seems fundamentally different from what VCSs are usually designed for, and another category of tool may handle the problem better. Rsync might be a good start.
Will lawyers be the next victims of the Internet?
The Python version of the CPAN is called ["PyPI"](http://pypi.python.org/pypi). It was formerly called the "Cheeseshop".

From the PyPI front page: "There are currently 5256 packages here." According to cpan.org, the CPAN is up to "14749 modules" -- dunno how many distributions that makes though.