skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Poll: Will Python ever lose the GIL?
The standard Python interpreter has a global interpreter lock (GIL) that prevents multithreaded parallel programming of the style you find in most programming languages. People have tried to remove this restriction, but failed because all the resulting lock acquisition is too slow. Will the GIL ever be removed?
No, and it doesn't matter.
No, and it is a serious problem.
Yeah, I'll add load-testing to my to do in releasing web frameworks.

But how ever solid one might think one's app is, there's no reason not to make one's front page static or at least have apache cache it.
everyone here wondering how a programmer can get in this frame of my mind has not been working for very long or has never worked for a lousy employer.
I don't think that's a good idea. Yahoo has a problem that it's divisions seem to be too diverse and unintegrated. Buying even more will lead to a further lack of focus. Purchasing several web 2.0 apps will lead to a fragmentation in the attention span of the people managing these properties. You also need to allocate engineers to develop each item.

What Yahoo should do is own several large sites, and monetize them across a single integrated brand per site. For example, flickr and the Yahoo portal are two large brands.
Thanks Adam Smith. This is a great talk.
I guess once you make enough money you can capitalize however you want. Like Jerry Yang sending all-lowercase emails.
Yes it has, very much so! It's funny that you say this because all people I've been telling about it have been shaking their heads in disbelief. I was starting to think I'm insane or something.
GMU's a decent school. So the PhD candidate and his research partner/associate professor didn't perceive that this research would have any broader implications? Hello.
A few months ago I splurged on a fountain pen that met all my needs (the sleek black lamy studio), and I've never looked back since.
CRI didn't engineer Black Sunday, but their work is the reason there hasn't needed to be a second Black Sunday.
Doesn't quite work for in-class exams where you can't type stuff up.
On both wikip and google, everything finally seem to point to this paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17400186
Maybe it's an unconscious slip about his MicroSoft member.
You can parse Perl with PPI (look at your nearest CPAN mirror).
OK - done that ...

http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/PaulGrahamEssaysRanking.html?Y...
This is the most over-used joke I've ever seen as a developer. It's tired and not funny anymore.

If you're really sick of people asking you what to do, then your ability to network and see past their faults is not where it should be.

Want success? Don't be a jerk.
You need to maintain readability (whitespaces) in Python, but in Perl you can do this automatically with perltidy.
Let me be the first to say, "sources please". Adult neurogenesis in humans is largely speculative, which leads me to think you're confusing it with neuroplasticity. Also, mood is regulated by neurotransmitters, especially serotonin. If neurogenesis is involved, that would be news to me.

That said, your steps are either harmless or beneficial, so I don't see a problem with this "experiment".
It's 14793 distributions and x3 modules.
In case you can't play anything at ustream, it's because they're serving their FLVs on non-standard ports.
"But, I think the real problem you have with rubygems is that you don't want to learn another package management system. I really don't think the rubygems devs can do anything to remedy that problem."

You don't think the RubyGems devs can use the normal packaging system, and hence get rid of these odd requirements? Why not?
If you look at TIOBE - they use bad query. Look at http://lui.arbingersys.com/ and http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?usage_statisti... for Perl programming and jobs usage statistics.
I personally think my handwriting sucks. But lots of other people tell me that it's actually pretty good. I think thats just because I tend to write big whenever possible - it's impossible to read my handwriting when i write small.
URLs are malformed. Otherwise, nice. When you say it's "similar" to PageRank on your webpage, what do you mean?
Iraqi Journalist Throws Shoes at George Bush
This story is going from bad to worse. The site was up again and I made it to page 5 looking for code examples (I was pretty interested to see some Haskell). The closest I found was a shell call for find. Page 6, "Server Error". The site is down again.

So yeah, load test and do whatever it takes to ensure you're ready for traffic.
I have to agree, and I am going to do my best to resolve this issue.

Meanwhile I restarted the server and it's running again.
Cool! Keep us updated, please!
Ask YC: Advisors
Any comments on the relationship between startups and advisors?

