skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They should use all languages and pick that one that is best for the job.

That's certainly a correct answer, but it's correct because it's almost tautological. 'The language that I like the most is the one that's best [for what I want to do]'. The issue is that, in this question, 'favorite' is a bit vague, and the task isn't specified. (This is why I have a problem choosing 'favorites'.)

Despite that, in this situation, I interpret it to mean 'What [general-purpose] language has the best design?' Theoretically, a perfectly-designed language would be designed in such a way that it has an absolute advantage over all other languages for every type of task.

Given that definition, it follows naturally that I would choose Lisp - it's actually not my strongest language, but even a novice Lisper can see that Lisp is both as minimal as possible and yet as powerful as possible . Since it's a shapeshifter of sorts, it can adapt itself perfectly to any setting.

The drawbacks with Lisp (in my view) have nothing to do with the design of the language itself, but rather the environment. The libraries of languages like Perl and Python are much larger, by sheer fact that the community is larger. Lisp is cross-platform, but the installation (quicklisp aside) is still messier than Ruby's gem-based packaging or Python's eggs. And lastly, because most people don't learn functional programming as their first step, it's got a learning curve.

But none of those are problems with the language itself - at least not the design of the language. (I'm assuming here that we're dealing with high-level languages - it wouldn't really make sense to compare x86 assembly to Python - if you're writing assembly, you probably have a very good reason, and Python isn't even on the table).

So in the end, your answer to this all determines on how you interpret the question, so it's fun to see what the results are... just don't try and compare them directly - I think anybody who interpreted the question the way I did would probably choose Lisp, but it's clear from the comments that many other people interpret this a different way.

(Thankfully HN is good at avoiding flamewars, but I'm sure everyone here has seen enough useless 'debate' of this same topic on other forums to understand why I mention it!)
If you don't mind my asking, as a Python person, how did you learn Clojure?

I'm mostly programming in Python and JavaScript today, and I want to learn Clojure, but I keep seeing these very strange talks. I don't know how to articulate it, really. My best metaphor is, it feels a little like I wanted to go out and learn about Catholicism and they said, "oh, that's easy, we'll just have you sit in on a bunch of confessions and you'll figure it out in no time." People explain why they made certain language decisions and I (as yet) lack any of the background needed to know what the hell they're going on about.
I can't wait until Facebook issues a press release instructing people to not log in as their parents when said parents are unable to change their profile picture or other basic tasks. That is such a bother.
List all the quality freelance job sites you know.
Let's build a comprehensive list that can be bookmarked and updated.

Don't post crappy sites like freelancers.com, guru.com, elance, or oDesk or the others you see on the Freelance Switch Monster List. While those are good for some jobs, they are NOT good for higher quality, bigger budget jobs.

I mean good ones, like the 37Signals job board (but that is mostly for full-time positions).

I am sure they exist somewhere and it would be good if we could collate them.
Is it just me or does anyone else think all the doctors need is a bug tracking tool ? Preferably something that can be used from a smart phone / tablet via an app ?
A good example of the immense unanticipated costs of regulations, in this case patient privacy regulation.
That's a good one, I'll keep that in mind. (I'm not just cribbing, I ran into a real world situation that just screamed non-nullable objects).
SQL isn't really general purpose programming language, it's hard to call it `programming' language at all. It doesn't really feel comparable to the other ones.

Also Lisps could be merged into single entry since all shell languages are one.
Yeah, C# tuples are a pretty glaring hack in an otherwise great, evolving language.
From Sears to Britannica, creative destruction rewards change
I will start:

http://www.authenticjobs.com/

I am not affiliated with them, but I did get a good job lead from them.
Monorail.js - MVC web framework for Node.js
Okay, so it's not really any better than the US system.

