skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I think stood out most as mistaken about Guido's post was his conflating recursion and recursive data structures in his third point. "For practical purposes, Python-style lists (which are flexible arrays, not linked lists), and sequences in general, are much more useful to start exploring the wonderful world of programming than recursion... Most of Python's library is written with sequences and iterators as fundamental building blocks (and dictionaries, of course), not linked lists, so you'd be locking yourself out of a lot of pre-defined functionality by not using lists or sequences." Well, chained cons cells are lists, too, and recursive functions are good for much more than operating over recursive data structures. Recursion is often the only simple solution in messy real world stuff. Just last week I wrote recursive code to do one of the most real-worldy and least Computer Science-y thing imaginable: get data from a public API. I didn't see any reasonable alternative to recursion. (But since that project was, sadly, not written in a language with TCO I am stuck with a function that's going to break if our little Twitter app gets popular, at which point I'll have to do unreasonable hack.)

But I admire Guido and could be misinterpreting what he said.
Earl, go read through the comments on the ultrasaurus thread, two of the conference organizers posted there. Their comments are worth reading.
I know that PHP brings a lot of good things to the web development arena, but I'm glad I've never had to use it for anything of significance. I've been able to use Python/Django and Python with Google App Engine, and they are delightful to work in. I know I produced a better product for my clients with Python than I could have with PHP. Someone else might have done better with PHP, and that's great for them.
Garbage collected languages are good examples of places where people regularly trust complex abstractions. Compiler behavior is analogous.
Much faster algorithm, calling your input value X:

1. Move the decimal point 2N digits to the left, so that your value X is of the form a.bcdef... or ab.cdef... Remember the value N.

2. If X now has one digit before the decimal place, set Y = 5. Otherwise, set Y = 2.

3. Compute Y = Y * (300 - X * Y * Y) / 200 to as many decimal places as you want. Feel free to start by computing only a few decimal places.

4. Repeat step 2 until you're computing Y to the number of decimal places you want in your answer and it's not changing.

5. Compute Y = X * Y.

6. Move the decimal point in Y to the right by N-1 places.
Levi-Montalcini is arguably genetically predisposed for longevity. Her twin sister, artist Paola Levi-Montalcini, died at the age of 91 [1] and was still actively creating works into the 1990s. [2]

_

1. http://quotidianonet.ilsole24ore.com/2000/09/29/1337059-MORT...

2. http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/levi-montalcini-paola
Which is often equally dangerous--applications which rely on garbage collection often use vastly more memory than applications that don't.

A particularly analogous situation, however, would be a C application that relies on a non-guaranteed GC, i.e. one that is not guaranteed to garbage collect all objects. In such a case, you're almost sure to eventually run out of memory. This is as opposed to the Java GC, which, while potentially inefficient, will (AFAIK) GC all objects.

Another analogous situation would be an application built to run on a server with 2 gigabytes of memory. The application uses 1.6 gigabytes and uses GC. A change in GC results in the program actually needing 2.4 gigabytes despite the actual internal memory usage never changing, and your servers grind to a halt.
I find it interesting that the test groups were students at community colleges and foreign applicants. Wouldn't it be far better to judge "intelligence" from students at a four year university, or those studying higher education? And just students? To me, this paper seems to be written to prove a hypothesis, not to test it.
So, this is why Asimov never really included sex or adult language in his novels. Not because he was a prude (he wasn't) or had any moral qualms about such things (he didn't), or because he expected any significant portion of his audience to be prudes or have such qualms (scifi, as a fanbase, is exceedingly forgiving of sex, violence, and language). But, because some percentage of people would use it as an excuse not to think about what he had to say.