More of a conversation starter than a list of specific questions, but issues like:

What is the norm in terms of compensation, frequency of meetings, etc? What do you look for in an advisor?
Just wanted to say thanks. Similar issues years ago were sorted by cpam2rpm years and the Java Packaging Project. I'd love to have proper packages for Gems.
You might get some ideas from the Lua syntax (http://lua-users.org/wiki/SampleCode). It's a nice compromise between the Python and C syntaxes; despite not having syntactically-significant whitespace, it tends to look about as clear as Python, IMHO.

You can definitely improve upon it, though -- the syntax for anonymous functions is a bit cumbersome, in particular. The Lua syntax was deliberately kept tiny to reduce the memory footprint on embedded systems, so some things like switch/case statements are missing, but your language likely won't have the same constraint.

Also, you might want to get an interpreter working 100% first before writing the compiler, as it will be easier to make changes to smooth out emergent quirks in the language. Just a suggestion.
If you want to do something about the problem I highly recommend:

"Write Now" by Barbara Getty and Inga Dubay [1]

It is a workbook-style introduction to "italic" handwriting. I worked through it a few years ago and to this day my handwriting is still legible. (It was not prior; the learning process was triggered by the realization that consistently I could not read my own handwriting.)

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Write-Now-Complete-Program-Handwriting...
Or it's intentional and he's commenting on how they've been too soft in the marketplace these last few years.
That's valid python.
This is reaching at best. To quote Peter Lynch, I don't think "de-worsification" is a viable strategy for Yahoo.
Why would you disallow macros in the Lisp style?
This will be the first time I'm doing load testing so gimme some time to get it right :)
Awesome!

One small thing, it looks like you included the RSS link from the bottom of the page in the list of essays.
Poster is correct -- this article is complete BS. The steps mentioned are of course great to do and would increase bloodflow to the brain (which has definite positive effects). But, saying that the steps increase neurogenesis (and even speculating that this is a good thing) is completely unproven.
I think it's simply because Indians are more willing to pad their resumes, in an attempt to beat the system.
Having programmed in both Python and Ruby, I've come to appreciate Ruby's combination of clean syntax (no semicolons or curly braces) with a required end keyword (making it suitable as an embedded template language, among other things). Python only has the first, and it's (slightly) the poorer for it.
Re malformed - fixed.

I've just pulled the description from WikiPedia, implemented pretty much that, and that's what I did.

In essence, each page gets set to 1.0. Then distribute 80% of that down each outgoing link, and 20% to everyone equally. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I think that's pretty much the algorithm. Pages pointed to by pages with lots of juice get lots of juice. Pages pointed to by no one, or only pages with little juice, get little juice. It's linear algebra thought of as network flow.

Well, that's what I did.
I am a person born in Bangalore and currently live in Bangalore. First i want to make this clear, Bangalore is not a threat to Silicon Valley or any Technology hub. With the way things are going on here, i would say pretty soon, it won't be a threat to anyone's job either.

Most of the top-tier companies are not actually technology companies but intermediateries between $5 Software or Electronics Engineers, $7 MBA's and Clients in Developed Countries. If these companies existed in Ancient Egypt, they would be in the business of supplying slaves to build Pyramids. There are hardly any Technology companies here which are actually in the business of creating and branding products. Most of them are sweatshops where you can buy a Fresh Engineer whose expertise is Java, C, C++, VB, Python, Ruby ( add languages as you hear them is the motto here).
Thanks, think I got it -- the passive elements can't duplicate a memristor, but transistors plus some passive elements can.
From what I understand, some games companies have the hopes of selling the engine separately from the game (e.g. Doom, Unreal, etc).
Re RSS: Hmm. Oh well, Wabi Sabi.
I imagine when interacting with foreign committees and governments, Obama would use a symbol of the United States such as the flag, rather then his own personal logo.
"Chronic Antidepressant Treatment Increases Neurogenesis in Adult Rat Hippocampus" is a good start: http://www.neuroscience.org/cgi/content/abstract/20/24/9104
tremendously
Gotta love those pencils and their undo support :)
Keep in mind that part of 'scaling down' (making stuff accessible to new users) is that new users are the ones most likely to use lame or inappropriate editors. Stuff like Java and Lisp need more in terms of editors because of verbosity, and sorting through the parens, respectively.
Java Developer
I am a Java developer working in the Bay Area and was planning to move to Boston. Any idea how the opportunities are in Boston, any technology companies present who work in java?
Put it all on one line then! :) I just grepped some of my C/C++ code and my one-liners consistently look like this:

virtual const std::string& getCommand() const throw() { return m_command ; }
Bad Times For BitTorrent: $17 M Financing Undone, Valuation Plummets
How much can you really make as an IPhone Developer?
LeveragingIdeas Gift Guide for Entrepreneurs and Startups 2008
Did you found any place where they have nice models of letters to get some inspiration and pick the ones I like? I just did a quick search but did not found any satisfying results yet.
Latent semantic analysis can be used to measure the similarity of two documents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis

I found examples in ruby and python in this blog, which is unfortunately down just at the moment
http://blog.josephwilk.net/ruby/latent-semantic-analysis-in-...
"... The key message of the article though is correct. A lot of immigrants (working in the IT domain) are coming back, surely not because they see Bangalore as a hub for innovation, but rather it gives them a good opportunity to settle back in their motherland without compromising too much on the other things in life ..."

Then again I bet the US Hardware industry didn't see Taiwan as a real threat as smart Taiwanese, graduates of US Universities who spent time working in the US Hardware industry came home and started companies?
It's extremely variable.

An advisor could give you business advice or make introductions or review your code or discuss product strategy. You could meet with them every week or every month or twice a year, or everyday while your company is getting started.

The more they give you, the more compensation they get. An advisor might get .1% per year of service (in equity), or as much as several percent of the company.
Its original name was "Micro-Soft", IIRC. Maybe Mark has just been around long enough to remember when the capital "S" was correct. (In his defense, he does get the lower-case "b" right in "Facebook", which many people capitalize erroneously.)
no. my handwriting has always sucked.
Note that the article is from 2003.
The best answer isn't necessarily the right answer. You should consider which style is closest to your likely users and try to appeal to them.

If your users are independent web developers then python-style would make sense. If you are aiming at more corporate-comfortable programmers, braces are de rigeur.
For once a nugget or real research amidst marketing voodoo. Good stuff.
Seadragon Goes Mobile
Thanks to you who have already visited the site. There is an (over)abundance of information available to better equip you to make an informed decision on the degree of her guilt.
I said "page rank", not "PageRank". When you perform a web search, you get a _ranked_ list of pages...
Same with me. One line of mine would take up space in which others would write 2 lines. I even have a lecturer who identifies me by my big letters.

When I write patiently and big, it looks neat. And when I write small, it looks Times New Roman font gone wrong. :D

Once when delivering a letter to a person, I handed it over to his assistant and he said "you've got really good letters". And everytime I want to write neatly I think of that incident. Coz he's the only in my entire life who said my handwriting is good. :)
Thanks for your suggestions. Yes, I checked Lua of course, it's neat, but as I said elsewhere, the if ... end syntax is not considered because I find it slightly less appealing than C and Python.

As for interpreter vs. compiler, I thought about this. One approach is to build a simple VM-based system with the entire language infrastructure in place (fundamental types, minimal standard library), which is not much harder than to write an interpreter with the same infrastructure. Then start fine-tuning the VM itself and possibly thinking about the JIC. The original compiler code, which is not the biggest part of your system, is left almost intact in this case.

As opposed to the "interpreter - first" approach, where you will be throwing away some significant portions of your code once you start writing the real compiler. I thought it would be a waste of time. Interpreters and compilers are too different in almost every respect.
http://www.ilandinternet.com/

Resells level3 space on the cheap. Had great experiences with them in Boston, but they have data centers all over.
Stupidity is not binary.
Lua actually has a very odd syntax in that statements don't have to be separated by any particular whitespace.

x = 1
y = 2

and

x = 1; y = 2

and

x = 1 y = 2

are all equivalent.