Incidentally, in the 24 hours after I posted that, they did in fact finally release a response to that petition. It was long after the deadline that they promise for petitions that reach the threshold, and it wasn't much more than a justification of what they already do, but at this point I doubt anybody was expecting anything more.
If Coffeescript is on here, Moonscript should be added too: https://github.com/leafo/moonscript
They are getting the credentials by asking the potential employee for them. So it's not without authorization.

Even if they wanted to build a case of coercion or duress they would need the cooperation of the employee to do this. And most importantly what is the specific harm done to facebook by this individual action? If I give you my facebook credentials and you login what damage has been done (to facebook in my specific case)?

If I was the opposing attorney I would raise the issue of whether they police and take action when people share their passwords in other cases. My guess is they have never taken action on something like this in the past.

And as far as changing their TOS what are they going to say? We forbid you from sharing your password with an employer (some might want to do this for some reason) or we forbid you to share with anyone? And if that is the case they have to police all sharing of passwords which, with hundreds of millions of users is simply not going to happen.
"Happy customers beat the crap out of any marketing team you could hire..."

You should beat the crap out of your marketing team if they aren't bringing you happy customers.
Heh you know its gonna be big, all sorts of work being done for a tablet that doesnt have an official release date yet :D
You're getting it wrong I think. I work in healthcare IT and many EMRs are getting on the mobile bandwagon and building out mobile clients that let you do this.

Additionally, hospitals require doctors to put in diagnosis / treatment notes into EMRs which is usually done by transcribing service that the doctors can call or by sitting at a computer and typing it out. Although this process is worse than doing it over a mobile client, healthcare IT is not in the dark ages as people would have you believe.
I recommend you learn either python, java, or c++. In fact learn all three you will be an elite programmer (:
I Love C, PHP. I also worked on Python long back during GSOC but did not get a chance to work on Python projects later. And after I started working on frontend, I have been a sucker for Javascript ever since!
Airy: Python websocket application framework
"When one's core beliefs have no basis in logic or objective reality, it's simple to maintain consistency. All that's needed is the invention of some new concept to explain the discrepancy."

Like empiricism.
Why can't you code it for chrome and have the computer have multiple browsers on it?
How OMGPOP scaled to 36 Million Users in Three Weeks
4clojure.com was very helpful for me, as was this: http://jkkramer.wordpress.com/2011/03/29/clojure-python-side...
What kind of problems. Could you elaborate a bit please?
The shards that are used in a Solr query are specified at runtime (you pass a list of shard URLs as part of the search query string) so adding new shards on the fly should Just Work.
I think some of us need a bit of a primer on trademarks.

A trademark does not restrict arbitrary use of a term, but only uses that conflict with available product. Off the top of my head, consider Nestle's (former) trademark for "tollhouse". This referred to the cookie. You could not legally sell your own cookies and call them "tollhouse cookies". But you could still sell, say, a booth for collecting highway tolls, and call it a "tollhouse".

So, no Facebook is not claiming complete ownership of the word "book" -- or, if they are, then they're wrong. They are claiming that you can't use it to conflict with their usage of it. So sell some software for recording purchases, and call it "checkbook", and you're fine. But make a social website called "friendbook" without their permission, and you'll get sued. You'll lose, too; and that is not a bad thing.

P.S. The law already restricts usage of trademarks. Adding this to their license, as far as I know, changes nothing.

Disclaimer: IANAL. Input from actual lawyers would be good.
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AWK. When I get to use it, that is. It's not right for most problems, but when it is, it's a pleasure to use.
Hi, fellow UK hospital doc so fully understand the frustrations with NHS IT. I suspect problems stem from the fact that purchasing decisions are generally made by individuals (management and senior hospital docs) other than those that use the systems (in the main junior hospital docs). The other issue is that systems are implemented to reflect the way that diseases and patients should behave but there are always edge cases that do not fit into these nice boxes. Striking a balance between free-form data input, which does not add much compared to conventional paper notes, and forcing patient data into categories and drop-down boxes is a a real challenge. The other thing that is often forgotten is the amount of clinician effort required for a system. If it takes too long or is too complicated accurate data will simply not be entered in the absence of draconian sanctions from above. Anyway there is clearly plenty of room for improvement so I wish you the best of luck!
توبة فضل شاكر
Why we chose Mongo + Hypertable
Installing Obtvse on Heroku
I was not expecting Python to be getting near as many votes as Ruby.

