skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He could always post and link to it when submitting a story. Or just use a new story completely and link to this as a reference for the "why"
Well, I have a tendency to be naturally adverse to anything that is incredibly hyped, so that should frame it. However, I have many complaints with the language itself and things surrounding it, so here I go, in no particular order:

- I don't like the overall community. That is not to say I do not like Ruby hackers, period -- a number of my friends fall into the category. However, I do not like the general holier-than-thou attitude that much of the community takes and the fact that they seem to spend more time talking about how fucking awesome Ruby is than they spend actually writing code. In many ways the community is young and I believe it has a lot of maturing to do. Once again, this obviously does not apply to everyone, but one of the most important attributes of a programming language (at least to me) is its community on the whole.

- I don't give a damn how "cool" a language is and this seems to be not only a general argument for it, but also a method by which many tutorials and other literature explain or introduce the language.

- I am of the opinion that Ruby is far more ad-hoc than it is elegant, and I think many are simply confusing the two. Sometimes you need (), sometimes you don't. Some people think the lack of "unnecessary" parenthesis makes the language more elegant, I just say it makes it harder to determine if something is an attribute or a method, for example. I don't believe there should be 50 different ways to do the same thing; there should be a couple different ways and one of them should almost always be considered "the best".

- What's intuitive for one person may not be so for another; it's not a universal thing and as such I do not find the language as intuitive as hyped. For instance, I find the following completely unintuitive:

['list',...]. each { |food| print( food.capitalize ) }

Why? Because it looks nothing like a standard for loop. In Python, I can do a similar one-line loop over a list, but the syntax is far more intuitive to me because it looks like a loop:

for food in [...]: print food.capitalize()

There are class variables and instance variables and constants and globals and you define one of them using @@ and CapFirst for another and... it just feels like a cluster-fuck to me.

- Despite all the Ruby community hand-waving about how "Ruby can't scale is a myth" and so forth, the fact remains that it is a (relatively speaking) young language which has many significant shortcomings -- shortcomings that even its own creator acknowledges. Except, many try to ignore these when they shouldn't.

Do I think Ruby has nothing going for it? No. Do I think it has no hope of improving and growing? No. I do, however, believe that it has a lot of growing, improving, and maturing to do before it is even half as godlike as so many feel it is (or just feel they need to say it is). That being said, I don't think I will ever use Ruby -- for these and other reasons (this is already too long). I imagine I will at least be civil towards it... eventually ;)
TechCrunch posts more than 5+ articles now. I read tons of news everyday, from HN, RSS reader, TC, OM..

But kudos for making the story short and concise everytime, it is what makes me come back to TC. Because they go straight to the point. Unlike GigaOM, they have long posts.

And, the cool thing about reading TC is you see some drama happening. You remember when Mark Cuban got angry and expressed his feeling in TC? How bout the debacle of DEMO? We watched how Michael Arrington brought down DEMO!!

This is what news should be! Excitement + Wisdom + Humour
I was wondering about this. Is it really comparing like with like? I do not know Erlang, but I thought it had a lot of overhead from being designed for distributed apps etc.
From answers.com: "Charity: An institution, organization, or fund established to help the needy."
http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=nhk
If the conclusion is based on that thread, then, I think neither did that thread establish that conclusion, nor is that sentiment very strong, although I also feel like this is a polar issue. Disclaimer: I err on the "critical period" side of the debate. I also don't take an absolute stance (as in, there exists a time T where when age > T, native proficiency is impossible. I think it is a continuum of rates, but it drops fast and irreversibly. I also think there really hasn't been anything strong on the other side of the argument, so take my bias however you will).

A very simple scenario here with somewhat related background: take absolute pitch for example. I don't think anybody would argue that absolute pitch cannot be acquired, if you are an adult, don't have it already, and set out to acquire it. Some people can achieve it to some degree, but the phenomenon of AP, strictly speaking, is entirely unlike what these people train themselves to do.

There are clear neural signatures associated with people with "true" AP, and to this extent the most likely explanation is that a combination of early training, and biological predisposition, are important factors in AP development. The literature seems to point to 7 years as about the "cutoff" for the "critical point."

Now the thought experiment. It is possible to invent a language that requires AP: we would encode special meanings to certain frequency classes. (this is not at all a stretch, given the existence of several whistle languages). Then, if you pass the critical point of AP acquisition, there is no chance of you learning this language.

Okay, maybe that was extreme, but as we relax the constraints bit by bit (like how rigid the frequency classes are defined), we can create languages that require different degrees of AP ability. In this thought experiment, I would expect a readily observable critical period effect.

