skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not actually about breaking functionality. Both java and python go through a long deprecation period before removing language features. Most Python 2.4 code will run on 2.6 just fine, a few warnings nonwithstanding. Just like most Jdk1.3 code will run on 1.6, again with a bunch of deprecation warnings.

The bigger problem with willy-nilly upgrades is that the new version is not the version you tested on. It might introduce new bugs, unwillingly. I have seen many more subtile problems with minor version jdk updates (e.g. changes in GC behaviour or outright segfaults) than with any python upgrade so far.

The gist is that when you upgrade your environment then you'll just naturally also update the codebase to match it anyways. Or do you upgrade your jdk1.3 project to jdk1.6 and then just ignore the 20 screens of warnings scrolling down on each build?

You don't. You either just stick with what works (for finished projects) or port it forward (for ongoing projects).
Quite simple. Inculcate the following wisdom in your education.

"A country is not made of land; a country is made of its people." --Unknown
There was a flight simulator hidden in MS Excel 97 as well, which makes even less sense. The only thing that sort of rationalizes it is that it's a stripped-down version of MS Flight Simulator.
The EB-5 visa is designed for foreign investors to get a green card if they are willing to bring capital to the US and create at least ten full-time jobs. Unfortunately, this program applies to the investor who holds the capital, and not the entrepreneur who discovers how to put that capital to use. A small change in the law could have a big impact on entrepreneurship in this country, and that's what [McClure] proposed

If all they did was extend that same provision to founders, it wouldn't do much good, because few early-stage startups create 10 full-time jobs out of the gate. Indeed, that would be an anti-pattern. However, these guys must know that.
I like this advice: "A person who studied stage lighting in college and worked in Hollywood discovered that almost no one makes it in the fun job of lighting. The people who make more money more regularly are those who become lighting salesmen."
Why does he feel the need to "defend" India to some stranger? (fwiw I am Indian)

EDIT: to be fair, it is an old article, and probably written in a moment of despair.
I am having trouble thinking of a good way to implement this..

How will you differentiate between the next google and Joe with 2,000$ wanting to start up a lemonade stand?
And the java style guide?!?!
Google has invested a lot in java projects, I don't think they don't care about the style there.
Strange...
so how do i sweet talk a .forward from you?
i'm pretty good at baking if that helps
Don't you think a hybrid is more likely?

All the qualities of both?
Events Often Overtake Companies
$1500/yr for that? Come on...
Have you ever seen a 100 year old tree?
The Python community, being relatively small, seems to dig this aggressive way of making changes to libraries and the interpreter itself. It has many advantages and speaking of disdvantages, most of the ones you specify are really non-issues.

I mean, you're not forced to use the newest version of the interpreter. You're not forced to use the newest version of any library. Moreover, you're not forced to use a single specific version of the interpreter on a machine. And with the use of virtualenv or buildout, you won't complain that your application used to work, and it doesn't, because the environment evolved.

And if you're "scpying directories" between servers, relying on whatever version of the interpreter you find, you're doing it wrong.
"The simulator was originally inserted as an easter egg but has since become one of the official features of the programme."
Sounds like the people on the beautification project had a lot of inbreeding of ideas. Crap like that just seems a way to justify a decision. I mean how many people actually tripped on those tree wells or on acorns on the ground? How much money is it costing to tear down those old trees and replace them with new ones?

This is just a small number of people trying to force their idea of what will look good onto the larger community. Bringing in things like 'tripping hazard' and 'the seeds are more pedestrian friendly' are just way to try and justify their actions/views against people that are outside of their group. It sounds good and all about wanting the trees to be a uniform height, but I suspect that decision was made partially because they expected there to be public outcry. They just wanted to tear down the trees without giving people a chance to rally against the action. Now people are stuck with the decision whether they like it or not.
At a glance, this looks kind of like a cross platform copy of the Mac-only (due to Mac library PDF support) application Skim.

http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/
Geocaching: Hiking for Geeks
Ooh, yeah, that's nicer :) By the way, I love the editor. The slider bars that change color are amazing and the way it saves the colors you've used is convenient.
Sounds more like the business owners didn't like the trees and wanted to get rid of them. All other reasons are probably just there to justify it in a way that doesn't make them look like the 'bad guys.'
What is really needed: Genetic engineering to get land-based crops to produce the omega 3 fatty acids DHA and EPA.