I actually don't mind this. I've never encountered a situation where this style makes the meaning of the code undecidable.
An airport-inspired puzzle from Terence Tao
I guess the point I was trying to make was this: 99.99% of the code running on "web 2.0 server" somewhere in California is GPL/LGPL stuff, good part of which originates from Europe. Therefore it's very foolish of us to even hint that "Europeans are lazy" or inferior in any way. Google, Yahoo and Sun might not be from Europe, but Linus, Guido, DHH and thousands less famous are.

Moreover, I feel SV entrepreneurs should be far more polite and humble because they have a terrible track record of returning the favor: where is scribbd's iPaper's code? We all know it's built on top of OO, why can't OO contributors host their own Office docs on their own personal servers using iPaper from scribbd?
The thing I've always hated about eggs is that invariably something that uses an egg won't have the permissions to write to the default egg cache. It has gotten to the point now that if I know something is going to install an egg, I just do setup.py build and copy the build folder into site-packages. It's just not worth the annoyance for what is, at least as far as I can tell, no gain.

(Edit: read cache)
Interestingly though, those who used Python extensively in web apps aren't very happy with it, at least because of the problem of mixing indentations and markup - see discussions above. On the other hand, Python is successfully making it into the corporate world, which is obvious from job boards. Which is probably because Python's modularity and clean OO-ness plays well with the hierarchical culture of commercial vendors.

No, this is a tough question. I still don't know.
Cached version: http://is.gd/bFtu
this article is complete BS [...] completely unproven

That's a little harsh. Not everything unproven is BS.

I didn't get the impression that the author was "saying that the steps increase neurogenesis". What he said was that there are findings to that effect about rats, and that he was "hopeful that these results also apply to humans". The main point is that he's curious and wants to try something. That experimental spirit deserves the label "scientific" more than your blanket judgmentalness does.

Incidentally, it wasn't too long ago that people in the name of "science" were stomping all over anyone who dared to suggest that "neurogenesis" might even exist. So I find your comment ironic.

Edit: the real problem with the proposed experiment is that its title is misleading, since it includes no way to measure anything about neurogenesis.
Yeah, that works for really short methods, but for anything even a little more complex you're just replacing vertical scrolling with horizontal scrolling.
My handwriting is nearly illegible, even to me. I think the main problem is that I try to make writing as efficient and fast as typing which results in blobs that don't necessarily look like words. I still prototype stuff on paper, but if I haven't looked at a diagram in a while I sometimes have to guess as to what I wrote.

That being said, I have the ability to provide very nice handwriting, but it requires an obscene amount of time and it hurts my hand after a while.
No, it was always terrible.
PasswordSafe (Password Gorilla for Linux/Mac users) is a nice option for password management (which I'm sure you've seen and decided against). But the Truecrypt volume sync works very well. I've been keeping a PasswordSafe archive along with the Truecrypt volume across Linux, Windows, and Mac.
I thought of doing something similar for the global financial system. I'm just not sure how reliable the information would be, or how to go about getting it.
Well, what's their business model?

BitTorrent DNA seems like an awesome idea - use individuals computers as a content delivery network to reduce bandwidth on your servers. However, it requires users to install a client program on their computer which means most people won't be able to use it.

And, like BitTorrent itself, what's stopping someone else from just reimplementing it and loosing them their profit?

I'm not saying that they don't make something of value. It's just that they don't monetize it well.
Yes, neurogenesis goes against everything we thought was happening. That's why it's exciting.

http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/10/the_function_of_new_c...

One of the findings is antidepressants possibly increase neurogenesis, but the new growth takes some time thereby explaining the delay between starting on the medication and seeing results.
It's my one major gripe with an almost perfect language: I spend so much of my time fighting round this problem it is silly :(
It measures some combination of how general an essay is, how early it was written (I usually add these links when I first write something, so most links are only backward in time), how much I like it, and sheer randomness (at least half the time I don't bother to add crosslinks).