It's easier to write someone off as not worth listening to, if they say or do something "offensive". So, if you have something you consider important to say, it might behoove you to think about the ways people can write you off as not worth listening to. Since the fellow with the naked ladies in his presentation included the naked ladies in order to get attention, I'm going to assume he felt like he had something important to say. And, since nobody is talking about what he said, and only how he said it, I'm thinking he failed.
Interestingly, longevity has about the lowest broad heritability of any human medical outcome ever studied.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/health/31age.html?pagewant...

I'd be glad to believe that genes matter, because my grandparents lived long, healthy lives, and one of my parents is still living, but I think my ancestors had rather different lifestyles from mine.
I am generally not interested in startups. I come to hacker news for the interesting articles and the high quality of the comments generated by the intelligent and diverse community here.
I spent a year writing C# in Visual Studio and ReSharper, and it is nice, but I'm happier now doing Python with Emacs and the command line.
Most companies hide vital support information in their CSR systems. What software rev is pushed out to my cable modem? What are the known faults with this modem on the Time Warner network? I'd like to be able to push the "update firmware" button myself rather than convincing someone at TW to do it for me. This volunteer army operates with one hand tied behind its back -- it tries to help people without most of the information required.

Openness and information can help companies reduce support costs. However, I suspect that they don't want customers to actually know how the sausage is made as it's often not as pretty as advertised.
I agree wholeheartedly. It's far too easy these days to immerse yourself only in the opinions with which you already agree, and to dismiss anything that is challenging or different.

Here's the thing: if you're going to start looking for challenging opinions, it's best to start in places other than talk radio and television news. Stop dismissing credentials. Stop vilifying academic research. Stop rewarding people who are merely controversial, or who play on petty emotional impulses or thinly-veiled bigotry.

Start rewarding depth of analysis, argument and complexity, because the world is a complicated place, full of colors and shades of gray, and no sound bite can possibly encompass it all.
oops, this is more or less a dupe of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=579401
I saw this presentation when a friend (who's not a programmer) posted a link on Facebook to it.

I wouldn't be surprised if non-tech people thought this was a porn site thing.
Possibly true. However there must have originally been some transfer from pigs to humans. Eating pigs and keeping them as livestock almost certainly contributed to the disease occurring. It is too late to stop this one but what about the next one. Anyone care to dispute the notion that the risk of these diseases 'crossing over' would be much reduced if humanity was vegetarian?
I think what he meant is that beginners have an easier time with iterators and list indexing than with recursive techniques. An important target group for Python is beginners and non-programmers who do some programming in support of their primary work. That's why Guido values stack traces over tail call optimization. For Python, supporting beginners and amateurs is a higher goal than writing elegant functional code. Even for problems with elegant recursive solutions, beginners seem to find it easier to cobble together a more complicated loop-based solution than to find the simple recursive one. I know that makes everyone really sad :-( and maybe the long-term solution is to fix the school curriculum to teach programming earlier and better, but for now it's reality.
Really? I don't understand why the thesis is even provocative.

Isn't one of the key points of the conservative movement that there's no correlation between smart/stupid/good/evil/judgement/etc and intelligence/iq/g/cognitive-ability/etc? And isn't it a pretty good point? Haven't you seen Forest Gump?

Is it really controversial that the highly educated and intelligent segments of society are massively less conservative than the less educated and less intelligent segments? Come on.

Is there any evidence that the "smart people" make better political decisions? No. Anyone claiming so would be an idiot. But who's claiming that?

"I'd rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard." -- William F. Buckley Jr.
J.G. Ballard dies at 78
You imply that you could have done better. So please share your relevant comparable experience. Ever raise $10M and bear the weight of those investor expectations? Ever been CEO of a multi-million dollar company? Ever launch a manufactured consumer product? I suspect that it might be a bit difficult. I suspect that what is best for your investors, your partners, your employees, your customers, your family, and yourself might not always be the same thing, which I suspect might lead to many difficult decisions along the way, decisions which unfortunately will later get called into question by a peanut gallery of HN readers who consider themselves business experts because they've built a couple of websites.
Best quote:

Neither of the company's two founders, nor any of their successors, can alter the product's basic economics.

