skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You could buy half of Havana on an income like that.
Performance is not the only reason to choose a language. Suitability to the particular project, availability of useful libraries, developer productivity, team members' existing skillset, health of the language's community, speed of change in the language, integration of the language with tools already in use, ease of learning for new team members.

In my experience as a sysadmin running hundreds of different applications written in a wide variety of languages over the years, I've seen some of the worst performing apps written in the "fast" languages you mention, and some of the best performing written in Ruby and Python. Of course, it can go the other way as well. My point is that the quality of the code has as much to do with "speed" as the language chosen.

And I could go on and on about maintainability, ease of refactoring, and more. But I think you probably get the point.

If you're curious about why people like Python, the best way to understand it is to learn it yourself. There are lots of free tutorials online and if you are already a skilled OO programmer, you should have no trouble picking it up. Spend a few weeks investigating it, and you might find that you prefer it, too!
Handy tip: one .beat (or a milliday, if you like) is about 1.5 minutes. This means that one percent of one day is about fifteen minutes. Try thinking of tasks in terms of percentages of a day. You spend about 30 percent, give or take, sleeping. You spend 30-40% working most days. How does one spend the remaining 30-40%? One percent showering. Three or four percent preparing meals. Adds up.
One of the startup companies I used to work with was called Cupcloud (http://cupcloud.com). If you're OK with a cloud app, it can support Photoshop and Illustrator
Sometimes complex webapps in symfony can spend a significant amount of time in routing, probably not critical but well, why not lessen it.
40 maps to BLOW your mind
Reviews are required, but we don't have automation to test integrity and authenticity. Mostly the diffs between what is reviewed and what is pushed are cosmetics that the reviewer asked for and pre-r+'ed without wanting another patch in a bug, but there's room for mischief.

People do watch bugs and repos and catch stuff. We are working on making the system more foolproof, as part of a larger effort to move all our CI infra (save Mac, sigh) to the cloud and our release engineering to a devops model.
Generally speaking, the Python community believes the strength of Python is in its culture, which can be summed up by the Zen of Python: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/. Python also recieves much praise for being easy to learn, readability, productivity, expressiveness, and its library support, namely NumPy and SciPy (Python is often used in scientific computing for this very reason). Aside from this, Python programmers like it and that's reason enough. Performance for Python (and Ruby) is adequate for most use cases.

Personally, I don't like Python. If I want a dynamically typed language, I use Ruby, but I came to this conclusion after spending time with both languages, and it wasn't the feature set that sold me of one over the other, but rather how I felt while working in the language and its ecosystem. In other words, whether or not Python or Ruby are worth your time is a decision you'll only be able to make after using the language.

I believe in being language agnostic whenever possible. Don't hold strong opinions about languages. People invest a lot of time and energy into their tools. This is a "sunk cost." Their time and energy can't be reclaimed. So it's no surprise that, when asked, they will praise their tools -- even if they aren't objectively all that great -- solely to justify the costs. They aren't trying to convince you, they're trying to convince themselves. So don't waste time trying to find feature comparisons. All languages have redeemable values, and learning a new one is always a valuable exercise.

So give Python and Ruby a shot. You might find you actually like them, but not for the reasons you expected to. And if you don't like them, at least you'll know why.
I'm tired but isn't that just 1.5 times?

Tied together, a 1m³ block of limestone and a volume of 1.5m³ of floats displace 2.5m³ of water. Assuming the mass of the floats themselves isn't much then already that would lift 2.5 tons off from the bottom of the water pool.
Python code is smaller, and had better package management. I am sceptical you have something in C# that does not exist within a "pip install XXX" in python.

Python requires less LOCs than C#

Less code to maintain and it's quicker to write. Binding to C is no problem either when you need raw performance.

You can run it on a wide range of systems too.
It's easy. Like, really really easy. That alone makes up for a lot of flaws. Also, it's easy in a way that makes it easy to mold to the problem at hand. It's my goto language when I just want to throw something together, and for a few more complicated projects as well.
Understanding the Underbelly of Online Marketing & Why You’ll Lose if You Don’t
How about swiping left or right (or any gesture really) brings up a new number/page for that number? I'd hate to see the clean interface get changed by another button.
So the duke of Normandy is of Viking descent, but you said Vikings didn't exist before
Yeah, I got it wrong.
We started Lambda (http://getlambda.com) as an Elance/Odesk competitor for precisely these reasons. Most of the people looking for developers on the big offshoring platforms aren't the types of clients we'd want to work with ourselves.

The big problem is education. We speak with a surprising amount of people who've never hired a developer before. They often don't understand the difference between Wordpress dev and someone who's been doing high-performance numerical computing. If they tried to hire a dev on Elance, it would almost certainly be a frustrating experience for both parties, since they're unable to write a reasonable job description.

