skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah, ok, I was thinking along the lines of Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking...

Terry Pratchett is entertaining but he can't hold a candle to Douglas Adams. It's more like he's found a formula and markets the hell out of it (he's a good businessman though!).
Ours does. (Magdeburg, Germany.)
That was the original issue, but then an argument about regexps arose in the comments. The situation appears to be as follows.

1. For JSON serialization, (non-callable) objects are meant to be serialized (but, IIUC, in a way that would lose all the useful information in a regexp object) whereas functions -- more precisely, callable things -- are meant not to be (so if an object has a property whose value is a function, it should simply be omitted on serialization, and if an array contains a function, it should be replaced with null on serialization).

2. The original bug: WebKit serializes callable things the same way as uncallable ones. Everyone agrees that that's a bug, and the WebKit people have fixed it.

3. The JS spec doesn't say whether or not regexp objects are callable (equivalently, whether typeof returns "function" for them).

4. Most browsers make regexps callable. Some don't (all IE versions and Chrome up to version 2).

5. WebKit has callable regexps and accordingly doesn't (now) serialize them.

6. Firefox has callable regexps but does serialize them.

7. Nothing serializes regexps in any way that's of actual use. Firefox produces {}. WebKit doesn't serialize them.
The styling seems a little too inspired by the segway...

Silence wouldn't be valued by the bikies I've seen. Also, pedestrian accidents will probably increase for a while, until we stop trusting our ears for traffic. On my bicycle, I've noticed people not looking for traffic because can't hear any traffic.

I wonder if there is a segment of motorbike riders for whom silence is a crucial benefit? That could be a good niche to start. Teenagers, sneaking home late? Shy people? Hunters? Burglars? Spies? Ninjas?
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I think it's reasonable to ask, philosophically, whether the kind of values society and the socioeconomic system as it is configured encourages us to express are the kinds we really want to have as a species, etc.

But, as you in effect point out: From a capitalistic perspective, total, narrow commitment of the sort being chastised here is much more desirable and stands a higher chance of being amply rewarded than being a jack of all trades and a master of absolutely none.

Whether we want that kind of world is one question. But there is no question as to whether hackers participating in this world and structuring their lives to follow its built-in incentives are doing the best they can for themselves, in terms of the parameters of "success" as espoused by this system. They are.
I agree, predators could be useful; although, that might disrupt the balance yet again...
I would suggest to learn C. It might sound a little bit strange, but when you consider it, it's probably one of the best things you could do. Most of the modern languages you will need are somewhat based on C. That is especially true for compiled languages, but most script languages take their fair share of C too.

You will learn about pointers, which is important in ANY language, binary trees and stacks are good to know about too.
Russia, anyone?
This figure is possibly not all that useful.

For example here in the UK barely anyone is beign tested now: if you have flu like symptoms they assume you have H1N1 and hand you Tammiflu (there is even a phone line for you to self-diagnose.... doh). My doctor admitted to me last week that he has no idea how many of his patients are infected - it's faster just to assume swine flu - and that he suspected the figures are significantly lower (here in the UK) than reported (currently they are waffling about 100,000 new cases day)
Realism? On Hacker News? I thought we had all agreed to act as if IT consists entirely of web start-ups with no such thing as legacy, even though that's probably 99% of the pie.
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Also, does the gfs1 still have single master, so that the gfs2 has mulitple Bigtable tablets serving as distributed masters for gfs2? Is this the cause for "In fact, it just makes the bottleneck limitations of the system’s single-master design more apparent than would otherwise be the case.", as stated in the article?
Oh, and: The JS spec defines callability indirectly. There's this notion of "internal properties" (i.e., fictional properties that some objects have and some lack) and "abstract operations" (i.e., fictional functions defined on JS objects) and the spec often says things like "Such-and-such a function tests for internal property [[Foo]] and then invokes abstract operation Bar".

So, what happens when you say "f()" in JavaScript? It's defined in terms of an abstract operation called IsCallable and an internal property called [[Call]]. IsCallable, in turn, is defined as "has the [[Call]] internal property". The spec specifies, e.g., that when you define a function the resulting object has [[Call]], and that numbers don't have [[Call]].

But it never says any of the following: (1) "RegExp objects have [[Call]]". (2) "Regexp objects do not have [[Call]]". (3) "Nothing has [[Call]] unless this spec says it does". (4) "When this spec doesn't say whether an object has [[Call]], it's up to each implementation whether it does." For some other internal properties there is a clause like (3), but not for [[Call]].

Which means that it's debatable whether making regexps callable is permitted by the spec (I think it is), but (I think) it's clear that if regexps are callable then they must be treated as having [[Call]], which means that they should not be serialized. But I am not a JS expert, and you should take the above with a grain of salt.
Which is precisely what has happened in the past.

