skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
@rmason -- coldfusion?

its DEAD.

quick application development...hmm. Some other language + framework would be more like it.

I like C++ or lisp.
Chatting with Hal Fulton (The Ruby Way, author)
A great interview with Hal Fulton, the author of "The Ruby Way" book.
While I agree that RoR is pretty damned hard to use in a shared environment, I'll point out that it is definitely possible. It took Jamie a couple of weeks to get it all spinning...but Virtualmin can spawn mongrels, configure load balancing in Apache, and still keep it all running as the user (making it safe for shared hosting environments). Several of our customers have it deployed...and while the load of the RoR stack is significantly higher than PHP (or Perl/Python) under mod_fcgid, it can be done safely.
"In many cases, it's still much easier to decrease cost than increase revenue."

It's also a more reliable sales focus, especially in an uncertain economy, to attack a cost stream that is real. Future revenues are a possibility, costs, especially recurring costs, are a tangible reality.
If a few thousand people run this server a day or two before Q1 ends they'll have to explain to the press why they missed earnings projections by so much
A fun, informative feature could be that list for each user in their profile. Even better if it updates based on use - how the hivemind splinters into the specific bees. There's so much that could be done there - similar users, related posts, discovery. I'm surprised we have yet to see that basic functionality in the more nebulous news sites.
Really, this should be a mea culpa, but instead it's a rant. Dreamhost was too ambitious in trying to offer Rails hosting given their legacy infrastructure. And now they're punting.

So why did they support RoR to begin with? "Ruby on Rails seemed to really fit in with our company philosophy and we thought our existing customer base would love it." Okay guys, so what have you learned here?
Analysis: Plaxo and Friendfeed, pushing the feed
Don't Care! I know I'm going to cheat! :)
cpython, jython, IronPython, pypy or stackless? :)
Oliver Steele has written a great functional programming library that adds list comprehension and textural/literal lambdas to Javascript.

I keep meaning to play with that, but I always seem to have something else (like work) that I need to worry about.

Analogy alert: I kinda see functional programming as like giving up smoking. It may hurt a bit at first, but it's much better for you in the long run, providing you don't annoy everyone by continually letting them know...
We have more than a dozen boxes at SoftLayer, having started there in August 2006. They're smart, nice folks and they deeply understand what their customers are looking for in dedicated hosting. I've traded emails in the middle of the night with their CEO, called support and gotten resolution to nightmare issues in a matter of a few minutes, sent them sharp criticisms on their forums to find the issues fixed weeks later. They're not perfect -- I think you'd be better off elsewhere if you really need to lean on them for system administration tasks -- but if you want boxes, power, and network, they're great.
..and start practising by looking up what "cargo-cult" actually means.
What about art, creative writing, music, etc?
its a funny one, but it'll take a lot more than a video for him to look cooler than jobs
From a money standpoint you probably can't beat Wall Street. From a mental stimulation standpoint it probably blows.

Most people who go into a technical major probably do so because they want to create and learn. I don't think the majority who choose those types of (Wall $reet) gigs initially came out of high school saying "I'm going into theoretical physics and math to get a job on wall street".
They just gave up on the dream.

At any rate, if your goal is to make a lot of money, going to a top law school probably has better average expected return than a similar caliber school technical degree, with far less variance, as someone here has pointed out.

But I can't knock people for trying to get paid.
With all due respect, this ain't a tech-related post so not sure why it's here.
Blub's is the best, as far as I can tell.
CES: FyreTV Brings the Porn for Ten Bucks a Month
There's somebody missing from the Hacker News leader list
There's somebody missing from this list:
http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

Who?
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg

That's right, according to his karma score PG should be number one, ranking about 2000 points above the current number one. Is there a particular reason for this other than to not seem biased?
Honestly, I'm amazed that anyone can keep up with Nickb. :)
We are the Rackforce one, and like them a lot.
New startup building floating data centers
Rails really exposes the overselling that occurs in most shared hosting environments. Though this isn't by any means praise for Rails, it does explain why a company that with massively popular shared hosting might be annoyed by it.

