skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He takes brief looks at four areas of interest.

Exotic type systems: he advocates dependent types. There appears to be an error is his second example (I dont know ML), so I cant quite follow he=is example. OTOH I implemented a program generation system a decade ago which included type composition and type reasoning, so I think we agree that there is much more interesting stuff that can be brought to mainstream languages.

He advocates strong static typing with type inference. I like Python 3's approach: duck typing with optional type declarations, although in Python 3 they are in effect just comments.

Visual programming languages. he thinks it's a good idea, but hasnt seen any good examples. I would go so far as to say all the ones I have seen are bad. I would welcome some good visualization tools for existing languages.

Concurrent programming languages: he mentions Occam and several others. He thinks Bigraphical Programming Language has promise.

Theorem proving: he is looking for something less ambitious than proving program correctness, maybe more along the lines of eclipse's error helpers. He suggests tools that ask your intent. I too would welcome tools that can reason about programs, that can attempt to understand the programmers intent and can answer questions about the systems implementation.
To suggest that household work is not work is old fashioned to say the least. Studies have shown that not "working" mothers actually work 80h+ weeks doing "household activities" like child rearing, cleaning, cooking, washing dishes etc.

Men even when they stay at home do only 60h of it as far as I remember the numbers.
You forget that the corporation usually pays for staffing costs of the workers who created this work, plus overhead, plus promotional expenses, and possibly even entered into contracts on the basis of the work.

A corporation spends more money to create a creative work, so its actual damages are significantly more -- why should it be forced to swallow those other costs? (Even staffing costs are damages b/c those costs could have gone into some other endeavor).

Furthermore, work created for profit receives greater protection precisely b/c of the money interest involved -- if the work was created for free, the presumption is that the creator didn't carry about money, and so is not harmed much by infringement.
worked for me.

JavaScript blocker active ?

flash working ?
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Could be. I think the free service only checks once a day. I would pay for a more frequent check.
For a very simple language start with HTML, then add some javascript and then go for a server side scripting language.

That way you can sort of ease in to the concepts of syntax (and debugging) in a familiar environment.

Adding some js will give you some client side functionality, from there it is a (relatively) small step to running some code on the server.

Then you can add things like databases and so on.

The language itself is not the most important factor, the method (edit - (compile) - test - evaluate and iterate) is.

You'll learn how to set yourself a goal (say building a website), sketching it out (paper is good), then make a static html mock-up, then expand on that.

This will take you some time!
"Paul, did you have a startup at one point?"

UM...yeah!?

haaa. I guess there is no reason to expect that she would know that...

(what?)
Thanks for that link. I saw her book when I was browsing the bookstore, it looked interesting but I never picked it up.
iMac, Powerbook etc.
I don't want to knock on the lady, I'm really glad that she has survived. But when you decouple your 'input' and you become disconnected you are very close to dreaming.

That does not mean that there is any relevance to your 'untethered' experience. Similar things happen to people that are subjected to sensory deprivation, such as being immersed in tanks with salt water for extended periods.

It usually does not take very long before hallucinations begin.
Is it just me or does he look mildly irritated by the end?

It seemed to start around the point where the host accuses Mark Cuban of duping everyone with broadcast.com then lumping Viaweb in with that... as if all founders made money by tricking acquirers rather than creating value.

Of course, maybe I'm projecting...
Also Hackers by Steven Levy is a huge source of data on the Lisp/Cellular Automation days.
If you're planning to write for the web (who isn't), then I prefer javascript for 2 simple reasons:

1. Unless you use Flash, you'll probably have to use some javascript anyway if you want any logic on your client.

2. You can click View:Source on any web page to see the javascript running that page. You'll have millions of examples of source code along with that code in action right now on your machine. A live example is an excellent learning tool.

You can also use javascript for your server side logic, but that's another debate altogether. If you build some pages that do something first, you can worry about the back end later.
Here in Chile you can stay as long as you want and there are no time restrictions on the free WiFi. Almost every other day I spend a few hours working at a Starbucks.

Recently a Colombian competition, Juan Valdes, opened a few shops here, but they restrict the free WiFi use to 60 mins. You don't see a lot of people working there.
Will we now accept that 'spirituality' is a construct of matter?
Twitter is my living room, Facebook my kitchen
In my opinion there's too much emphasis on general-purpose languages over domain-specific ones. There's lots of low-hanging fruit in the domain-specific space.

While designing or implementing a worthwhile Turing-complete, general-purpose programming language with a correct and efficient implementation is a huge undertaking and requires vast amounts of knowledge, doing the same for a domain-specific language is much easier because the scope is much more focused and the efficiency requirements are often not as strict.