Our solution has been to take a very unsexy approach: anyone who wants to hire a dev through our service needs to first hop on a phone call and tell me a little about what they're looking for. Sometimes we reject potential clients outright (particularly if they have poor expectations about price) other times we suggest they hire a different type of dev than they initially thought they needed.

Unless Elance is willing to start offering this sort of concierge service, it's unlikely to grow into the sort of place where qualified devs will want to find qualified clients.
It is not just language. It is the platform behind language. You choose python/ruby your stack probably is opensource/linux stack. If you choose c# you probably is stuck with windows stack, (in which you don't have a lot options like open source stack).
i love this - even if it turns out to be not fully correct in the end.
one thing i was wondering was if any evidence had been found about about the balloon floatation devices, and, along similar lines, if they modeled the idea that small barges atop the blocks might have worked instead of balloons.
It works because a reviewer will say "here are a bunch of comments, the patch is approved once these are fixed". It's a very reasonable thing to say when the comments are minor (such a style issues) and the reviewer and coder trust each other.
http://nlp.stanford.edu/sentiment/

> Good, a very good game! I gave 1 star so that my comment gets seen.

++ very positive

> The game is an example of how a good game should be! Don't bother that I gave 1 star, it's because I want my comment gets seen.

++ very positive

> Super! I gave 1 star so that my comment is shown first but I actually liked the game.

0 neutral

> I hadn't gave 1 star just because I want my comment gets shown on top, I actually think that the game is aweful aqws.w.wew..ws

- negative
Funny that the first I heard of Goths, Ostrogoths and Visigoths was in an Asterix comic. I now wonder how much of the Asterix universe is historically accurate.
Are you taking into account the surrounding water (density=1) in your calculations?
What you say:

> What do you know, the top comment is a pseudo-intellectual tear down of an article, asking for evidence and proof, admitting that the original article wasn't even read to completion, but offering plenty of criticism.

What I said:

> I tried to read this all the way to the end but I wasn't quite able to do it in a single round.

So actually, yes, I did read it to completion. Some of the paragraphs I read, well, several times. I just gave in to the urge of angrily closing the browser tab once or twice, before I forced myself to go through the whole thing.

> Guess what? This is a book excerpt. Maybe if you want some answers and notes you can buy and read the book?

I don't see how this changes my criticism of the material. Do you mean to say that the book contains, say, a list of all the New Jersey accountants who noticed something weird about the patterns in which people pay taxes?

> Of course, that would require you to read and synthesize something for longer than 5 minutes, fighting the urge to show how smart you are by instantly going to an internet message board to ask for line-by-line bibliographical references.

This is fairly presumptuous of my ability to read, coming from someone who hasn't carefully read even the first line of my reply :-).
> isn't it best to keep a dialog going

Don't be silly, RSA is not interested in honest dialog. Have you seen the press release? It's nice to be for virtue but play pretend virtue is not virtue.
Well for that matter, do we really need to try to solve every medical issue?
It's fair use. If a book is not available for sale in the US I can travel to the UK and buy a copy and bring it back with me and read it. It may not be what the publisher wanted, but it's a legally purchased good used in a legit way.
"that more money makes you happier does not mean that any amount of money can make you as happy as you want"

And "more money" is not always the easiest or most available "life hack."
One thing that I really like about Python is the interactive style of development that it encourages, at least for me. I tend to do Python development in emacs with source code in one buffer and a repl in another buffer, building my program up slowly and evaluating bits of it as I go along. This style of development works very well for me. There are other languages where you can do development like this but (and please correct me if I'm wrong), this doesn't seem to be the way that people write code in C#.

Secondly, with Python, the most popular implementation of the language is supported on all the main platforms. Compare this to C# and .Net where, although you can use Mono on Linux and Mac, you'd not be using the same runtime that folks would be using on Windows. Call me paranoid but I still don't wouldn't trust Mono as much as I would trust CPython or Microsoft's .Net runtime.

Having said all that, and despite the fact that I've written little C# code in anger, I still do like the look of C#. Microsoft seem to have done a pretty good job of updating the language over the years to support stuff like generics and functional programming. They've certainly done a better job on this front than Sun/Oracle have done with Java. If C# works better for you than Python does on the platform that you use then I wouldn't worry about sticking with it.

(EDIT - typo)
It seems to me that if you go far enough down that route, you're going to end up thinking functionally, even if the data flow is obscured by out parameters and such.
> This was in context to the previous comment about power dynamics

There is no reasonable sense in which it is accurate to say that Black Girls Code is geared for "black girls vs. white girls".