This will not provide me with delicious sashimi. I somehow doubt the majority of the increased demand for fish is because people want their oil for health reasons. A better source of food for the farmed fish would be a more practical way to mitigate the environmental stress caused by aquaculture.
tried to grep the source. but all I could find was

// IID for the nsIRenderingContext interface

// 37762dd8-8df0-48cd-a5d6-24573ffdb5b6

#define NS_IRENDERING_CONTEXT_IID \

{ 0x37762dd8, 0x8df0, 0x48cd, \

{ 0xa5, 0xd6, 0x24, 0x57, 0x3f, 0xfd, 0xb5, 0xb6 } }

which does not mean anything to me.

other example, that also do not work with minefield: http://www.c3dl.org/

Official word: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Canvas:3D
The point is that such a drastic action (e.g. cutting down ALL the trees on a frequented, busy downtown area) should be voted on by the citizens/tax-payers. In this case, a relatively small number of people instituted a drastic change without consulting 99% of the people that it would affect. Not only that, but it is an IRREVERSIBLE change. If they had decided to repave the sidewalks or repaint the lampposts, it would be a different story. Had it been a single tree or only a couple of trees (that weren't prominently display -- e.g. signifying the center of town or something) it might be excusable. But to tear down that many trees without any sort of public input on the matter other than 'the public tasked us with beautifying the city' is irresponsible at best and malicious at worse.
Is the Internet melting our brains?
So much better than so much of the discussion around Tornado, that's for sure.

Definitely would like to see two more takes:
* long-poll setup (lots of idle connections with sporadic bursty activity)
* thundering herd (max sustainable active connections)
What do I need to do so that this page doesn't appear when I try to save my avatar?
http://www.imageboard.net/create/avatar/
1994, and SGI IRIX already shipped with browser plugin for 3D and 3d content creator. even the lowly 8bit indy could handle it. VRML at it's best (if it had any best...)

The 5.3 or 6.2 version of Irix (do not recall which one, the one that shipped with netscape 2.0) also had all the admin apps written in html+javascript, but completely merged with the OS look n feel. you simply couldn't tell.
Maybe someone should track these people down in a few years when the new trees are installed. Tell them that the new trees are diseased and need to be completely replaced a second time. Then ask them what their opinion is. If their opinion is, "There's nothing wrong with those trees." Then you know that the axed the oaks just because they preferred maples... no other reason.
Using something that requires you to understand a couple big ideas ("formal theory", as you put it) is usually a lot less complex than using something that doesn't, but requires you to remember a bunch of inconsistencies and exceptions to rules. It's easier to remember concepts than details.

I haven't used Scala, but it's certainly a more general rule. Prolog or Make, for example, are damn simple once you understand the model they're based on - they're just fundamentally different from (say) Java or Python. Make has a reputation of being weird and complicated* because people assume its complexity adds to whatever model they're familiar with, but actually it replaces it entirely. Once you understand make's underlying model, everything you need to know to use it would comfortably fit on one page.

* Except the GNU make extensions added to bend gmake into a more 'conventional' tool / make it work with the autotools. The original, non-GNU make is vastly simpler. (Same with gawk vs. regular awk.)
That person's art looks eerily similar to _why's.
Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against Scribd
As was said before you are arguing for forward compatibility as backwards compatibility between point releases is guaranteed.

If you have code that works fine in Python 2.4 upgrading to 2.5, 2.6, 2.7 etc won't break your program. If you write you program in Python 2.6 you have to take special care if you want it to run in 2.4. Until Django decides to bump up the minimum version required, which I believe is at 2.3 now, you have nothing to worry about.