Suppose this all follows through -- then, these languages must be learned as children.
It's a protein staple for many vegetarians (who aren't allergic to peanuts, like me :-/)
"...that drops to 80 degrees below zero, the temperature needed to keep many kinds of bacteria alive."

What kind of bacteria are they referring to?
Can it fill a house with popcorn?
There's a one-stop-shopping solution for this kind of thing - the biggest clown of them all - Jim Cramer. Read it and laugh: http://nymag.com/news/businessfinance/bottomline/42392/
A Derivative of Open Source: What is Crowdsourcing?
Do you have any google custom search engine to share?
No. That's exactly the point: people don't give money to charities to help a cause, they give money to feel good.

If they gave to help a cause, then they would support whatever (reasonably ethical) methods best helped that cause. The fact that so many donors bitch about frankly miniscule CEO compensation proves that the majority of them are not in it to improve the world -- or at least that there are other things they want out of their donation.
Of all the groups, fat is the most energy-dense.

Carbohydrates = 4 kcal/gram | Protein = 4 | Fat/Lipids = 9 | Alcohol = 7 | Vit/Mins/Water = 0
I'm investing in emergency zombie-outbreak kits. Each include a mask, shotgun w/ shells and a case of redbull.
There's more to this.

Toddlers are not inclined to perform tasks that are hard. So, they don't really make a choice about learning a language or not, neither is it based on necessity: before and after language acquisition, a baby would receive attention and protection. Before anyone says anything about reinforcement, kids with delayed language development (up to around 7) can be mute for years regardless of any coaxing. This is a special case though -- the brain seems to delay its pruning, almost as if to "wait" for the speech centers to kick into gear when speech begins.

Toddlers are innately imitative. Speech acquisition can be viewed as an imitative behavior, akin to, say, reaching out and grabbing something, kicking a ball, what not. The remarkable thing is that by observing something happening, they know how to control the analogous functions in their own bodies. I mention this as an alternative to this "necessity to communicate" idea: it could be largely the result of imitation, with the ability to communicate as a byproduct.

Finally, early languages take precedence over later languages. It could be because the early development of concrete operations, and later, abstract thought, rely on the available (i.e. first/native) language to "bootstrap" more complex thought processes. So the first language gets used non-stop. Then the second language comes in. Let's say you study it as an adult, and work real hard on it. When we fire a neural signal though, the wirings for the first language are so much stronger that they enjoy a lopsided privilege in access speed. In this sense, the later languages will never quite equal the earlier ones, by far.

So while I'm not saying anything against the adult ability of new language acquisition (and by this I mean a different set of phonemes and grammar -- in-family languages like Italian to Spanish won't count), I would say there is something quite magical about the child learning their first language(s).
I should have said:

I doubt that C++ or Lisp's success or a lack of it has anything to do with stern looks.
"Chile's economy isn't even 10% the size of California's."

Maybe so, but Chile has a whole lot of free trade agreements.
http://www.bcn.cl/carpeta_temas_profundidad/tlc-con-japon/ma...

Bear in mind taxes are also quite favorable. Entrepreneurs pay VAT taxes and that's about it; there no bullshit taxes on capital gains, either. And for what it's worth, if you don't have a citizenship, knowing you have the right to a fair trial if you're arrested is nice.
... + Linkbait
I think you hit the nail on the head there. You need to be the underdog to keep you motivated and innovative.
How do bilingual native speakers (i.e. learn multiple first languages) fit into this? Or people who're immersed in a second language early on, eg. my dad's a native Cantonese speaker, but he went to dual Chinese (Mandarin) and English schools where all instruction was in those languages, and so he speaks all three with minimal accent.
Very well written constructive criticism. You have brilliantly summarized the issues with ruby (and its community).

And i really liked the point about the language being not intuitive for everyone. Not many say it as it goes against the core 'cool' feature of ruby, but it's far more easier to crank up a good amount of messy code with this language, if one is not careful enough.
Yes. ;)

This is what programmers are paid for. To decide on a case-by-case, moment-by-moment basis whether to use Google (and, more importantly, which phrases to Google and which results you should try to use) or whether to work through something on your own, or phone a friend, or surrender and just do something else.

There is no general rule.

I expect that within another generation nobody will distinguish between "thinking" and "using Google", just as I don't distinguish between "solving a problem on my own" and "solving a problem on my own by remembering something I read a month ago".
You might not call it that, but one anecdote is indeed data. A very small amount, to be sure -- but it's all we've got.

Tiny amounts of data can almost never prove a particular theory correct (in sociology, at least), but you're quite simply wrong if you think we can't get anything out of them. This particular data -- datum, I guess -- certainly can't show that charity CEOs in general earn their keep, but it so blatantly contradicts your theory that I think it's safe for us to assume that you're incorrect.