As long as you focus on semantics, limit the scope of your language, use declarative techniques like pattern-matching that will let you avoid the Turing-completeness trap (Turing-completeness makes your code hard to analyse and process, unlike declarative data) and use a proper general-purpose language for the implementation, designing and implementing a domain-specific language is really not that hard, though proper IDE integration and a debugger are still not so easy to do.

I like to make the right tool for the job, so I use Common Lisp, which makes it almost ridiculously easy to invent new s-expression-based syntaxes via macros and compile through production of trees of closures, among other things.
XtreemFS hits 1.0 – distributed research filesystem for grids
You don't choose a language in such case as you don't build with Ruby nor with Python. You build with the language and a web framework such rails or django.

There are many things to consider. And most of the issues ar non-technical

- will there be support for the frameworks, language etc long enough?

- are the coders competent with the language / framework

- what limitations exists on deployment

- what limitations the customer imposes

Of course if there's are no non-technical issues to consider, go for the technically "best" solution.
Ask HN: Other businesses?
I'm curious how many of you have (or had) other non-software businesses large or small.
e.g., I'm into LED lighting and right now I'm designing small reading lamps I plan to sell on Etsy.
I can already imagine the kind of comments that this article (and even more her TED talk) will trigger here.

Which will, ironically, prove her point.

EDIT: What I mean is that we are (myself included) mostly left brain people. Otherwise we probably wouldn't be here.

It's hard for us to relate to this kind of experiences. It's easier to dismiss them and go back to our own so very important projects and our endless elucubrations.
Consider expressiveness. The number of lines of code that a programmer can write in a month tends to be a constant independent of language. A program in Java takes 2 to 5 times as many lines of code as in Python. In Java you will get a lot less accomplished.

Take a look at the standard libraries and third party packages. If someone else has written it, you dont have to, unless you want the experience. Python, Java, and Perl have lots. Ruby and IO less so.

Look at job listings. If you are starting out, you might as well pick on that you can get money for.

Look at the communities. Are the people ones that you would like to hang around with. If they dont like newbies, look elsewhere. Python seems to be pretty good in that respect.

As for web development, Python has Django (I recommend) and Pylons. Ruby has Rails. Stay away from Java; everything is too damned complicated, but there are a lot of jobs.
Why the New American Real Estate Dream Is Renting
The coolest thing about different cultures is that the grave insult that can get you and your family killed and your brother-in-law's tractor dealership bankrupted in one, is funny or no big deal in others.

A guy I know (here in US) got in trouble for beckoning a Fillipino coworker. Apparently only prostitutes are beckoned in the Phillipines as a solicitation. In some places in India, you -can- will get killed (or, if you are lucky, your dick cut off) for saying "Your sister is hot". In other places you will be considered enemy for life. In the US, I hear "Thanks man, I'll tell her". Cultural differences between families is also very interesting to observe. When I was a semi-kid, I heard one guy shout at his brother that he is son of a whore and my jaw dropped and remained dropped for a while.

I wonder how shocking alien cultures will be. Zaphod was(is?) his own great-grandfather due to a time-machine mishap and a defective condom, if I remember it right.
I agree completely.

Several of my past businesses have gone through tranched rounds and each time I have found it to be significantly destructive.

The VCs who think financially tend to like it for several reasons:

* They are effectively only risking half the capital at any one time reducing their downside.
* They are investing the second tranche later which improves their IRR
* In their minds they think they have more control over the business.

The reality is, as some the linked and original blog post touch upon:

* The VCs expect you to grow at the same rate as though you'd raised the full amount despite the fact you've only got about 6 months worth of cash in the bank.
* It puts loads of pressure to hit short term targets. Both on the company to the VCs and on the VC on the board to their partners. In startups things don't always go to plan (and rarely go completely to plan), and software, markets and deals always take longer. This short-termism is a killer.
* It means you are constantly being drip fed and having to worry about manage the shareholders rather than working together about creating a long term view. Very few tech businesses were overnight successes.

In my experience the net effect is considerably to the detriment to of the business, and of entrepreneur/VC relations.

The other thing to realise is the VC is actually getting (assuming 50:50 tranche) X/2 shares and the option to buy X/2 shares in the future if everything at the same price if everything is still peachy. Considering the pretty volatile nature of startups, a rough Black-Scholes calculation will show you're effectively discounting the shared by about 40% by tranching it in that way. E.g. it's better to sell shares at $7 a share untranched rather than $10 tranched.
Definitely. I like it that the author jumps straight in with the most important skill any programmer should master: Debugging.