I don't mean this as an indictment of Dreamhost. I recall when I first started experimenting with Rails (years ago, pre-1.0 IIRC), Textdrive somehow had this reputation of being "the Rails host." This was probably a combination of the Textdrive folks giving some early sponsorship to Rails while having one of the more customizable shared hosting environments available. Anyway, imagine my surprise when I found that one could not reliably deploy a Rails app of any substance (even apps developed by Rails core members) on TxD's shared hosting because they kept killing the processes due to memory overages! Though it's understandable from a business perspective why there are process (and, more generally, resource limits) for shared hosting, it's also an absolute disgrace for a hosting company to imply that one can run Rails on its shared hosting when their policies preclude it and then all but call customers cheap for not wanting to upgrade to a $150/month plan just to run a basic app.
Oops, you've misunderstood me -- my telegraph post was, dare I say it, too telegraphic.

Yes, Edison (like all other telegraphers) must have cared a lot about telegraph key design, just as great hackers care about language design. I did not mean to imply otherwise.

What I was trying to say is that it's inconceivable that a hacker of Edison's caliber would use a single technology for his entire life, even in the (already extremely hypothetical) absence of external factors. That's because, within a handful of years, the hacker changes the tech to the point that it's no longer the same thing.

I would suggest that Edison not only cared a lot about telegraph design -- he cared so much that he took every aspect of the telegraph apart to see how it could be improved, and eventually developed the Edison telephone (http://encarta.msn.com/media_461551270_761563582_-1_1/Thomas...) along with a vast raft of other tech that was unknown in his youth.

What makes the question inane is that it assumes that "now until the end of time" is equal to or less than the lifetime of a computer language. It's not. Computer languages evolve so fast that nobody has ever stuck with one language throughout their lives. If external forces don't rewrite your language, you eventually rewrite it yourself -- you develop a bunch of libraries and restate problems in terms of them. And by "eventually" I mean "in weeks, rather than months or years" -- Steve Yegge rebuilt Rails in Javascript in less time than it took me to write this stupid post.

I suppose I could try to claim that I would be happy to be a Lisp programmer until the end of time. When someone accuses me of cheating by using Arc (which I hope to do, someday), I'll just claim that it's really Lisp. When someone needs a device driver written, I'll just claim that x86 assembly is really Lisp -- all I need to do is write the assembler in Lisp, yes? Or should I go for broke and claim that my "eternal language" is the native language of a Turing machine? It'll take me a long time to get back up to, say, Rails, but I've apparently been sentenced to spend the rest of my life at it, so why not bite off something challenging?
Slicehost. They are just awesome.
Okay, maybe "inane" is too harsh. How about "ill-posed"?
Oh and I've got some basic stuff up at Bluehost. They seem like a really solid shared host.
Oh, awesome. I never noticed it anyway since I have an account already.

I use both slicehost and linode, and definitely recommend both!
Why do men dominate the fields of science, engineering and mathematics?
Tech Dominated by M&AXnot IPOs
I was going to chose this as well because eventually I'll want to interact with new (and exciting) hardware. I think that's the overriding concern.

For instance, no matter how much I love PLT-Scheme, Haskell, etc if I chose one of them there'll come a time when I want to code on a new piece hardware and won't be able to because I cannot access the underlying memory registers.

But if you have to choose which hardware specific asm then that's even harder...
Entreprenuse (female version)
How to Be a Supremely Productive Person: A Chat With John Halamka
I am right and the entire Industry is wrong
Naming twins in Python & Perl
AideRSS announces funding
Network Solutions has now become the world's largest domain squatter. They're really going to eat it after this mess up.
Re: Java | Dinosaurs Can Take the Pain
"Name another language supported by three commercial vendors plus a fourth open source version."