Since Python 3.x is not a point release, compatibility is not guaranteed anymore between 2.x. The 2to3 tool will take care of all the easier but time consuming tasks. Why waste the man hours converting 'print x' to 'print(x)' and 'xrange' to 'range' if there is a free tool to do it for you?

Really you are making a mountain out of a mole-hill. If you are not updating your software/site anymore with new features let it be. Python interpreters can run side by side.
> it works, at least for me.

It's just easier to say, "it works for me." By saying 'it works, at least for me,' you're claiming that it will always work everywhere 100% of the time... then saying "but I could be wrong." This is just anecdotal evidence. It's possible that none of your friends are the kind of people that would react that way, or that you have a personality that causes people to quickly forgive you for such things.
Yes, I can certainly point you in the right direction.

Toby Segaran, author of the highly esteemed and good-read Programming Collective Intelligence (published by O'Reilly, so you know it's good), released all of the source code that he talked about in the book. You can find it all here on his blog: http://blog.kiwitobes.com/?p=44.

He talks about hill climbing and variants (random restart, simulated annealing). He does a great job of explaining the algorithm and the math behind the hill climbing decisions. For optimization, something hill climbing is not even the best tool. Look at some of the other optimization strategies he employs (specifically the genetic mutation algorithm).

I highly recommend buying the book, even if only one chapter currently interests you. I bet you the other chapters will too. It's on Amazon, and at B&N if you want it this second.
Glad you mentioned the UK or I would have no idea what the hell you meant by NA.
It's only a slight exaggeration. In the OP he states "my heart just said yes, it wasn't' a rational choice but an instinctive emotional one". The original article also states/quotes that picking an esoteric language is a good idea because that way you attract people who learn languages for fun. The "let's use a cool language" attitude is very visible here on HN.

I stand by what I said in (b). That you shouldn't pick a language because it's fun -- this I find almost self-evident. When you want to build a business you need to be more pragmatic and you need to consider other factors. Django and Rails are now probably the most popular frameworks for web 2.0 shops. I claim they are not very stable (and I provide supporting arguments in other posts). So I argue that using Django/Rails is adventurous enough. Barely stable enough obviously doesn't mean that it's unusable or worthless. The success of many Django/Rails projects is evidence of that.

The onus is on those who use non-mainstream languages to provide evidence there is an advantage. I claim there is no advantage, and I point out several downsides. If I claim that using Assembly for web programming is foolish you wouldn't expect me to show you why either.

"But of course there are obvious exceptions" covers the few businesses that have become successful. Here too, the onus is not on me to prove that Lisp did not contribute to their success, the onus is on those who are successful to show that it is Lisp that made it so. The reddit people drank the cool-aid, and it didn't work out for them. A single data point, I know.

I'm not taking back anything I said. I stand by it. I find that some of you are looking for things to disagree with, and you read my statements in the most objectionable way. You're saying you know what I meant better than I did when I wrote it. That's quite presumptuous. To attack my character by implying I'm trying to weasel out of anything is most uncalled for.

My claim that Perl didn't exist when viaweb was started was indeed stupid. Had I known viaweb started in 1995 I would never have said that. I (mis)remembered something pg said some time back, along the lines of "if I had to start viaweb today, I would use Python or Ruby". Maybe pg never said that, I don't know. Either way, I was completely wrong there.

edit: found the reference http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36905 (I was wrong)
Yuk. I'm no fan of scribd, judging these lawyers by reputation they'll find a way to mess up their case.

Isn't it the case that class action status first has to be granted ? And if so has that already happened ?
With all due respect to these guys, 50M to market their product sounds unreal. They should publish their marketing plan and let let the public help them out.
The "reversed stupidity is not intelligence" principle and its corollaries are all true, but only trivially so. In fact, many good ideas and opportunities can be found simply by reversing what stupid people are doing (intelligent people, even). Stupidity is more than falsehood. It's a certain kind of attunement to the world: conformist, short-sighted, demanding. By seeking it out and "reversing" it, you can often find new and fruitful directions to explore.

