skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Scala feels like the Perl of the modern era: there is more than one way to do it. There is value in that mode of thinking, and Perl is a better language than people give it credit for.

However, I think there's a reason Python and Ruby have overtaken Perl in the interpreted language space: Python values simpler solutions [1]. Ruby also values a certain type of beauty over Perl.

Clojure/Scala is a similar dichotomy. Scala has everything you might need, while Clojure is rooted in the spartan power lisp provides.

Also, I wonder: if they weren't both JVM languages, would we even be having this type of discussion? I mean, we aren't comparing Clojure to Cobra or D.

[1] See the Zen of Python http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/
Another perspective I read recently is that 'time is the ultimate form of wealth.' Meaning that if you have a lot of money, you don't need to spend your time on things which do not interest you.
Well £120m. Still pretty good for selling a few greetings cards.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14275632
Ask HN: How do I make my dating app popular?
Me and a friend are going to be developing a dating app for some fun. The development will be difficult but we feel that getting people to actually use it will be even harder.

How does one get the first adopters and get people to stick to it. The app may be well made but who wants to use a social app if there a no or little users?

We just plan to put up a few posters at our Universities, some leaflets at some bar and word of mouth via Facebook.

Apart from that we are clueless? What can HN suggest?
Presenting Big Data Analytics In A Social Context
A world managed by apps is closed for those without a smartphone
Improvements needed in preventive dental care in the USA
At least it's a fairly descriptive one. If you can come up with something better, please, by all means start using it in conjunction of current longread threads. A good (or improved) idea will eventually get picked up.

I for one like the ability to find thorough articles, regardless of their topic by a well known tag. -shrug- At the moment that tag appears to be "longread". Now, one CAN argue what should be the minimum length for an article to consider it a longread. (My background stems from magazine freelancing, so I tend to count characters and not words.)

As a first apprpoximation: if it takes longer than 20 minutes to read the article, it might qualify. If it takes longer than 45 minutes, it most certainly does. As to how many will give up before reading such a monster through, is another question...
CS doesn't make you rote learn solutions to individual problems. It teaches you how to reason about entire classes of problems.
Those people are thinking they will never be able to retire, so why include that?
Sounds like someone should read Paul Graham's essay on Wealth again.
oh agreed -- less harm. And when the government do it, we the people pay tax to enable it. US Taxpayers are paying for these buildings, mega-data centers, and contractors.
"A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do." - Bob Dylan
The real problem is: This additional freedom you can buy with money means less freedom for somebody else.

This assumes that wealth is a zero-sum game, so it can be traded around but not created.

It's hard to reconcile that view with the fact that standards-of-living have been growing, more or less worldwide , for the two centuries.
Yeah it seems kind of an odd choice to write the thing in Perl. I guess they have some other Perl stuff they want to link it with perhaps?
The difference between software development and computer science is the difference between being able to assemble a car from spare parts, and being able to design the pieces like a new engine or gear box.

The two skill sets don't overlap entirely. However having the latter generally makes mastering the former somewhat easier.
First Parallella User Created Video
Techgene launches PelicaMigrator to migrate the data from RDBMS to MongoDB
My job as a software engineer involves a mix of all these things. Not a lot of heavy algorithm development, but definitely some.
Some things are strongly typed and playing cards are among them. It is just that playing cards are strongly typed as playing cards, not integers or pairs of integers.

In blackjack:

case 10 => Jack or Queen or King or 10

and

case Ace => 1 or 11

and poker with "Dr Pepper"

case 10 => ace or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 or jack or queen or king
case 2 => ace or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 or jack or queen or king
case 4 => ace or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 or jack or queen or king

It is sometimes better if the data type provides abstractions over the messy details of the world rather than adding another one to it and planning for the possibility of a Joker in the deck might make sense.
Anyone know a good movie/book on his life?
Ummmmm No... Really? Men are not attracted to status/wealth? Come on, dude. Odd, I personally know more men sponging off their female counterparts then the other way around.

It will never cease to amaze me people who will go out of their way to display their total ignorance.
Ask HN: Do star programmers ever hire 'ghostcoders'?
Earlier this year Verizon discovered that one of their best programmers had outsourced his own job to China. So he basically hired ghostwriters, or maybe more precice: ghostcoders. Celebrities, executives, and political leaders often hire ghostwriters to draft or edit autobiographies, magazine articles, or other written material. But do well-known programmers hire 'ghostcoders'?
The British government has taken steps to address teh 26,000 that are still alive [1]. While this should be automatic it is still a step towards progress.

[1] <http://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/sep/02/home-office-gay-s...
In the current political climate you might have to wait no longer than about a decade for that to happen. Several countries already started out-sourcing prison guards and/or other security relevant jobs to companies like G4S
I think that's a simplistic view. Most rich people became rich because they provided a particular value to society. This value is exchanged for money, which allows the rich to draw back this value as they see fit.