It is my favorite language simply because the pseudocode I write on whiteboards is basically Python. Strangely, it has been since well before I really started using it regularly.
Which targets are you using?

Wouldn't be awkward to use Haxe for a project that employed language specific APIs? It seems like the sweet spot would be using it to write basic libraries that had no external dependencies.
What does this mean about fonts like Helvetica? Are they typically protected by design patents? If not, could someone take a bitmap screenshot of Helvetica, product a font from it, and distribute that font?
No. I tried it but it fails in two ways:

1) all the libraries are it takes advantage of are written in Java and this doesn't fit the closure style of coding at all.

2) the available tools just suck. Sorry, but without autocompletion the time it takes to write something balloons way, way too high.

I guess 2 would have been less of an issue 20 years ago -- back then most of the IDEs that we use today did exist -- but it is not 20 years ago. It is now.
Awesome indie game coder makes his own jaw-dropping tools
The JOBS Act explained
That's the right attitude. Each popular language has its strengths and shortcomings. As long as you enjoy it and get the job done, it's a good language. What I can't stand are people dissing other languages to make their language look good. It's like they have to justify their insecure choice of their language by bringing down the others.

As for Perl, I used to hate Perl for its many arcane ways of doing the same thing, but I then forced myself to do some Perl scripts at a job and it's not too bad. It got the jobs done. Since then I've used Perl for many quick scripts.
Being a little offtopic, but I have a personal pet peeve with ASP.NET MVC ... since they bothered to release it as open-source, why are they keeping Razor as a binary blob? Shit, why are they keeping ASP.NET itself as closed source?

This is something that always bothered me about Microsoft-related stuff. Right now I'm using Python and Django for web development. I'm also using Ruby on Rails for a side project. Having access to the source code is vital for me as I've become accustomed to reading a lot of source code. And reading source-code for lack of better documentation is sweet, but then I went further and for instance I also copy/pasted a lot of snippets straight from Django's source code, or worked-around bugs by patching components.

That's why I consider open-source to be superior, regardless of all the polish that Microsoft is able to apply to their products. I'm a software developer, not your average user. Just as a sports-car racer would find unacceptable the lack of access to the internals of her own car, I find unacceptable the lack of source-code that I can read, modify and distribute.
There's nothing terribly special about the application, other than the fact that it now exists. Dustin had a problem and solved it. That the solution is relatively easy to copy doesn't change that it went from an unsolved problem to a solved problem.

Do I have the same problem? No. Do most of HN's users? Probably not. Do I agree with his approach on sharing things? Not particularly, but he wrote the code and came up with the design, and is entitled to do whatever he'd like with that. To me, this clone comes across as a personal attack trying to trivialize someone's work. If it added new functionality, improved upon flaws, or in some way was actually different I'd think otherwise, but I click through and read "hey, I can code too, give me karmaaaaaaa!"

I definitely dislike Curtis' attitude on a lot of things, but he has a lot of insightful things to say (and plenty of inciteful things, too). I try and take the personal stuff out of it - regardless of how I feel about him, I may or may not find the posts interesting, but from what I've read they appear to be pretty accurate and well-reasoned.