I'm sure you could say the same about C++ and Java, and probably a bunch of other languages. But that doesn't really say much about the language itself, only who uses it.
A Year in O'Reilly Books (2007)
I had to check the calendar to make sure it wasn't April 1st.

I was literally seconds away from buying NNW when this news appeared. The free version has been great, and when I heard that the full version can archive articles on my hard drive I was sold.
Yahoo tests support for OpenID
That's pretty high praise . . .
Reversal Of Alzheimer's Symptoms Within Minutes In Human Study
I'll second The Planet

We have two boxes and have had no major issues - Tech support is quick and helpful - Most of our trouble tickets get handled very quickly;
Not so easy as the distinction between programming language and ways to interpret data is often rather soft. Would xml already count as programming language? If not, how about using Lisp only to load configuration data and maybe to exchange data between running applications? An advanced data format is not really different anymore from a programming language. Or should I no longer use s-expressions if I chose something else than lisp? What about makefiles or bash-scripts? Am I no longer allowed to use my editor if it's not programmable in my favorite language?

It's just a hypothetical question, so there's some room for interpretation :-) So I really thought more of it as "with which language would I start out".

In my case C++ would have a good chance for that (maybe I better change my nickname on ycombinator after getting out with this...). It's one of the few languages which does not confront me with any barriers between me and the system and I like that. I might take longer than with other languages for a lot of tasks, but I know that if something can be done with the computer then I can do it with C++. Also I have lot of experience with it (for example in implementing small parsers) and experience is certainly always an important factor.

But the most important factor would be the tasks I would expect to face from now on. Lets say I expect to work on some more games or similar virtual worlds. I already know c++ works for that (for me) so I would chose it. If I would expect to do server-side programming then it would be another language.
Cool? Yes. Interesting? Yes. But I'd love to see the click-through rates and conversion figures before you label them 'brilliant.'
Hacking the old publishing model with the new Amazon Kindle
Wow, what an incredible article.

I have to remember to downplay the connection between Bill Gates and the faults of Microsoft as a software company. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the Gateses, more so now than before I read the article.
No insult intended: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=For+all+inten...
Major screwups in mathematics (why are there none)
FAA: Terrorists Could Hack New Boeing Jetliner
No, I'm pretty sure it's in order to not seem biased.
Bill Gates: Life After Microsoft
Einstein's credo
I don't know that that's an entirely fair assessment of TextDrive (and not just because they're a customer of Virtualmin). They were pioneers in running Rails in a shared environment...and the Rails development community is hostile to shared hosting (perhaps because, like RoR exposing "overselling" in the hosting industry, shared hosting exposes the extreme resource usage of most RoR deployments). So, it has always been an uphill battle, and until you've actually had to fight that battle, it's hard to imagine just how ornery it is. That it took them a few months to work out all of the issues shouldn't be damning evidence against them. It was untrod and undocumented territory, and the fact that two years later most hosts still don't offer it ought to be enough evidence that the hosts that can offer it safely are above average in their technical savvy (or Virtualmin customers...).
"Secure multi-mediation is the future of all webbing." (and other stuff):

That guy ought to be a troll. I refuse to believe such delusion exists.
No Matter What They Tell You, It's a People Problem
There are people who drop into CS after finding maths difficult.
This should probably be titled "Declutter your floor"
There is YC, thought I'd find PG also.
Why Google New Web Startups, You Ask?
Let the contest to make a title with the most popular keywords begin!
So now that we have the most popular keywords, who can make a title with the most keywords in it?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=96660
Good to hear -- I've re-added myself to the mailing list, so hopefully I get a new invite soon.
Ask YC: Why Microsoft Best Hacker Use Open Source Software?
nice contest, here is mine :P

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=96663
Ask YC: Do we need to file an amendment if we change our idea after incorporation?
We've decided to switch to another idea but while incorporating as a Delaware C-corp, we mentioned things that were specific to our original idea.