Here is a down-home example. I have a couple friends who occasionally give me advice. For them, it's probably good advice. But not for me. One day, it occurred to me to always do the opposite of whatever they said. Wonderful results! I would never have thought of some of these things without their advice.

Does this mean to run headlong against everything you hear? Of course not. That would be stupid.
OMG programming language design is going postmodern.
But my tweets are already busy supporting the Iranian revolution!
I see similar misguided attitudes in both science and medicine. A pre-disposition, often strongly held, in practitioners to falsely equate "not proven" with "doesn't exist". It leads to many poor decisions, especially as some of these people are in positions of heightened responsibility and influence.

I think that sometimes, although not always, these attitudes are held as a matter of convenience. If an idea can be dismissed immediately and out of hand, the person dismissing it doesn't have to deal with, or even think about, its implications.

In the case of animals, if they are "mere brutes", then you are free to do with them as you please. Nice escape from any further ethical implications, in your own mind. Or the terror of contemplating one's own existence, and whether it may similarly be at the mercy of the larger world.
There's no relevant difference between GV and the plethora VOIP & dialer apps out there. At least none that would be explained away with a straight face by the "core functionality" argument.
His comments read as very general to me, but the intro commenting on the trigger for his thoughts was good and it made a strong closing. His thoughts felt like they had been abstracted from any one specific case.

From you're perspective, maybe that's right. Maybe India is similar to where the US was before the civil rights movement. Ostensibly free for everybody, but not quite. Of course the civil rights movement couldn't come quickly enough and there are still problems today, so it is right that someone should love their culture and wish the flaws to be mended. As things continue maybe they will improve naturally. I don't know enough to feel sure, but it will be interesting. (Though I am not familiar with India and so my comparison is meant only very loosely.)
We've solved this semantic issue. Redundancy is used to refer to availability while backup is used to refer to recovery from data loss. Hence the R in RAID.
Performance aside, the release of Tornado has been very good for the non-blocking httpd world.
> I have no idea how it can be interpreted as an insult.

http://esolangs.org/wiki/Esoteric_programming_language

> It's meant as the opposite of mainstream; languages you won't find at IBM.

Then what you're looking for is "non-mainstream". Or maybe "suit-incompatible". And FWIW IBM has a lot of Python stuff in their developerworks site and newsletter. And given Erlang comes from Ericsson, not exactly a small company, it's hardly "suit-incompatible".
My eyes are very good. Infact, even sitting at a distance of a few meet I can see individual pixels and sometimes even the subpixels.
North-East Passage navigated [video]
Brilliant - thanks - I'll check that out.

I do know that hill-climbing isn't always the best strategy - I've got experience. What I'm lacking is knowledge of people from other disciplines doing things in an organised and more complete manner. This is a good start.

I've also found AIMA stuff on Google - http://code.google.com/p/aima-python/ - which claimsto be a Python implementation of algorithms from Russell and Norvig's 'Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach'
Ruby on the JVM is production ready. Apparently Thoughtworks generally deploy on it. I've got it in production too - there's a few very very minor issues, but basically rock solid.

http://martinfowler.com/articles/rubyAtThoughtWorks.html
You are used to it. So am I. If you use a stupid design often enough you become immune to its failings. The concept of disk images is needlessly complex, confusing and way too abstract.

You download a file that is a image of a disk, you have to mount that file, you have to drag the contained app to wherever you put your apps and then unmount the disk image. Can’t you see the craziness of this approach?