Also, it's not an air strike. They plan to shoot the animals with rifles, not drop bombs on them.
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I'd actually suggest giving Python 2.6 a shot. It's not significantly different BUT in some aspects I think it is a little easier to learn.Incidentally I find the Activestate Programming Network (ASPN: http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Python) a really useful resource for python learning - especially the cookbook.

PHP might be good to learn (so long as you avoid the bad habits it invokes) if you interested in web programming. I know others might scoff a little at that suggestion: but the online documentation is stellar and you can pick up the basics in a few weeks.

C is also hellishly useful because it will teach you some core concepts. In fact I would poke around in C anyway whatever you choose - just for "background".
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Thanks, that one's really good.
It really depends on your objective. If you want to be able to go out and score yourself a coding job and earn money quickly, any one of PHP, Ruby or Java would be ideal.

If you want to become a good enough programmer that it becomes pretty much irrelevant which language you are asked to code in, I would recommend starting with something like Scheme, perhaps with the aid of either:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Design_Programs
or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_of...
Please list a dozen. I like the challenge of attempting to break problems down into small parts. THx.
I'm really not a big fan of online application forms - is there an email address I can contact?
Library is usually much bigger, the trip to take a leak longer and more time-consuming, and the presence of other people much less physically dense. With a coffee shop there's a very, very narrow window of time in which someone can take your stuff, and it would be in full view of a much higher number of people per square meter than would be the case in a library. In many coffee shops, much of the customer floor space is within the field of vision of staff.

Oh, yeah, and fewer exits. The coffee shops I go to all have one exit, so if I want to go outside and grab a phone call, I just keep an eye on the exit. There's no other way anybody's leaving with my stuff.

So, while probability of theft may be higher in a coffee shop, it's rather harder to pull off, logistically.
You're free to state it, of course. But

1. While indeed we're likely not alone, I see no reason to think that the density of life in the universe is anything like as big as the density of life on earth.

2. What's technologically possible is clearly limited by the laws of nature, whatever they turn out to be. It could very well be that there simply is no way to travel faster than light, for instance.

3. I would be interested to know your evidence that the planet will eventually be controlled by mild-mannered nerds. (And: given your (1) and (2), isn't control of this planet rather a feeble goal anyway?)

Perhaps I'm just too much of a nerd, but I think it's important to believe things on the basis of evidence and reasoning, not on the basis of whether they feel good.
Yeah, and annoying Quixtar drones. Grrrr.
Depends on which library. If it's the library of a well-known state party school (cough http://www.uga.edu/ COUGH), you get more.
You're probably better off starting with Python 2.6. Python 3 is not seeing wide use yet, and the Python community is still revolving around Python 2.6, so that's what you'll be able to get lots of help with. IIRC Dive into Python is written for people who already have experience in programming, so it might be a bit hard if you don't, but there quite a few books about learning how to program with Python.

You can use many languages to learn, but I'm pretty sure Python is indeed the best choice for a first language.
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I disagree.

While I think C is a valuable language to learn and I agree with your reasons for learning it, I do not think it should be someones FIRST language. It would make a great second, though. Why? Because C (and C++) has a lot of confusing cruft that a beginner just doesn't need to know about. The noise in the language is too high and too much work is involved in achieving relatively simple things. A higher level language also has quicker returns, which definitely helps keep someone whos just starting out motivated. Most high level languages have better tools to learn with too, like an interactive read-eval-print-loop.

I would recommend Python. Not Python 3, but Python 2.6 - better library support.
I recommend Python because it takes very little to get working and it comes with everything a beginner would need bundled. When you're learning, you don;t need direct hardware access, you don't need direct OS interfacing, you don't need high performance (and probably wouldn't get it anyway until you learn how to write good, fast C). You DO need to get things done quickly (its hard to learn, otherwise) and you DO need an environment that doesn't require much background knowledge to work in. In Python, a simple program is simple. Theres no need to learn about "main" (and therefore functions), about includes, printf format specifiers and so on - just to write a hello world. As your skill increases, you can gradually add more language features: conditional statements, loops, I/O, functions, data structures, classes, functional programming tools, libraries, metaprogramming. You dont have to deal with manual memory management and you'll get more meaningful error messages than "segfault".

You learn a lot about PRGOGRAMMING (rather than having to deal with the low level complexities of C) which can then be applied to almost any language. If you outgrow Python (and I don't think you ever would, I know people who write some amazing stuff in Python, including HIGH PERFORMANCE CODE) you can learn C. I'd recommend it as a second language. Everything you've learned from Python will be applicable in C too. At this stage you should be well versed and pointers should come a lot more easily. You can also use Python and C together - its not even that hard.