Lets imagine that Steve Jobs, instead of getting paid for his iPhones, sold them in exchange for a person's time. The average hourly wage in USA is approximately $24, meaning an iPhone would retail for about 25 hours. You can choose not to buy an iPhone, in which case you are free, or you choose to draw this value offered by Steve Jobs, but then you'd owe him 25 hours of work. The exchange is still completely voluntary, and therefore can't constitute domination.
A posthumous... wait for it... Turing Award.
Yes, it's called open source ;)
Is Ruby Dying?
Unrelated to the topic, but:

> He said the research Turing carried out during the war at Bletchley Park undoubtedly shortened the conflict and saved thousands of lives.

Clear example of "history is written by the victors". The Allies were as guilty in the war as the other side. Neither side's goal was to "shorten the conflict and save lives" but to "defeat the other side" with no regards to human life.
Heh, same time as my edit. Those methods should be private (i.e. they just exist for building the deck, its the consumers responsibility to shuffle / split into multiple decks etc, as well as assigning value to each card).
Or use value classes and get the best of both worlds.
Sort of. But I don't think most people are actually using the concurrency primitives in Clojure all that much. How many systems out there that people are writing make heavy, or even significant, use of concurrency primitives? I'd guess it's definitely the minority.

Immutability and programming with data structure literals are what Clojure's all about. Lisp, dynamic, and functional are obviously the other big choices that were made to achieve the overarching goal of the language - simplification. But imo, programming with performant, immutable persistent data structures is the essence of Clojure programming.
Haha. Also known as don't reinvent the wheel.
This tweet pretty much sums up the whole problem with this pardon:
"So remember children-homosexuality is acceptable, but only if you also invent the computer & single-handedly defeat the Nazis" https://twitter.com/bristolpaul/status/415467991414083584
Agreed, any problem may be better solved by one or the other. What I notice, having never used Clojure, is that the Clojure devs may well finish the implementation while the Scala devs are still discussing the design. Of course, that level of flexibility will better suit some problems. I read a high profile project's coding guidelines recently: "Scala is a very flexible language. Use restraint." Perl's TMTOWTDI is the reason I moved to Python. I've recently been using Go instead of Scala, partly again because TMTOWTDI, whereas Go is supremely clean, but also, I think, Scala is just too big for my needs, a skyscraper when I need a house. This sounds a bit like sql vs nosql, rather than when should I use x vs y. I look forward to trying Clojure.
New circuit design allows for elimination of laptop charger brick
If we had evolved with only eight fingers we would be much better off. Also sometimes you do use a hammer to set a screw so it won't move when you go to drive it.
I'm speechless that "phpBB, Drupal, Wordpress" are supposed to be the "great" examples of "high quality PHP".
I agree with you. Not only we accept this, but many are not even conscious about this injustice. I think it's not an exaggeration to say this is still slavery, in a less direct form than what it used to be.
Start with answering this - What problem are you trying to solve?
It is really easy to talk smack about PHP because as a language it is not the prettiest, best designed, or cleanest language out there. It often leads to some very gross code.

However, programmers write ugly code in every language and even in a much more beautiful language like Ruby, there are so many projects that end up with ugly codebases, poor performance, etc. that PHP by no means holds an exclusive ownership of terrible coding practices.

Writing high quality code in any language takes significant effort on an ongoing basis. Practices like TDD, code review, pairing, etc. can help, but only if they are applied with significant effort.
Ask and validate a question within a shell script.
SO MUCH EDGE
Bill Gates's dream: A computer in every home
We as humans owe a lot to Bill Gates. He is the reason we have a computer in our home. Indeed his dream came true. He succeeded and progressed so did humanity.

But this also has led me to think, what was Microsoft strategy when actually everyone would have a computer in their homes. Microsoft’s sole aim apparently was to provide basic to pro computing at personal level. But there does not seem an apparent strategy present for the period, when everyone has at least one computer in their home.

People now have enough computers laying around. They do not need computer any more. Or for that matter, they do not need an ordinary computer any more. The technical level of computer users generally has increased. Even my Dad now uses Youtube for uploading his personal videos. (in Pakistan, a 3rd World). This is just a simplest example to give an idea, how computer users worldwide have become tech-savvier.

And this is the sole point of post, Microsoft apparently did not have intelligent strategy for the tech-savvy PC era, or when computer users are no longer, just sending emails via Outlook, composing letters using Word, and preparing spreadsheets using Excel.

The above period is over. You can no longer sell your product based on above, there are millions of tools available even for free, (OpenOffice). Moreover, users simply do not want products that merely feature what they do. They want smart products, that assist them and are based on user-experience and as well as look neat. I know Microsoft is catching up, however in the same fashion they catched up with gmail after 10 years. (ref: new outlook.com, it took them 10 years to make it somewhat at part with Gmail.)