I know that changing ideas is not uncommon. Does anyone know a good way to go about this? Do we need to file an amendment? Re-incorporate?
You will be forced to maintain poorly written C++ for the rest of your days.

Quote from some guy at Continental. "It wasn't a memory leak, it was a memory faucet!"
Screw you, I have to use lotus! :-)
How to be a pimp for RIM.
:-O Yikes. How embarrassing. No insult taken. I have pointed this out in other's writing. Funny how easy it is to slip and type mistakes like this when you're rushing out comments. Good catch...
Aha! Now I understand your choice in usernames.
@kajecounterhack

Maybe you should tell the four vendors that keep producing new versions that Coldfusion is dead.

As to other languages/frameworks - did I mention that it needs to scale as well?
Tiinker.com - intelligent news
tiinker is an intelligent news aggregator that learns what users like and selects stories tailored to to each individual's interests. The goal is to reduce the amount of content that people must sift through to find the stories which actually interest them.
I think one reason it seems there's more PG cargo cult members than really exist is because a good portion of his essays are written to express and argue what is already well established among good hackers.

If someone wants to discuss with me how to run a workspace for hackers the first thing I do is say "Read Paul Graham's essay 'What Business Can Learn From Open Source'". I've been arguing those same ideas since before that article existed, but he managed to express them much more succinctly and convincingly than I can do on the fly.

If you've known me long enough then you know that's not cargo culting, but if you haven't how can you tell?
Since the question specifically includes libraries, I would pick the language with the best selection of useful libraries, and the largest community of users actively creating new ones. For my money, that would be Java -- even with all eternity to write my own libraries, I'd prefer have the option of not doing so, so that I can focus my time on the areas where it is important to roll my own.
pretty shady - something I've always wondered about - thanks for cracking it open.
Norvig reviews SICP
Is YouTube Looking At Live Streaming Video?
The Art of the Sign Up Page
I'd say it's because it's the field with (a) the strictest formal definition of what "correct" means, and (b) no dependence on experiment, and hence no data and no statistics.

Everything you need to determine whether or not a given proof is correct is either in the paper in front of you, in the literature, or implied by the literature. If you can't follow the implications, you ask the author of the proof to clarify it.

Compare this to research in, say, medicine, where there are always millions of variables and progress requires careful controls, a statistician, an enormous budget that supports many trials of the same thing, and hope.

My hypothesis is that this is also why so many mathematicians do great work when they're young: It's one of the few fields where you don't have to do everything N times, because the error does not depend inversely on the square root of N. Once you've figured something out in math, it stays figured out. So all you need to become a mathematician -- besides your own mind -- is a library, the ability to read, and patience. (Although, in practice, nobody becomes a great mathematician without a teacher or two to guide them through the library. Even Ramanujan only found a couple of the books on his own.)
As tempting as lisp is, I think i have to throw my hat in the Haskell ring.

Lisp lets me turn pure thought into code, as it turns out a good percentage of my thoughts are pretty crappy. Haskell fixes that.
I'll tell you why it looks spammy.

First, you have the nicely designed part of your site sitting in the background, and your main section enclosed within a box, which separates it from the rest of the site as if it's disconnected content, and making it look like a huge ad placed in the middle of your site.

Second, building off of the first reason, your design is discontinuous. You have nice web 2.0-ish designs with the logo and the pinstripes in the background, but your foreground content is a white box with text of various colors and sizes, versus designed boxes that section the site, text that is styled well (like the seekler logo), and an overall design that promotes unity.