You could easily replace Python with Ruby in the above, if you prefer. Python and Ruby are pretty much equal players.

If you don't mind going a less mainstream, I'd suggest learning Factor: a fast, powerful, very dynamic, native compiled concatenative language. It has pretty much all of lisps powerful features, with some ideas taken from Forth, Smalltalk and others, has an active community and very clean codebase. (The library code is some of the highest quality code ive seen) being stack based, it may take some effort to get into the mindset though.
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On the other hand, being highly specialized can be a bad thing. Look at all of the skilled laborers that went straight from highschool to working on the assembly line making $70k. Now that all of that work has been undercut by outsourcing to Mexico or China, what options do they have? (other than dropping their profession and learning a new one)
Hence the laboratory tested figure.
I would choose Python and Django over PHP, just because its very VERY easy to fall into the "bad habits" trap with PHP.

C makes an excellent (and important) SECOND language, but a pretty terrible first, IMHO.
A coworking facility in Atlanta? I'd love to hear more.

I live where Midtown borders downtown and am a self-employed telecom consultant - basically a glorified one-man show.
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Crime: Microsoft offers deep discounts on its OS to makers of low-spec computers.

Punishment: Some clown on the internet accuses them of "crushing" stuff.

I know that we're all supposed to hate Microsoft and all, but really, can't they even do something nice without everybody piling on them? So yeah, in order to give out a discount on low-spec machines, you need to draw a line somewhere. In a field as crowded as low-spec notebooks, chances are that line is going to be close to a few existing machines.

But really, it's just silly to pick a few of those machines that happen to be near the cutoff and pretend that somehow Microsoft decided to "crush" them.

It's a discount fer cryin' out loud. It's a good thing.
It depends on what you want to accomplish, if you want build some real stuff like web apps then I will take Ruby or Python for start.

If you want to take this route for taste of programming I will take a Haskell, it is much more easier to start with it if you do not have much experience with imperative paradigm.
I can't imagine how learning C as a first language will be of much value, other than it will be so hard and confusing and slow it will make other options later on seem light and easy. C is a fine language for when you need to do very low-level work, but it lacks most of the abstractions that make modern programming languages so easy to learn and work with.

I must say (not for the sake of picking a fight, but because this is the answer to a real person's question) that I think this is not good advice. If you get into programming, sooner or later you might want to learn C, but for now it will only make the experience frustrating for you.
Nice article. I should pass it along to everyone who tells me I need to raise prices and spend more on marketing.

Edit: I mean, I see the 'don't focus on value, focus on perceived value' attitude every day, and I find it irritating. that's not the business I want to be in. I'm pretty happy with the current profitability of my company. Sure, I could double or so, and I'd be much happier, but I think there is value to trying to provide a product that is of the same quality as the competition, but at a lower price. Commodities are good things. I think it is reasonable to focus on building something better rather than on selling something better, and ultimately, a 'commodity' service is far better for the consumer than something proprietary.
Tell me about it. I just can't do any serious work on any conceivable laptop I could own for that very reason.
no need to panic or flog anyone. OCC isn't competition, right? i mean, you both sell choppers to slightly different niches. this article will only help drum up business for EV bikes.
Definitely ... it is the latest worth-noting language hitting mainstream today.

The most simplistic, user-friendly and well suited for all your tasks.
I really am amazed at the fact that no one has a problem with a link to a .js file. I'm not a security nut and this bothers me. The fact that it doesn't bother anyone else just shows that incredibly smart people like the folks at HN are not immune to apathy or hubris (I'm not sure which) when it comes to computer security.

And the excuse that, "We all already know how to view the source" is so lazy that I don't know what to say lol. I can't think of another site in which someone posting a javascript link would (a) be allowed, and (b) not be instantly jumped all over. There's a reason for that...
That only goes so far. Big screen gives you the ability to see many things "simultaneously" -- well, requiring only to cast your eyes, not make distracting and tedious mouse or keyboard movements and process mental context switches from the contents of a totally different desktop.
OpenVPN is a godsend.
If I were to start over again I would have started with Scheme as a good first programming language.
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"Another of Microsoft’s chief vices is to over-engineer things. Engineers are always looking for ways to overhaul old sub-systems with monster functionality, and breath-taking designs. This is akin to building a rocket powered scooter with fuel cells when all a kid wants is a skateboard to get across the street."

...

"The details for why these failures occur are numerous, but the result is the same: a technology gets built that just collects dust but never gets removed, and still requires constant maintenance."