This former executive claims they were trying to sell a product for $1.29 that cost them more than $1.00 to produce and distribute. If true, this sealed the company's fate regardless of any drama or inattention to detail.
I do, have 2 toll free numbers there
I don't see proud, smug, or weakness. Nor do I see that "HN readers are on one side": I don't use Facebook, Twitter, a cell phone, an iPod, or a TV, and the only electric things in my kitchen are for heating/cooking.

I certainly don't think it's generally true that they "don't think themselves capable of moderation". Obvious counterexample: if she thought that, you wouldn't be carrying a cell phone at all; but she carries a cell phone which she simply never uses.

I see it as simply a natural progression: technology was great, when there wasn't much of it -- like sugar and fat, when your diet had almost none of it. Now that we can have all we want, we have to reconsider what we truly want: is more technology (or fat) really our goal?

Does TV or Facebook make my life better in any way? I tried, and the answer was clearly "no" for me. I fail to see zealotry in not doing something that doesn't benefit me.

Moderation and self-control have nothing to do with it. If there's no point in doing it at all, it doesn't matter how much I do. I don't smoke tobacco, and not because I'm incapable of moderation, but because I see no point in doing it at all.
I do . I have 2 toll freenumbers there
That's a joke, right? (Since you just did exactly what you argue against.)
That's interesting. Perhaps it could be called "idle recursion"?
If all of humanity was vegan, the risk would probably be greatly reduced, since no one would have any livestock. Vegetarian diets still include eggs and dairy.

But it's just a completely unhelpful comment. Humanity as a whole is not going to go vegetarian, let alone vegan. Proposing it as a solution is just pushing an agenda.
I was a current T-Mobile customer, and I was still able to get two of the phones for the standard $179/each by renewing my contract. If you don't want to deal with contracts, you should expect to pay much more for your phones anyways...
Maybe we should stop using the term "sexist," and start saying "not cool," or "less than optimal," or "alienating."

Why? Because when we use the word "sexist," some people immediately go into "i only care about the code, I don't care about the gender" mode, which I think is sincere, but misses the point about the other, non-code-review behavior not being cool.

I believe it when people say they can impartially evaluate code and conference proposals without being distracted by gender. But that doesn't mean we can't be alienating with our behavior.

The blogger in this post is successfully putting Ruby code into the world, and co-chairing a new conference (raising eyebrow, maybe she is "doing something about it" :D ). It's not necessarily about acceptance, which she has. It's about wanting to really like your community, which she doesn't at the moment.

Speaking personally (am female)my problem with this is more the feeling of being repelled than excluded.

I regularly back away from IRC channels, user group meetings, BOF's, etc not because I think individuals are sexist by the definition of "They think females are inferior coders," I don't think that's the problem. The sensation is more like, "it seems like they'd have more fun if I weren't here."

I think to myself, "If they're talking about strippers and whores this much when I'm here, they probably would have more fun if I weren't." I don't call them out, it's their space as much as mine. I just leave.

It's not really about content, it's about context. There are a million places where the t&a graphics from those slides wouldn't make me wince at all, but this place wasn't one of them. Ditto strippers. I'm not offended, I'm just pickin' up signals.

That said, I don't think anything should be censored or not allowed, (not that anybody, even the original blogger has suggested as much), We just can't be surprised when people who don't know us well interpret our subjective expressions a certain way.

Lot of people are talking whether the presenter "meant to offend." Of course he didn't. He seems really nice and smart. And NOT sexist. I feel bad for him, because this issue is bigger than him, and I'd probably love to hang out with him in a heartbeat, even though I don't think his slides were the right call.

But...

I'm reminded of this Jay Smooth video where he said you have separate "if a person is racist* from "is what the person said racist?"

(http://www.illdoctrine.com/2008/07/how_to_tell_people_they_s...)