Is it possible that "there are many qualified people in charity work who make barely-subsistence wages who would likely do an as-good or better job with far less pay" and that the story's CEO's departure caused an 85% loss in the charity's income? Yes, of course. But it's unlikely. At the very least it seems like there needs to be some kind of barrier to hiring those people -- maybe it's impossible to determine which of these minimum-wage earners is actually a highly competent manager.
Right, caffeine. I knew I left something out.
However, I do not like the general holier-than-thou attitude that much of the community takes and the fact that they seem to spend more time talking about how fucking awesome Ruby is than they spend actually writing code.

This is exactly the position taken on both sides of religious language wars. Don't consider yourself above the fray unless you can get over these emotions.

Because it looks nothing like a standard for loop.

I'm reading: "Because [language feature in A] doesn't look like [language feature in B]." This argument is frequently made by Blub programmers. I can say that I find the first way more intuitive simply because it matches all the other kinds of iterator functions in Ruby. Will you accuse me of immature fanboyism?

There are stupid fanboys and uninformed wannabes in the young Ruby community. Try not to let them influence you as much as they are now. If you want to divide programmers up like that, then try to imagine someone similarly minded on the Ruby side. What they might see in you is a Python guy on a mission against Rubyists. There is plenty of room to interpret your comments as a manifestation of a "holier-than-thou" attitude.

I can come up with just as many silly reasons to hate Python with all of my heart and soul. There have been plenty of times when I have programmed in Python and have stumbled across something I can rant about. So what? I can go rant about it, and then someone will rant back at me, and pretty soon we're having an idiot contest.

Ruby and Python are both stupid, over-hyped, and totally awesome. Their communities are both full of morons, trolls, anti-{Ruby|Python}ists, and really smart and nice people.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't argue about languages. I like to argue about languages. I'm saying that "that doesn't look like a for-loop!" and "I hate Perlisms!" are vacuous, and I'm also saying that being anti-fanboy is no better than being a fanboy.

Think independently and make your own conclusions that are uninfluenced by all the people on the Internet that are wrong.
Both C++ and Lisp are successful. Of cause It depends on how you define a "success" among thousands of programming languages.
He's a hack. God do I look forward to the liquidation of the new york times so we don't have to put up with friedman and krugman anymore. Not to mention about five others.
I'll try to if I get some time. I haven't compiled on Windows in a while so I'm sure there are some bugs.
Not that I'm a big Ruby fan or anything, and I do agree with some of what you said, but... what does or doesn't look like a loop depends entirely upon what you're accustomed to. Pythons loop syntax isn't objectively better (I realize you said to you); however, don't think something else can't feel just as natural after a little experience with it.

There are advantages to the Ruby version as well, the Python version uses special syntax; a control structure one must memorize the semantics of. Semantics which are slightly different for different control structures in the language like knowing boolean expressions in if statements short circuit their evaluation, or the body of a loop is evaluated once for each iteration of the loop.

The Ruby version, copied from Smalltalk, is using a more general technique of building control structures in the library rather than as special syntax all built upon passing lambda/anonymous functions/blocks, whatever you like to call them, around to higher order functions like each. The benefit being you can see the delayed evaluation and build custom control structures in your own libraries without the need to memorize new semantics that aren't visible in the code as with procedural keyword control structures like if/when/do/while/switch, etc.

Admittedly, I think Ruby's version is a bit ugly, I'm a Smalltalker and find this much better...

{'list'} do: [:food | food capitalized print ]

And to me that looks totally like a loop. Once you have a concise notation for lambdas like [ ] or [:arg | ] you find much less need for special keywords and tend to want all control structures in the library rather than the language.

Lispers feel the same about their macros. To a Ruby programmer, each screams loop just as loudly as for to you, or do to a Smalltalker.
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Ukraine faces Russia’s wrath
Cash crunch seems to hit all economies. Ukraine is facing the wrath of Russia. The Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, has threatened to cut natural gas supplies to neighbouring Ukraine if it failed to clear bills. The President also said that the entire debt has to be paid.
Maddox is much funnier than this dork
A better comparison would be with Multiprocessing, or Eventlet/Spawning.
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If memory serves, there are different levels native multilingualism. If you learned multiple languages in parallel, they end up sharing space on the neural structure. I would believe this is "true" multilingualism.

If you learned one separately from another, after the first was stable already, the new language will occupy an adjacent region (somehow I think this is because the region is still growing).

All languages will be functionally native (assuming early enough acquisition and abundant practice for all), but in the latter case, you would still expect a slightly weaker signal for the later languages. But in both cases, I would just count all native-level languages as first languages, taking "minimal accent" as the litmus test (some people slip through, and in my experience those people had amazing ears and were gifted with languages in general).