There might be some vague sense (though its still a very bad and misleading way of putting things by inventing a conflict which is not essential to the focus) to saying it is geared for black girls vs. white boys.
It should have been based on UTC ("zulu time"), not UTC+1.

Zulu Beats.

There, I fixed it.
Bit offtopic, but I liked this game a lot, and am looking for a decently priced (< $50 with shipping) board game version of this. Anyone have any leads?

All I can see right now are sets imported from English gift shops, or handmade versions, both of which exceed the $50 price point.
As some others have pointed out, speed of the application at runtime is not always the most important consideration, else we'd probably be doing everything in a mix of Fortran, C, and Assembly.

I have found that developer productivity is higher, especially when it comes to maintenance. For me, all the tools in an IDE help offset Python or Ruby's simplicity when working in say, Java, when writing new code. But when reasoning about old code I haven't touched in a while, or looking at others' code, Python is easier for me to reason about.

If casting about for a reason to learn any new language, I can think of a few. Understanding another language and how you approach problems with it may provide insight on how to better use your main language. Your career may be long, and your main language may not be popular forever. When acting as a hiring manager, I look for people who know multiple languages, even if I only need one. Especially if they tackled learning them outside of school. It shows both passion and initiative.
You can gain ridiculous performance improvements without anything ever really being a bottleneck at all - this attitude is wrong and annoying.
Sssssh. Stop using facts. "Everyone knows" that things were great in the past.
> Just curious — aesthetics aside what other
> advantages do you think an analog watch provides?

Think of an analogue watch as a 2d graph where one of the dimensions is t. If you have a table of numbers you can compare them by looking at all the cells or you can graph each row one a cartesian (or polar or...) plot. Both contain the same info, and the table probably has higher resolution, but which tells a more illuminating story?

On a watch face, the minute hand is the biggest win: you can see at a glance approximately what time it is / approximately how long you have / approximately how far away you are which is what you usually need. I definitely think in terms of it being about "a quarter past fourteen" or "half past seven". The digital watch has too much precision and requires too much parsing.

The hour hand gives you similar data on a larger scale, but you typically need that less. And in fact though the watch face shows 2x 12 hours, when I look at it I see the normal 24 hour clock.

The second hand is good when you're working out since as you see it sweep to its goal you might push harder to get one more rep in or whatever, but this is a less common need and in fact many analogue watches come without a second hand.

===

The analogue clock face is an example of more humane design for specific problem domain, sort of the like US & Imperial unit systems. They are utterly useless for engineering (but even in engineering I use both MKS and CGS depending on the problem domain -- and its community). Miles and km / acres and hectares -- it's no big deal to me either way. But when making a staircase, cooking a meal for three people or resizing a dress pattern, the ability to use a system that naturally decomposes into rational factors is appropriate. And that's the beauty of the babylonian time system: despite the annoying (though necessary) primality of the week, there are plenty of factors available for subdividing the intervals.
CES: A Love Affair
Did you make this with Meteor? Because the "sign out" button looks exactly like it would if you just used the stock accounts package in Meteor.

(and then I went to your website and noticed it was built with Meteor too)
Yeah, it'd be interesting if there was a study on population size vs. happiness. I imagine there would be an inverse correlation (smaller population, more happy). But whether you could isolate the cause would be a different matter.

For example: is Norway happy because they have a small population with massive, well-managed oil reserves to pay for their social services? Or are they happy because with a smaller population it's easier to gain a consensus vote for alternative ways of life (eg. social democracy)? Whereas say, the USA might always be stuck with a capitalist democracy because the large population is too big to influence easily.
I think EVERYONE needs to write a book, at least once. I am not entirely convinced every book should be published, however.
Which first language is best for learning programming techniques?
"grassroots movement"

Having lived thru it, it was astroturf at most. It was a marketing gimmick to solve a problem that still doesn't exist.

"Here, try this, its just like things that work perfectly such as UTC or Eastern Time, but way more confusing"
> This is almost 100 years old. 100 years ago, there were cars, roads and buildings

But soon we'll have nuclear-powered flying cars and colonies on the moon.
using System;

public class Hello
{
public static void Main()
{
Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!");
}
}

vs

print "Hello, World!"

Everything is just simpler in python and ruby.
Right, but I think you missed what I was saying about order of growth: the loss of life on 9/11 was very small, so economic damage due to death was relatively very small. But as loss of life increases, it makes up a larger portion of economic damage, to the point that it outweighs direct effects of terrorism.

To wit, to offset that $40b loss we could either a) prevent a 9/11 scale attack or b) prevent at most 40,000 deaths of any cause. The operative difference being 1) we know for a fact that many more than 40,000 preventable deaths will happen in the next year alone and 2) we can make a good prediction about what the cost would be to prevent them.
Congratulations, you just invented the IDE.
So a prime directive of sorts, perhaps?
This is cool and they should probably do something so that things like https://github.com/twitter/killdeer are no longer listed on the page.