Personally, I'm willing to drop the word sexism altogether, and just say, bad (subjective, but may get us to focus the discussion more.) This way, we can talk more about whether stuff is good for us, rather than if it's sexist.

(added)
Anyone care to dispute the notion that the risk of getting run over by a bus would be much reduced if you never left the house?

Not to mention that livestock-spread diseases are just a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of horrible ways to die via epidemic.
That may all be true, but they made a large and significant bet on consumer purchases in their focus on design and heavy television ads focused on celebrities (all notebook ads, BTW). They've been aggressive on multifunction printers in a way that others have not. I submit that they don't engage in a lot of new product risk, but I have admired the hell out of them for their balls to define themselves as a consumer-centric company and succeeding without resorting to price discounts. That's an incredibly difficult thing to do.
> "I’ve been in this business for a long while, and life span is probably one of the most weakly heritable traits I’ve ever studied," Dr. McGue said.

Evidently "extreme longevity" is more heavily dependent on genetics than non-exceptional lifespans:

"Perls and coworkers originally found that the survival ratio for siblings of centenarians versus siblings of 73-year-olds was about fourfold for ages 80–94 (79). In a more recent assessment involving 444 centenarian families, these investigators found that, compared with the U.S. 1900 cohort, male and female siblings of centenarians were at least 17 and 8 times as likely to attain age 100, respectively (80). Similar findings of a much stronger heritability of unusual longevity have been obtained by Kerber et al., who demonstrated an increased recurrence risk for siblings for surviving to extreme ages (81), and
Gudmundsson et al., who found that the first-degree relatives of probands who live to an extremely old age are twice as likely as controls to survive to the same age
(82)." [1]

_

1. Annu Rev Med. 2005;56:193-212. Quote is from p205. http://pi.edu.pk/donald/genetics.of.longevity.and.aging.pdf
(Yes, that's the joke...)
I'd happily change my opinion on the matter if you can cite a source that counts more than just white people.
I want to point out the the left-right colouring of GW is largely a US (Also Australia, where I live) development. I think the reason for this political situation is quite silly.

If GW is true, this probably requires regulation, complex interventionist policies etc. The things that the left wants. So the left believes & the right doesn't. Or it thinks that it is natural or inevitable or not so bad.

I think this is an example of how ideology can become a belief in policies rather then principles.
It's not a dichotomy, it was a generalization and certainly there are exceptions. My point wasn't that it's impossible to change the world with a balanced lifestyle (Reagan famously stopped work at 5 at the White House and he certainly made a dent in the world). My point was that some people love to be monomaniacal and throw themselves at huge problems (or huge risk)-- just because that's not your bag doesn't mean it's the wrong choice.

MOST of what people would characterize as "lifestyle businesses" are owned by people who have other priorities. And if the mega-risk startup junkies look down their noses at that, it's their fault-- not yours.
While Kevin's regret is pretty valid, I think the most interesting is definitely Gauri Nanda's - regretting going at the business totally alone.

I refrained from applying for YC funding in the past because I couldn't find a good partner, but now that I'm working on something with a good one I really notice the difference.
I wouldn't want my pacemaker running a garbage-collected language and yet most web apps are written with GC. Google uses GC languages. GC can be done correctly and efficiently.

TCO is not very hard to implement in a compiler/interpreter if considered from the beginning. Unless your compiler/interpreter was designed very poorly, it probably isn't very hard to implement later, either.

Given this, it doesn't really make sense to not trust TCO because it's somehow black magic. There may be other arguments against wanting TCO in your language of choice ("I really need backtraces all the time and I can't sacrifice simple, provable interpreter optimizations!") but reliability can't be it.
I would worry about publication bias here, since it's a metastudy and few people would publish such a study showing that, would you know, there's nothing going on...
I must be missing something. Why can't we skip the drama & add it as an option?
Nice summary of design patterns. Having a design pattern book on hand is a wise choice for any programmer.