Larger numbers of outgoing links probably don't imply recycling. If anything it's a sign I think an essay is good and will get lots of readers, so it's worth trying to spread that traffic around. (These predictions are often wrong, though. I find it practically impossible to guess which essays will get lots of traffic.)
Yes, the original papers indicate it was in lisp. "Why AM appears to work" suggested that a lot of the reason math was a good domain for discovery was just that lisp is well-suited to the domain. And Eurisko could modify heuristics expressed as s-expressions.

People have asked him, but I'm not aware of Lenat ever commenting on the source code. Cycorp is substantially funded by DARPA, and I wouldn't be surprised if Eurisko is part of its IP now.

Feel free to email me to take this offline.
The main Lua book points out that such code is "ugly, but valid", and leaves it at that. It seems to me that "x, y = 1, 2" would be cleaner, if someone were determined to make it a one-liner.
A Few Corrections To “On Python Packaging”
Mumbai terrorists used Google Earth, had tech edge over police
Ah okay. Try Tsung, the Grinder, or JMeter if you have extra machines. For less heavy-duty testing try httperf. Siege and Apache bench are okay for basic testing. And always use a separate machine to generate load.
Watch boxing fights online
Short version: don't reinvent the wheel. And, going back to an analogous issue in the Ruby world mentioned by the author, I hope RubyGems team will finally accept the reality we live in and fix that little "parallel dimension" they created.
oh jesus between allthingsD, valleywag, blodget and blogmaverick, they've saved yahoo twenty times in the last month in various blog posts. give it up folks, google won. but if its still an obsession, round up some of the thousands of former y's around the bay area and just build the company you keep blogging about building.
4 weeks holiday / year + stats. Generally normal office hours (ie 40 hour week) are encouraged though depends on company and role, making friends with coworkers is normal, Friday drinks is standard possibly couple of beers provided at the office or head to a local together. I don't work weekends or evenings or work from home (ever) but you could find companies that encourage this workstyle if you want. Previous job it was totally acceptable to come to the office in shorts, t-shirt and jandles but some places have higher dress standards, now I just wear casual trousers and a shirt with buttons + collar.

Had a couple of trips to San Francisco last year (previous job @ startup), I prefer the balance in NZ as a long term lifestyle, though had a great time in SF too. I just think the work/life culture there is a little shortsighted, in NZ there is more emphasis on family & out of hours life. This is in Christchurch where I've worked for 1 small and 1 medium sized company since graduating.
Here are the ones that get the most traffic, with daily page views:

1760 Stuff
770 What You'll Wish You'd Known
403 How to Start a Startup
365 Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy
349 Why Nerds are Unpopular
294 How to Do what You Love
274 Web 2.0
247 Great Hackers
207 How to Make Wealth
187 Lies We Tell Kids
You can still work with the rest of the digits in the percentage (eg 1.1% should be more likely than 1.9%), I imagine the problem isn't the numbers themselves but the lack of a decent sized sample. You only get 12 numbers for a year and that's plenty of time to lose your shirt to a con man who has your money!
I think he brings up a very good point about acquisitions and yahoo. However, many questions need to be answered before yahoo can move forward with any sort of acquisition based strategy. Does yahoo have the cash to buy up relevant companies that will help them in the long run? Will these companies even want yahoo stock if offered? What does yahoo's board think about this?

Right now it seems that yahoo is dealing with the fallout from all those layoffs and finding a new CEO. As good a strategy as it might be, I don't see yahoo rapidly acquiring companies right now or even in the near future.
This article reminded me of something I read on GigaOm back in 2005:

"In the ephemeral world of digital content, Bit Torrent is as close to a sure thing, you can get."

http://gigaom.com/2005/08/11/bittorrent-seeded-now-waits-for...
Bram is the "chief scientist". Interesting title. Why not "CTO"?
SBCL: faster generic arithmetic (clever hack borrowed from Factor)
Merging different data sources and applying transformations in SSIS
Good article