Debugging is where the boys get separated from the men, for want of a better expression. To be able to replicate, locate and fix bugs is one of the most time consuming things in software development, and by employing the wrong techniques (for all the right reasons) you are going to waste a lot of precious time.

If you think you can develop software that works well and 'as designed', think again! It's happened to me once or twice that I wrote more than 20 lines of code and it worked the first time out...

This was such a rarity that I had to go over it back to front to make sure that I wasn't seeing things :)

Usually when I'm done debugging a piece of code I can say for the first time that I really understand it.

To read this article - if only the chapter on debugging, but the rest of it is pretty good stuff as well - is a good investment of your time.
Technically because of my one flat foot, I believe I still have a bit of metatarsal stress in that foot. People often complain that it feels worse without support (ie. barefoot) but I find it to be the opposite in my case, although after walking for an hour or more either way I do start to feel it pretty good.

What I'm hoping and seems to be working a bit is that walking barefoot more helps strengthen my arch and other less-used muscles in my foot and that helps eliminate this too. But I expect that's not a 100% solution and long-term I'll probably need some sort of treatment to correct the underlying cause, which is the fallen arch.

The shin splints were really painful though, and those are completely gone. If I put any downward pressure on my legs (sharp stops/turns, jump shots, etc) it used to feel like my legs could snap in half. Not fun :)
I could have sworn the parasite theory is very old. I even recall genetic studies of human head and pubic lice vs. ape and gorilla lice. The genetic history of the lice matched nicely with our hair loss genes.

And I have no trouble believing this, as well as hunting by running down, and sexual selection and fire all contributed to our hairlessnes.

Sexual selection in particular is very powerful. It routinely spawns new species. Just one female that prefers something different in males, can quickly lead to a reproductively isolated population.

Just about the only thing that I don't think is a factor is an aquatic ape phase.
For me the whole point of buying programming books is to save time and these days fewer and fewer printed books accomplish that.

Before the web I used to drive 50 miles every other weekend to buy books from Computer Literacy to add to my personal library when I didn't have a need for them because of the time saved having them at hand later. I don't do this anymore, in part because for my needs the web is often sufficient but also because Computer Literacy eventually went out of business and there's no comparable store anymore worth that trip.

These days I'm thrilled whenever I do find a printed programming book likely to save me time compared to searching the web. The last such book I found was Kurt Jung and Aaron Brown's "Beginning Lua Programming". It's full of well-organized time-saving details and an excellent companion to Roberto Ierusalimschy's "Programming in Lua", a book at the same quality level as K&R's "The C Programming Language". Unless the price is an absolute bargin, I won't bother buying a printed book unless it's as good as those.
Guess:

- Do fake A/B testing for your AppStore product page, toggle once a week and compare sales.

- For the product itself, try usability testing face-to-face with potential users, using ad-hoc distribution.
There is not a lot of information on the site. I have only a cursory knowledge of Django, but the django-cms features seem to be the same as those of Django. Can anyone enlighten me to the benefits of django-cms?
Venture Capital Is Simply Pattern Matching
The most important thing when choosing a first language is to choose a language that will allow you to get stuff done as quickly as possible. The only way to learn how to program is to build stuff, and if you optimize for that, the minor differences between two languages are actually a pretty marginal factor in comparison to the advantages of getting your hands dirty and having some early successes.

I like Python very much and think that it's a fantastic language for building things and probably the best language for learning programming. But if, say, all your friends use Ruby, or you find that Ruby has better libraries for whatever it is you hope to be doing then I'd recommend you choose Ruby. In fact, I think PHP is an awful language and that learning is is a complete waste of time, but if you're in an environment where using PHP is the best way to get up and running, you should choose that.

All other things being equal, I think Python would be the best choice for you. It's a great, very versatile language, designed from the ground to be easy to learn and understand. It comes with libraries for doing pretty much anything you might want to do with a computer. It has a wonderful community - very mature and very helpful. You'll find it easy to get very high quality help learning Python.
Speed of execution and expressiveness are common factors, and this depends on what you're doing. For instance, regular expressions. If you're doing a program that is primarily not dealing with text, but occasionally needs a regex, then Python regexes would be fine. If the program does a lot of text processing, it should probably use Perl, due to the performance and built-in syntax. And if the entire program is a simple filter, "sed" is even better than the Perl sledgehammer.

The standard library can be a big factor. Not having to download a dependency is a big win, which is why large standard libraries such as Python can often be better than something like a CPAN dependency in Perl. It can be the difference between using C++ or Objective-C, versus C. But more generally, if you need to do X, and you already know how to do it with language Y, you'll need a really good reason to try a different language.
do you remember the name of the iPhone support app?
Black Polos are serious business.
Stroke is not a brain defect.