It was a strange experience to scroll down, see something that sounded interesting and then end up at a repo like that.
Couldn't agree more with this.

Effectively, Bret is taking a single page of quotes that are used in a marketing effort in order to frame the conversation in ways that people understand. Zuck's quote, for instance, conceptually maps directly to the open job market for engineers as a perfectly valid reason to learn programming.

It's pretty trite to say, just because Zuck says something about there not being enough engineers to fill the open positions, that he wants you to be a "cog in the wheel". What a horrifically poorly formed argument.

The effort of moving people is one that requires incomplete, idealistic language. That's the ugly truth of marketing. Incomplete doesn't mean dishonest, but it very well may mean "intellectually hollow". And the truth is, the real intellect is in understanding what gets us to where we want to be: a place where we unlock the educational power of learning to program by convincing people to try it.

<reckless>
It's like convincing someone to lose weight so they'll look better, when really you're wanting to prevent them from a heart disease.
</reckless>
I guess Turkish users will get blocked by app developers after looking at this ridiculous attitude. Btw they helped Google to find this bug, good job Turkish users.
Agreed. Ultimately it's all bluster unless someone is willing to pose a direct military challenge.
Seems like all the complexity and special casing of the time keeping is moved into the "holiday month" at the end. E.g., Which financial quarter does it belong to? Moreover only 5 or 6 out of the 10 weekdays will occur in the holiday month, then you have to reset to "Monday" again to have a fixed date->day mapping.
I was wondering the same thing! Wikipedia says: [1]

> In the United States, the first documented use of a painted center line was in 1911... According to the state of Michigan, the idea of using a painted center line was conceived in 1911 by Edward N. Hine...

> In the UK, the first "white line" road markings appeared on a number of dangerous bends on the London-Folkeston road at Ashford, Kent, in 1914, and during the 1920s the rise of painted lines on UK roads grew dramatically. In 1926 official guidelines were issued by the Ministry of Transport that defined where and how white lines on roads should be used.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_surface_marking
Gox is a follower in the BTC market now that it takes forever to get USD out. BTC-e looks like its traders move the market and Gox just follows, especially at times of high volume.
[Show NH] ElixirLang + Mongodb + Weber
OK. How about if they also built a large water tower on top of the pyramid? The seasonal rains would be trapped in the basin(s) and used to refill channels and replace water lost due to leakage?
There is a performance criteria that is fundamental to the use of interpreted languages and justifies their use based on other criteria. It's called "good enough."
added to my book to read in 2014 list :)
To some extent if you choose C#, you also have to choose windows, visual studio, iis, etc. In python you can take each of those pieces and exchange it for something else. A lot of people like to do that.

Fortunately if there's no need for a lot of .net ecosystem, you can run .net on linux and similar systems using mono. (I have and it's a great platform to write for) But as soon as you want something more than the bare .net you'll realise the pieces are hard to find.

Regarding the missing features - I don't think there's anything missing, you just need to know where to look. Only linq may not be available since relies on specific syntax, but due to what you can do dynamically, it's not that needed in the first place.
Likely, it's trying to show a helpful good and a helpful bad review next to each other. Amazon, etc all do this as well. I guess they haven't had as many issues with people exploiting it because you can rate reviews as helpful or not. Google should introduce a helpful or not helpful up/down rating for reviews which should solve this problem. Or a "This user is an idiot" button that, if enough people click, the review is thrown out. And, if enough people click it on multiple apps for the same user's reviews, they are banned from reviewing.
Real-time applications and will Django adapt?
And here you are writing this, you dopamine fueled junkie.

This is kind of sad because I use facebook more than anyone and I'm not depressed. Also humans evolve for a reason, if our primeval selves saw us today they would say the same thing.

ADHD isn't real, not everyone in the world can have identical brains, the CT scans and brain scans you use as evidence to prove people have ADHD is nothing more than propaganda fueled by the pharmaceutical industry, to push more pill sales.

What you suffer from is the lack of ability to understand youth, I know, I feel the same way about teens now. Except you took this to a whole new level of hatred and misunderstanding, as to almost call to put them all in camps, take away their phones and get off on them all being distracted while you show them how to live your 'ideal' lifestyle, and preach about what's wrong with them.

Times change, you're getting old and now you're filled with contempt and anger at the fact that humans will adapt to their environments.

This isn't because cell phones and technology. I fail to see any corellation with technology and school shootings.

Maybe we should ban guns, yeah, ban guns, and apples too, I think the shooter had an apple for breakfast.