This is just anecdote, but from all my friends who have began learning English at a different age, their accents seem to follow a general pattern of later acquisition -> stronger accent. While this seems obvious, for those who learned English around 12-14, you get an interesting effect of native-level fluency, but just at certain places, you can tell it isn't their first language. And usually, at least for my friends, you can tell about what age they started learning.
Agree on index funds being bad in general. They distort the market. CRM at over 300 Future P/E...who wants that? You watch the whole market over swing...

I think gold is a better move than anything denominated in dollars. Inflation is coming.

A good amount of cash and physical assets makes sense for emergencies- if power goes out for a couple of weeks, the atm won't work.
You'd have to ask Knuth why he thinks so. He may have seen the source code, for example.

Speaking merely as a user who remembers when the Mac was first introduced: Because it was a program which you could play with for sixty seconds and immediately get a vision -- not only of exactly what the Mac was all about, but of what the next few decades in computing were going to look like. It's hard to describe the intensity of the experience of seeing it for the first time. I still have the issue of Popular Science in which I first saw a photo of the interface.

Sure, in a sense it was nothing that Engelbart and the PARC guys hadn't done before. But it was no research project; it was a shipping consumer product with a solid, elegant, friendly, minimalist design, built (according to Wikipedia) in 8500 lines of source code, that ran crisply on a PC which cost far less than the $10k Apple Lisa, to say nothing of a $100k piece of custom Xerox research hardware.
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google shines when there's a lot of data point (say ubuntu)

man pages shine when the info is very specific (say openbsd)

first time it's better to use google (to see whether it's an issue -- where people encountered the same problem ... or non-issue -- only ME? having this problem? it could be something else)

but after facing it multiple times, man pages (and brain) are my friends
regular expressions still confuse me sometimes. i'll think i've got em down, then i'll see a new one and go wtf?
Note that fat is more energy dense than ethanol, but a little less than gasoline (which is 48 KJ/g, compared with fats 37 KJ/g).
Yeah. The entire message of the studies seems to be that colds don’t reduce your physical performance, and that exercise makes you feel better (I don’t think you necessarily need to be sick first for exercise to let you feel better…)
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i heard iDealsChina already has leaked pics of an iphone with this embedded
hard to tell which one of these is the most frightening, though bernanke's might take the cake
Y A P L C: How to create Linux style virtual desktop in Windows
Thanks for the link. Recess is a full-stack PHP framework I've been working on the last 12 weeks or so. This preview release is intended to demonstrate core functionalities and help work out major issues. Over the next couple of weeks I'll be focusing on documentation, screen casts, and stabilization.

There are some interesting and novel techniques being used in Recess that you won't see in other popular PHP frameworks. It's a framework I believe will cater well to hackers and the HN crowd.
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I think Madoff's is worst. It's so ironic. While he was executing one of the greatest financial schemes in history, he was saying that it's impossible to violate the rules.
Your Guide to Obesity Prevention
A very informative site about Obesity
http://www.amazon.com/Uncharitable-Restraints-Nonprofits-Con...
Makes great soap too - http://i44.tinypic.com/sm62c1.jpg
Take a look at this section of the manual. This explains how we encrypt a data structure encoding change permissions with data that leaves the database:
http://www.nextdb.net/devguide/index.html#Up

At a thirty-thousand foot level, we explain the "round trip security model" here:
http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=df7mdmdw_11c5rmfbg9
"Because [language feature in A] doesn't look like [language feature in B]."

Well, obviously. It's not like I'm arguing that Ruby's syntax is for The Gays because it differs from Python's. I find nothing fundamentally wrong with it, other than the fact that it is not intuitive to me, having seen hundreds of incantations of the for loop. An oft-touted "feature" of Ruby is that it is intuitive; I find it to not be intuitive. This is entirely my opinion.

In the end, a large portion of one's opinion of a language is based off of personal preference. There are undeniable, factual problems with Ruby in terms of performance, community maturity, complexity, language features, etc. There are even more opinion-based, subjective reasons why I feel it is a poor language choice. I make no attempts to justify these reasons beyond making it clear that they are merely my opinions. And I was quite clear on that.

If you can come up with as many silly reasons (some of my reasons aren't silly by any definition, but I digress) to hate Python, then go right ahead. I certainly don't care. I wasn't ranting about it to try to convince anybody of anything; why I like a language isn't important enough to make a soap box out of it. I was asked a question, I answered that question. That's all.
From your explanation, I would then imagine that were I a long-time Smalltalk/Lisp user I would decry Python for its silly keywords.

As you noticed, I tried to make it obvious that some of my reasons were in no way objective.
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