Personally, I use 'Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.' However, Wikipedia or this website are fine.

Can anyone comment on sourcemaking.com's 'Design Patterns - Simply'?
Where's the feedback? A constant throttle might get you a stable speed on flat ground (after adjustment), but when its time to climb a hill, you're going to have to press down further to even make it up at all.

I do wish cruise controls were designed such that you'd still push down on the gas, and it acted as an upper limit. I avoid cruise control entirely if I'm tired, as I like the feedback from unconsciously slowing down as a sign that I'm too tired to be driving.
"Intending" no offense really doesn't make it much better. All it means is that instead of being a jerk, you just don't have a concept of what's appropriate, and more importantly, why that might not be appropriate.
I dare you to find me an example of someone so shamelessly, transparently looking to profit off of the hypothetical suffering of others.

EDIT: OK, I guess it wasn't clear why I find this hysterical. I'll explain how I see it. (As background, my job previous to starting Dawdle was as the junior member of the investment team at Ascension Health Ventures, a health care VC fund. I know a little something about how this all works in this space. Also, it's Saturday night and I'm sick at home but nonetheless tipsy.)

To me, a fund dedicated to pandemics is an example of thematic investing gone to its extremes. Pandemics are a such a minor subset of the incredibly large and complex health care system that it strikes me as implausible that there are $200 million worth of worthy VC investments. I could be wrong, but that's my gut.

But what really strikes me as hysterical is that pandemics are hypothetical situations. Medical devices and new pharmaceuticals are generally about finding solutions to known - and existing - problems. The economic returns from investments in those things are well known and replicable.

Pandemics are totally different - the next pandemic could be any from a range of diseases with any sort of transmission protocol with who-knows-what root cause. To me, trying to find infrastructure investments for something that doesn't exist (cause Lord help you decide what the next pandemic is going to be) that takes rapid adoption by the moribund and dysfunctional health care industry is crazy.

KPCB strikes me as being perhaps the world's only venture firm that could get $200 million in commitments from LPs for such a crazy-ass thesis. To me, it's just a crazy-ass boondoggle to think this could possibly work. But, hey, I could be wrong.

Thanks for the downvotes, though. Those who did showed a total lack of appreciation for the English language. Y'all saw "hysterical" and read "terrible". Perhaps you'll do better next time.

[EDIT 2: If I were to invest in "pandemics", I'd try to take advantage of the certain hysteria among the public that would result. That, at least, is predictable. EDIT 3: http://www.fluidinfo.com/terry/2009/04/26/a-few-comments-on-... is worth the read.]
I think that compiler optimizations should be classified into "leaky" and "non-leaky" (much like Joel's leaky abstractions). Basically, a "leaky" optimization would be where the compiler looks for basic patterns that can be optimized away, but where sufficiently complicated and convoluted code can cause the compiler not to recognize the optimization.

A "non-leaky" optimization would be one where the compiler can always optimize away a specific coding pattern. Though, to some, tail-call elimination is dark magic, in reality the optimization can always be performed. As alluded to in the article, all that's necessary is to replace the existing stack frame when returning a value.
Well, I've raised and received an acquisition offer of about that number, but the startup team quickly disintegrated. Guess what, I don't put this on my resume! It was a failure and caused a major fallout under several friends!

Regarding the "built a couple of websites" - I've worked for startups in bioinformatics/ AI and for public research projects with several million bucks funding.

I'm sorry but my heroes are company owners that can sustain a business for a long time and give back to the community. Not quick scams that screw over investors. I know quite a few startup founders (in IT) here in Ontario, Canada, that know how to support their people. And these aren't guys building websites, but in the 'top 10 awards, up and coming in Canada'.
The secret of a long, alert life is probably as important as the secret to a long life. To live to 100 and be able to say you feel more intellectually able than when you are twenty is quite something. Even doing that till 85 would impressive.