Ischemic stroke is caused by a blood clot that could come from as far south as your legs. Hemorrhagic stroke is caused by a burst blood vessel that blocks blood getting to your brain. In both cases, stroke is the lack of oxygen to your brain.

It is largely caused by cardiovascular disease.
I do! Books are great for learning. You can tell how difficult something is simply by the weight of the book. Books have a linear structure suitable for learning. You always know how far you've got and how much you have left to learn by the number of pages left. You can even feel it with your fingers!

No online tutorial comes close. Just wish they had a CTRL+F.
It has a somewhat flexible meaning, but is usually used to refer to the partners (owners) of a business with an emphasis on the financial aspect of their ownership. The ownership has to be significant; elementary shareholders don't qualify. It is also sometimes used more loosely of corporate officers, i.e. CxOs.

The signature of a principal is often required in serious contracts. In other words, the defining attribute of a principal is his or her ability to represent the firm in a legally binding way with no limitations.
Ask HN: How or Where can I get data sets?
I need a lot of data to make my application really work. Statistics without the underlying data would help some, but I really want to be able to do my own modeling/analysis on a data set.

I've been searching the web without luck. Does anyone know of any resources for acquiring valid data sets that can be used commercially? In my case specifically, I'm looking for data related to human health, exercise and weight loss.
That's what I did. I just wanted confirmation.
You probably won't have enough experience to decide which language is a better fit for a project until you know at least one of them quite thoroughly. At that point, the differences that will actually matter to you should be much clearer.

While people can argue about the relative merits of Ruby and Python for days, the direct impact of language characteristics on a beginner are likely to be overwhelmed by other issues. For example, if a friend knows one of them quite well, go with that one - he/she can probably answer some questions, and in the short term that's far more important.

The same principle holds for Linux/BSD distributions, version control systems, and so on: If there's not a huge consensus and the differences don't mean much to you, just pick one. You'll be in a better position to make an informed decision later, and you're not stuck with it forever. Time spent trying to decide could instead be put toward learning the basics.

Another example that comes to mind is systems for parsing. There's ANTLR, lex + yacc, packrat parsers/PEGs, Prolog's DCGs, etc. While they have different strengths, any deep comparison will also nonchalantly throw around terms like LALR(1).
No venue has been listed yet but Zellerbach Auditorium has a capacity of 2089 (http://facilities.calperfs.berkeley.edu/zellerbach_auditoriu...).
http://www.allbusiness.com/glossaries/principal/4945311-1.ht...
I had some medical problems when I was growing up that caused me to black out often enough that I became pretty familiar with the sensations of the process. What you are describing sounds similar to what I would call a sense of euphoria I would experience when I first came back to consciousness.

I never got any sort of satisfactory explanation for what exactly was going on, but it almost seems to be some sort of neurochemical boot up process related to consciousness.
Some great stuff here in the comments for you, but don't get caught up in decision paralysis. The truth is no matter which you learn it will create a foundation for you to (if you're interested) pick up other languages and/or frameworks. Get one solidly under your belt. None of the languages/frameworks are perfect- all will have you scratching your head (or banging it on the table) from time to time. Some will be a better foundation than others (Ruby and Python would both be great here).

So don't spend too much more time thinking about it. If you just need someone to just tell you where to dive in so you can really get going here you go: If you have or plan on growing a beard- Python/Django. If you plan on staying clean shaven and dressing smartly- Ruby/Rails. When you've mastered the current choice and have a nice career going, go ahead and master the other(s).
With regards to visual programming, I've seen it well-executed for event driven systems.

MindRover was one example. It's a robot programming game I was involved with, released in 1999. You would put components such as radars and weapons on your vehicle. When you went to program the vehicle, it would show you the components you selected, and you could draw wires between them. The wires would create events of the form "when the radar sees the enemy, fire the laser".

You could develop fairly complex behaviors. For example, there was a logical component which worked like a state machine: you could say "when the nearby radar sees the enemy, enter the run-away mode", and program the run-away mode to ignore the radars and drive in random directions. There were also 'variable' components that kept state and could remember values from one event to the next. I am pretty sure it was Turing-complete, although sort of awkwardly so. (The events were compiled into an object-oriented language which just defined methods for everything)

MindRover's execution model was sequential in response to events, but I think this sort of event-driven visual programming would work well as a concurrent system, because it makes it hard to depend on the internal state of other components.
The way I understood it this integrates a number of common elements that go into makeing a CMS in to one package.

I'm searching around today to see how much of the 'drupal' functionality that we have used for the last 2 years or so can be achieved with django.

Unfortunately their wiki is down... I was hoping somebody here already has experience with this package.