If someone wants to make it personal, I can't stop them. But I'd much rather see it presented as "Curtis made XYZ but didn't let everyone in. I made a copy that the rest of the world can use." rather than "Curtis is a jerk for not letting everyone in, and his work is such a joke that it only took me half a day to copy it"
JavaScript protocol based polymorphism inspired by Clojure protocols
Writing C# code in Visual Studio feels almost like telepathy. Intellisense is so good that, it nearly writes 30-40% of total code.
How do you show your love of programming?
Closure compiler is also very useful for making JS a bit more safe and fast

https://developers.google.com/closure/compiler/
Oh, I know, and it is much better. But the whole stack is still heavy- compare setting up an ASP.NET MVC site and IIS to node.js's "http.createServer()". There's no comparison.
Oh ok well that's reassuring because those are three languages I have toyed around with in the past. From a step one scenario (where I consider myself to be), do you have any recommended learning resources?
tools are like 16 minutes in
Test will predict a heart attack within three weeks
F#

It's really fun to use; a bit like Python but with the benefit of static typing.
Thanks for the info. Seriously I should have said "almost nobody" in the first place. In fact I thought I had said that :)

I didn't know nfshost was doing it. From what I see, they're probably using FreeBSD jails in this case, which is nice if they are.

Anyways, we have to agree that this space is largely unexplored. I never thought there was a need for this kind of service, but just after reading the ZeroVM pages I think it's a very good idea. With a "little" more initial effort, it would enable writing systems in a very interesting way: self-healing (when the other end has failed, make an API call to provision another copy of it), self-provisioning (when traffic is high, make an API call to provision another copy of a worker), etc. Of course we can already do this already, it would just be more natural, and if you combine this with the idea of Mobile Agents, then the cloud suddenly becomes much "cloudier".
Craftsmanship is a broader concept than hand-crafted, and covers the looking classy/nice aesthetic/lot of design work you mentioned.
BATS Cancels Its IPO After a Day of Glitches
FYI, canned reddit-esque responses don't go over too well here.
Start with Richard Buckland's lectures on Computer Science on YouTube.

~50 1-2 hour lectures starting from machine code all the way up to software engineering, told by a genial, honest, and passionate man with a likable accent.

Not only will you want to continually keep watching them (because they are compelling), but you will probably watch some of them more than once (because they cover the fundamentals in a way that you really only get in a classroom).
Facebook's statement doesn't actually say they'll sue employers as employers. It says they'll initiate legal action "where appropriate", "including by shutting down applications that abuse their privileges." That sounds more like shutting down an app publisher that was collecting employee logins in order to gain access to social graph data, for instance. Grounds to sue an employer who wasn't a Facebook API user would be pretty tenuous at best.
Awesome job. Thanks so much for making it open source.
One small thing though: escape to edit doesn't work in Safari.
'Are those "X for Y" not allowed on HN?

This isn't a case of X for Y. They both do X, but one is language specific, it seems.

When the story hit, I immediately thought it was a Codecademy product and was surprised to find a price tag for the opportunity to move forward within the course.
Moonscript (voted for Coffeescript and Lua). It's like Coffeescript for Lua instead of JavaScript, which is great of you need a fast and concise language to embed in another application (compiling the standard lua interpreter for a platform consists mostly of dragging the source to your IDE and compiling). ( http://moonscript.org/ )

I also love OCaml (and miss it's static inferred typing and pattern matching everywhere else), but it's ecosystem has never fit with what I'm working on outside of coursework in it.
The only thing I disagree with is the limiting mindset of who your addressable market is... A better formula would be deciding who you WANT your addressable market to be, and finding a way to reach them.

For example, a local cafe might appear to be limited by geography, but could just as easily build a reputation beyond their borders and become the Omaha Steaks of Coffee.

I think you subtly made the point that things like making your product and experience remarkable, will expand your addressable market, but I think it is important for businesses and startups to realize that "Their Market" could be by design, and doesn't have to limited to the apparent cards they were dealt.

In fact, any marketer worth their salt should be able to find any consumer or target market no matter how big or small, no matter where they are and no matter the barriers and limitations and find a way to engage them.
A python script to download lectures from Coursera.org
Help you to download lectures (videos and slides) from Coursera.org, a free online education website which provides free Stanford, UCB, and UM courses.
"imagine you woke up tomorrow and there was no google". So you mean there would be no analytics (something gizmodo probably uses), no gmail, no google docs, no code.google.com and on top of it I would have to use Bing! That seems like apocalypse to me.