This doesn't sound like innovation to me -- it sounds more like my first few programming projects.

YAGNI and KISS are first principles in building excellent, long-lived software. The Microsoft portrayed in this article hasn't yet learned this, and is excitedly building the next great Rube Goldberg abstraction.
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I might be in one of the weirdest places to do stuff, a kebab house in turke. i'm not "working" here, i'm currently in holiday and that was the only place i could find free WiFi
Python, Ruby, JavaScript and Perl are all fantastic learning languages. They have good books (Perl probably wins on this count and JavaScript probably loses), good communities (again Perl is awesome with PerlMonks.org, but all of them have good communities), lots of interesting features that will bend your brain in pleasant ways (all are dynamic multi-paradigm languages allowing OO, functional, and imperative programming techniques), while automatically handling all of the stupid tedious stuff that C and Java and C++ and Objective C impose on you, and they are useful real world languages that people use to build real software every day.

For sheer ubiquity, JavaScript can't be beat. In five years, I suspect we will all be writing a lot more JavaScript, no matter whether we are frontend web developers or not. But, for now, the backend is still better written in one of the other languages I've mentioned (or PHP).

gdp mentioned HTDP and SICP. He's right, though you have to phrase your question differently...because the language of those books is not a language most real world programmers would suggest you learn. And yet, if you want to be a good programmer, there are probably no better resources. The books and lectures are available for free from various (legal) sources, and provide a really solid foundation on which to build your programming skills. I strongly suspect spending 3-6 months on these two resources and learning Scheme would accelerate your development in any other language enough to repay the upfront cost within a year or two. Becoming a programmer is a multi-year investment, so that's a really good deal, even if it looks like the long way around.
My biggest problems with trying to work in a variety of public places (coffee shops, libraries, universities, Panera, lobbies of various buildings, whatever) are:

- Lack of large display. I can't really do anything serious on a laptop anymore. I know I used to before large displays are affordable, but it just feels indispensable now - for development work, at least.

- LATENCY! Public wifi hotspots suffer from lack of QoS policing or fair queueing, and there are always going to be a few annoying people with virus-laden Windows laptops around to help slow things down. I work on large telecom systems that pretty much require me to do my development remotely via SSH and/or SSHFS and/or NFS over VPN; there is no local development alternative for me. I can't cram my stuff onto a laptop. So, if I have to deal with substantial lag (consistent or spikes) over an SSH session my productivity just circles the drain.
I can't tell if you are serious or not...
I work for a major law firm (think top 6 worldwide) and we run a DM system that requires IE6 only (ie, doesn't work in IE7 even) so every office worldwide is tied into IE6.

Only recently have we started rewriting it to work in newer browsers ... and I don't expect a working prototype before middle of next year!
I would definitely suggest replacing Houston with Austin on that list. Houston is pretty culturally devoid, whereas Austin is more of a Portland/Seattle type city.
Seems to be by Paul Krugman. He's always worth reading.
The introductory programming course's language of choice at my university was C. I have mixed feelings about learning C as a first language. I remember the people who go it right from the start benefited the most and got a good base for the rest of their programming learning/experience. But the people who had trouble grasping some concepts of C, got stuck with that and later ended up hating either C or programming altogether. (Disclaimer: this was a class full of all kinds of engineering students, not just CS).

Anyway, I think C could be an excellent second language to learn. Starting with something having a similar syntaxis like Javascript could be a good choice and pretty helpful in the future too. Plus, you won't need an IDE, a compiler, setting up a server or a database, only a browser.
Ask HN: Quickest way to get up to speed in Scala ?
Title says it all. I've come to the conclusion that I need to go and invest time into Scala but I haven't a clue where to start from.
Awesome. Do u have an H1b visa? Good on Daniel for sorting it out. Doesn't it get expensive for a startup to sponsor H1b visa btw?
I doubt that they will shoot 650 thousands of them with rifles.
As far as I remember, Qik (http://www.qik.com) was hiring Ruby gurus recently, and Parallels (http://www.parallels.com) constantly looks for Java/C++ engineers. Both are in Moscow.

Privet. :)
This really gives you an idea of how long 100 years has gotten.

Krugman was asked to predict the state of the world in 2096, and and most of his vision is happening right now.

And then there are things he didn't mention, but which have (or will shortly) become technically feasible. I think any of these are potentially more world-shifting than, say, the decline of the American suburb:

- Real-time neuron-level simulation of human brains (~10 years to go)

- Design of artificial proteins

- Machine vision good enough to drive cars/trucks

Personally, 2096 looks further away the closer we get to it.
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I have never heard eigenvectors called identity vectors, and a quick Google search turns up no examples of that usage.