I won’t name the company which has filled above gap and went from $3 Billion to all the way to $500 Billion surpassing every and each one.
Therein precisely is a HUGE problem. I was nearly homeless, then made more money than I could have ever imagined. I turned into a monster. 9 cars (yes, all for me) and other stupid crap that I'm ashamed even to recall now.

Come to think of it, some of my buddies who made it out of the ghetto did the same thing, at first. It does take a while of being "secure" that the money isn't going to be taken away, before you start to think the way the author does. It's when you're surrounded by stuff and your life still feels empty. When you realize most the rappers were sellout pieces of garbage who, during the daytime socialize with the dentists they live next to if they can and rarely rap about how crappy a life surrounded with material wealth can also be.

Fortunately, knowing a couple of billionaires helps. I sat down with one and expressed my frustration in how I felt and how I had slowly but surely become someone I never really aspired be. It was at this point in my life it suddenly hit me. I'd known this guy for a while and had never seen him flaunt his money like I did (and he had a lot more of it than me). Then he told me that money for him is a tool. If you start using it to become a "consumer", you become consumed by it. He is not just free to do whatever, because in some way that is selfish too. Rather he uses his money to help others and makes the most positive changes in the world that he can. I know that's true because it's not just his money but he actually devoted, the much more precious commodity, of time, to his philanthropic efforts. Efforts he started when he had money like me, except he decided early on to give his away rather than spend it on himself.

It doesn't take a lot of money to be free. I live off less than a 1/3 of what I was before and have a few more in my family now (I was single before). I work with some amazing people and am trying to work on making things better for others on a daily basis. One non-profit I help out from time to time has been tackling the issue of homeless families (not substance abuse or psychiatric issue related, primarily economic issues), and not surprisingly, it's often about the parents' attitude towards money. It would be nice if they felt "secure" enough to understand that money won't buy happiness and were frugal by choice. It would really help if more people had the luxury to have the author's opinions, but thanks to culture/advertising or whatever, there's a large contingent of people who need to think about money differently but don't.
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The other ones I use are specific to the sites I frequent. As such, I don't think they'd be that useful to others. I wrote some that help me grep the Gearslutz.com classifieds board, for example. I wrote another that highlights certain things on Yahoo's soccer index page. Meh - boring to anyone else but me!
A start-up moves teachers past data entry
CGI is pretty much never better.
No, your first sentence is wrong. The following definition stores the ranks as unboxed integers, but prints them differently:

case class Rank private (val rank : Int) extends AnyVal {
override def toString() = {
rank match {
case 1 => "A"
case 11 => "J"
case 12 => "Q"
case 13 => "K"
case _ => rank.toString()
}
}
}

object Rank {
val Ace = Rank(1)
val Two = Rank(2)
// ...
val King = Rank(13)
}
Are you talking about this problem? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem The math is a little different: You can increase your chances of finding the single best applicant in a pool just by discarding the first 36.8% that you come across, then picking the next one that is better than those.
Thought this was part of https://www.cloudflare.com/railgun at first...
It's not what is said there. Read again: "The focus of PHP has always been on "getting things done" and the language’s developers still value this goal highly. This practicality has spawned great open-source software such as phpBB, Drupal, Wordpress and various other well known applications that are hosted on millions of servers worldwide"
So - "getting things done" have spawned great tools like phpBB, Drupal, Wordpress. They are great, because they address problem for end users and are used by millions. It's not said that they are high quality PHP projects if we look at code level.
He simply made a good gun, not a weapon of revolution, and not a weapon for guerrilla armies. It was just a new gun for regular USSR army. Kalashnikov was a simple soldier during the WW2, so he knew very well that a new rifle: 1) has to be very reliable, 2) it has to shoot better than your enemies weapons, 3) it should be easily mass-produced in the time of war, when resources (of all kind) are scarce. These are the design goals.
With so many different dating apps available you will need to differentiate yourselves and show why your app is different (better) than the others. Your plan to guerrilla market at universities and bars is a good idea, but it will not work if you are seen as "just another dating app". If you can show why it is different and/or why it is better that is appealing to your target market the rest will come naturally.
I left PHP about 3 years ago, and I have recently had to look into it again due to a new course I am preparing to teach.
The PHP I knew is no more, and it is leaps and bounds ahead of what it used to be.
But using Drupal as an example is really a bad choice.
Talk about Laravel, Composer, new language features, but not crappy giant codebases.
The big difference that the PHP ecosystem seems to have vs the ruby/python ecosystems is an emphasis on providing complete stand-alone solutions to problems vs providing developers with the most flexible and powerful tooling to develop their own solutions.