Having a single privacy policy is not that bad. Surely, we need to be wary of google overreaching, but the world is still better off with google than without it.
If it where me and I where starting out I would get an Arduino board and a book on C/C++ development for Arduino. The reason I would do this is because it is very much like the early days of PC development where you are closer to the hardware and the feedback loop is quick, it also cuts away the layers and layers of stuff that can be distracting in a less focused segment. While working through learning to develop on the Arduino I would start reading foundational theory books as the theory will start to click with what you are doing. From there once I had a good grasp of C/C++ and what is going on in the hardware, I would learn a Lisp and start reading the deeper theory books on the various algorithms and start implementing those algorithms in Lisp. To me this will give you the most well rounded foundation in CS that you can get, you will learn two major branches of languages and you will be close to hardware in the beginning.
Ask HN: Why Isn't My Average Calculated?
When I click on my name it tells me how much karma I have but not my average. Why is that?
That hasn't been a problem for me personally, but I see where you're coming from.

For pure debugging purposes, have you tried using a decompiler? For reasonably well-written (and not obfuscated, naturally) code, the decompiler output is remarkably clear.
Yes, I found when I was at university that it was very difficult to take on a personal project and still be motivated to do my school work.

I would start hacking on something and not notice the time going by, so I would end up having to do assignments the day before. This was easy to begin with since the course starts easy but after a while becomes impossible.

The only way I can see it being possible would either be to have super high intelligence and productivity or military level discipline.

That's why I am amazed to hear of people who start whole companies whilst still getting top grades.
Mercury (http://www.mercury.csse.unimelb.edu.au/), a strongly-typed, fast, relative of Prolog.
I am verymuch surprised that there are over 2x JavaScript votes than Java or C++
Python Buildpack for Heroku via shocco
Article includes a nice TL;DR

Thursday, @ 7:30 p.m. BATS prices its IPO at $16 a share, the low end of expected range. 6.3 million shares are priced.

Friday, 10:45 a.m.: BATS trading begins with trades occurring at BATS Exchange at $15:25, and seconds later trading stops due to technical issues.

10:48 a.m.: BATS says it is "investigating system issues" in all stock symbols between A and BFZZZ.

10:57: A trade on BATS in Apple shares sends stock falling 9.4% to $542.80. Trading halted.

11:02: Apple shares resume trading.

11:07: BATS declares "self help," an industry term meaning the exchange is having problems and other exchanges can stop routing orders to it.

11:14: BATS reopens trading of its stock and 1.2 million shares are executed at $15.25.

11:14: BATS shares route to Nasdaq and in seconds crash to pennies.

11:14: BATS shares halted.

11:53: BATS resolved issues regarding stocks with symbols A through BFZZZ.

11:55: "Self help" is revoked.

12:21 p.m.: BATS says it is cancelling all open orders in impacted stocks, and that trading would reopen for them at 12:50 p.m. It also says a "resume time" for its shares would be "communicated shortly."

12:41: BATS says it will restart trading of its shares at 1:20 p.m.

1:03: BATS says it will be "further delaying" trading of its stock.

3:10: BATS says its shares won't trade Friday.

3:42: BATS withdraws IPO.
You are correct that we both teach programming and hence the blog post. That said, we've removed the pay wall for the PHP course and would appreciate your feedback. Thanks!
If you think NaCL is bloated, Russ Cox's vx32 may be a lightweight answer:

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~baford/vm/

Some of my experiments:

http://www.lshift.net/blog/2010/03/31/what-has-happened-to-t...

https://github.com/majek/vx32example
Are you talking about the self-awareness and introspection you perceive yourself as having?

Does it help if you view your consciousness as both being produced by the brain, and used as an input - i.e. a key part of a feedback system?
SpiderOak introduces Enterprise backup program