On a Mac your app is a single file (it isn’t, but behaves that way) you can drag anywhere and if you don’t like it anymore you trash it. Delivering your app with a .dmg breaks this simple model. Suddenly this app you see sitting there must be first dragged somewhere before you can use it (and you don‘t even get a warning if you don’t). And you have to handle a completely virtual disk image as if it were some real disk. Crazy.
well-paying day jobs that can subsidize their startup hobby on the side

My well-paying hobby subsidizes the day job at the moment. ;)

Seriously though: if you're charging money for whatever you're selling, servers via any of the above methods are dirt cheap. Its not quite on the same level as "economize on what brand of pens I use", but it would be impossible for me to meaningfully affect my life via switching hosting providers, whereas it is very possible to meaningfully effect my life via doing productive work on the business.

Accordingly, I suggest optimizing for whatever provider or system gets you back to solving problems for your paying customers. (I use Slicehost, for what it is worth.)
It scares them to have the web as a platform as it marginalizes two of it's cash cows: Office and Windows.

Them not innovating is actually a smart business decision from their angle.
If you haven't seen his TED talk, it's here:

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y...
Bianca Gonzales covers UNO Magazine September 2009
Bianca Gonzales covers UNO Magazine September 2009, she is a Filipino TV host and model. She is the previous contestant of Big Brother and other reality shows.
Do their forums even work for you?

I just got back, and I'm needing to look at the google cache of almost every mozilla forum page; I haven't gotten through to their forums a single time yet.

Their 'search moz code' thingy still works -- searching it for WebGL turns up lots ... I mean LOTS ... of code. But even though I've found a list of enums for contexts, etc, I still haven't quite found where the mapping is, or where the actual base getcontext() function is located.

I have powerful procrastination forces pushing me, though.
"The "let's use a cool language" attitude is very visible here on HN."

Some evidence would be nice. I don't see it at all in the sense you claim i.e "we'll use a cool language because it makes us cool". No one I know on HN ever makes that claim or thinks that way. And yet to you it is "very visible". Links please?

"The reddit people drank the cool-aid, and it didn't work out for them. A single data point, I know"

But you don't accept "single data points" in the other direction do you? ViaWeb, Jane Street, Orbitz, FlightCaster?

"single data point I know" ;-)

"The onus is on those who use non-mainstream languages to provide evidence there is an advantage."

You are the one who makes outrageous claims that there is no productivity gain without ever actually using "esoteric" languages in a business context, so you could have some experience backing t your claim that there is no productivity increase. Your troubles upgrading Python (or whatever, your arguments on this are very vague and unconvincing) are not sufficient. Sorry.

When people who actually do use powerful languages to run their businesses report increased productivity, you refuse to accept it or consider it a possibility.

<Shug> Flip Bit. Move on.

"You're saying you know what I meant better than I did when I wrote it."

I don't know you in person. I have to judge your argument by what you actually write not by what you thought in your innermost heart when you wrote it. In your writing you come across as uninformed wrt your claims, and constantly shifting positions when confronted with counter claims, citations or evidence.

That said, I am done discussing this with you. Your argument has nothing backing it but "I think thus and thus with no experience or data or evidence and I refuse to consider anything contrary to my stated position".

Good Bye, Have a nice day.
> Take Python: print used to be a keyword, now it becomes a function. I think it's too late for that kind of change, and it's only a minor blemish in the language anyway. You can't upgrade to Python 3 until every single library on your server has been updated.

Stop using Python 3 as an example of "python instability" damn it, it's a change known to be incompatible, it's been in preparation for 5 years, it's not an evolution one's supposed to take lightly and it does not mean the end of the 2.x branch for at least a pair of years.

Before that, here's the track record of Python backwards compatibility: you can run Python 1.6 (2000-09-05) code on Python 2.6. In fact that's exactly what ElementTree does.
bunny1 – A Command Line for Your Browser’s Location Bar
Shut up, Brain. Stop Thinking About Cool Shit.
Their product is better than okay. I can't think of anybody competing with them who does what they do better than they do.
ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up (2001)
The Best Plugins For Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal. 20 of Each.
If this means I won't have to deal with the indefatigable Charlotte bot ever again, I'll be a happy camper.