Suggestions: take your content out of that box and mesh it with the background in general. Take the login/create an account/search bar and place it in the upper right. Make the pinstripe background permeate throughout your main content and vice versa. I almost expect an 'X' in the top right of that box that would let me 'Close this box,' like many ads I have seen.
That's easy: Motorola 68000
I wonder if continually searching trademark-based names and notifying over-aggressive corporate trademark lawyers might be a better strategy? Maybe your script should be "mcdonaldsrestaurant#{i}.com"

There was a thread on reddit where people had gotten NS to register some names that might be awkward to explain to any outsiders (gross, non-pc stuff, etc). If you have a non-pc sense of humor, you might enjoy:

http://reddit.com/info/64xuc/comments/
I think that compilers should be specially easy to write in Lisp over any other language.

However in the time that most people were writing compilers no common or popular computer had enough memory to run Lisp reasonably. Even 8MB were a luxury.

Now we have 2GB of RAM as the norm.
My favorite sign up page is the news.ycombinator.com one. There isn't even a password verification box.

Also, it hurts to look at Turtle Interactive's website.
>> There isn't even a password verification box

And what if you type an incorrect password (to what you thought you typed)?
"326 of 331 people found the following review helpful:"

That's gotta be some kind of record.
If I could only work with one language, then I'd have to say Forth. While I don't know this one nearly as well as any of the others, this one allows you to work at the assembly instruction level up through the level of abstraction of languages like Python/Javascript. Lisp on LispMachine hardware would offer you the same sort of advantages.

The C and D languages look like they might also be fairly good choices. Everything else doesn't seem to give you the flexibility to go down to the metal while also having the ability to move up to much higher levels of abstraction.
Well, on news.ycombinator, you're screwed.

But I was being slightly sarcastic.
I thought only people on TV said "with all due respect".

It's a workspace hack, interesting to anyone optimizing their device-filled desk space -- which is much of the YCHN audience, I suspect.
I guess it is still undecided if such an ego is beneficial or harmful. We all know people who made a good career with that attitude.
I think at least one should be able to believe that one is right and the rest of the industry is wrong. Sometimes it really is true. As an example, most people on news.YC seem to believe that Java is bad, in contrast to almost the entire industry. (I am not sure what is true in that case).
Just like prison wardens were afraid Mitnick could launch nuclear missiles by whistling into a telephone...?

Beoing's engineers would have to be brain dead for this to be a problem. The only reason [I can think of] for the in-flight entertainment systems to be linked to any navigation equipment is for those live maps and speed/altitude data, but even that could easily be linked to a separate GPS receiver.
computer languages evolve so fast? all languages used today are at least 10 years old
There is little known provider of virtual linux servers http://www.openhosting.com (CentOS instance with root access for as little as $20 a month ).

I have been using them since early 2004. Nice experience.

Author of http://modpython.org is their founder, so presumably they know a thing or two about web applications.
Python till I die baby!!
And then some...
Turing completeness is a pretty good indicator. According to that, XML is not a programming language.

And since both C++ and Lisp are Turing equivalent you can implement each using the other.

Given that, if we're allowed to build other languages on top of our chosen language, then I too would choose a low level language like C or C++ (at this point I think assembly is too low level for most things)
Extending that argument, if you give someone any Turing-complete language, he has any other Turing-complete language...
I had an incorrect proof in a paper I wrote in Mathematics of Computation; it wasn't noticed until three years later, at which point I wrote another paper in the same journal with a (correct) proof of the result -- with the slight difference that the correct proof was five pages long where the incorrect proof was five lines long.

The reason the result I claimed was not significantly wrong (the correct theorem required the additional assumption that nobody does floating-point arithmetic with less than five bits of precision) was because I discovered the result experimentally: When I was writing the first paper, I needed an error bound and wasn't sure what it should be, so I had my computer do millions of trials on random inputs and tell me the worst rounding error which it encountered. Only after experimentally convincing myself that I had the right result did I try to come up with a proof.

EDIT: I should add that the result in question concerned the maximum rounding error which could result from multiplying complex floating-point values -- so it's not exactly an esoteric problem which nobody would care about.
What could Steve Jobs be getting into next?