Whenever I find myself wanting a photo-gallery, an eCommerce platform or a forum I always seem to find that the most mature solutions are based on PHP.

The advantage of this is that semi-technical webmasters can easily deploy complete websites without writing a line of code, thus the underlying code quality is of secondary importance to the functionality provided.
Yep, valuation can be simply a function, but wrapping in a typeclass might work as well.
Is it that day of the week again?

I would like to also point out the title of the post is misleading, as the findings are exactly the opposite.
Don't be silly. They obviously use World of Warcraft.
No, the cert is for webserver.ispgateway.de thus you should get an error.
The purpose of income is to buy goods and services. The world bank data I cite gives you data on income, the data on goods illustrates the resulting difference in goods.

If you have any data at all suggesting the Indian middle class is remotely as wealthy as even poor Americans, feel free to cite it.
You just may not be used to Ruby not having the exciting fire of initial hype. That is dead. But that's good. Languages can't live like that forever. Sooner or later they need to stop the wild experimenting, find some best practices and things that work, and settle down and ram home the things that work.

Ruby has entered final maturity. It will be in that phase until such time as it really does die, which could well be 10-15 years. Or more, though, honestly, I doubt that in 2028 we'll be considering Ruby anything more than legacy code... that's not because of Ruby itself, but rather the language category it is in. I expect we'll be looking at Python and Perl the same way.

Oh, and kudos for running numbers before simply writing the "Ruby is dying!" blog post!
lol. Agreed. I'm not a fan and sometimes wish it would but enough people are using it successfully to make it pretty evident that it is not going anywhere anytime soon.
Sure, it's just a proxy signal. But don't discount "willingness to be a capitalist drone for a few years". For many people, taking on a multi-year commitment and seeing it through is beyond them. Such a signal would be attractive to someone who wanted kids, for example.
4 Reasons Not to Build Enterprise Apps
Wait? What????
What do you reckon could not be legacy code in 15 years? C family, Java, maybe Erlang?
I'd say you should shift your point of view. You say: you made an app and now you need the community for it. That's the wrong order. In your case, the community is the most important thing, and the app is secondary. So, go and find an existing community and turn it into 'your' community (hard!), or build a new community from scratch by focusing on a narrow class of customers (even harder!). Third alternative: buy a community, if you got enough vc ;-)
| Possessions have the effect of tying you down.

This is getting to be a little off topic, but I see comments like this often from people who imagine a mortgage as a massive amount of debt hanging over your head. While I agree that home ownership is not the right move for everyone, and it's definitely true that you can't just up and leave, you can sell your house. It will probably take longer than the 30 or 60 days notice you would have to give to a landlord, but it's not as if you are signing a contract to live there for the next 30 years.

| Buying a house, assuming you get a mortgage, is a huge expense requiring you to work to pay for it.

Doesn't rent fit that description too? Unless you are crashing on someone's couch or living with your parents, housing is going to cost something. In my experience, first+last+deposit was the standard amount due upon moving in. At the end of the day you at least get to keep some of the money paid on a mortgage. Plus, if you do make it to the end of the loan, you could be paying the same monthly payment that you locked in 30 years ago, whereas rent will probably rise over time.
Hopefully he'll stop hogging the frontpage then. Just like nobody remembers Julian Assange anymore.
The author loses a lot of credibility by calling those three apps "great". If the article is about high quality PHP I'm interested in that, and not the poster children for PHP's popularity. As a user, phpBB is a nightmare to use, as a developer, WordPress is spaghetti code at it's worst.

Edit: What's even worse is that we don't get examples of PHP code that was actually written with proper development procedures from the ground up. I mean, I was genuinely hooked by the headline..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
And you can create a new string interpolation to make card instances, like:

card"Heart:Ace"

or

card"$suite:Ace" if you want to reference a variable.
A Bloomberg TV Host Gifted Bitcoin On Air And It Immediately Got Stolen
Spirograph: Circles on circles rotating in opposite directions
Why use Clojure?
A better title would have be, "Is Ruby Dying? Getting The Data." As others have pointed out, the data suggests no, it is not.
A relational database would have been a much better fit for this system.

The author initially states that all relational databases are good for is speed but then goes on to highlight flaws in their object store that could all have been mitigated by using an RDS:

* schema changes without needing to write programs to update all your data

* data aggregation (and in fact any sort of adhoc reporting)

* data storage independence.

There's also no mention of data integrity but this is a big risk as soon as the original authors are no longer involved.

Object oriented data stores are hierarchical/network databases. Relational databases were introduced to replace these years ago and for good reason.
Does that 'or' method actually exist in a library somewhere or was it just for illustration?
actually, it's examples of "high quality software", I believe. And, problematic and freaking annoying as those can be at times, they also have been, historically, extremely easy software to set up for enabling people to get stuff done.
Renaming database schema in MySQL