skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"PG built Viaweb in Lisp because there was no Ruby, Python or Perl back then."

First, you were the one suggesting we don't use Ruby or Python, in 2009 in the name of "stability". and now you are saying PG would have used these "unstable" languages in 1995 "if they existed" which brings me to

"because there was no Ruby, Python or Perl back then."

You are wrong.

ViaWeb was started in 1995

Perl was available (and being used to build websites) in 1995. Python was available too. Do your research before making ridiculous claims!

As PG says in one of his essays (link below)

"During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers."

;-)

You go on to say,

"If there is excellent rationale for picking an esoteric language, I'd love to hear it."

Start with the PG essay I quoted above, http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html

many nice points there, for e.g:

"In fact, choosing a more powerful language probably decreases the size of the team you need, because (a) if you use a more powerful language you probably won't need as many hackers, and (b) hackers who work in more advanced languages are likely to be smarter."

He (and others) have written a lot about this. Again, do your research. You may or may not agree with the rationale he puts forward, but you undermine your own argument when you make up things to strengthen it (like perl not existing in 1995).
What lawsuit?
Reminds me of this: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/11/understandin...
Why not? It's shipping with VS 2010.
"PG built Viaweb in Lisp because there was no Ruby, Python or Perl back then."

Then why did he build Hacker News in Lisp?
I just downloaded and installed the latest Minefield nightly. I enabled the single webgl option in about:config.

Not a single one of the examples from http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/48330 are loading for me.

They all error with:

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80070057 (NS_ERROR_ILLEGAL_VALUE) [nsIDOMHTMLCanvasElement.getContext]" nsresult: "0x80070057 (NS_ERROR_ILLEGAL_VALUE)" location: "JS frame :: http://trac.webkit.org/export/48330/trunk/WebCore/manual-tes... :: initWebGL :: line 19" data: no]

etc.

Anyone on here get it working?
It's frustrating that this is the state we're in.

We've got just about everyone EXCEPT the major browser vendor working on cool, useful, forward-thinking innovations, and standardizing on them with relative ease. Yet all of this innovation is so sorely limited without Microsoft's contribution (to IE).

Normally I just nod my head and move on, but the future doesn't look any brighter for IE. Hopefully Microsoft's halfhearted interest in HTML5 will improve.

But then again, MS could drop WebKit into IE9, and we'd still be stuck, unless Microsoft shoves IE9 down the Automatic Update pipeline as a required update. Which they should, IMHO. Progress is worth some pain.
I would have appreciated a more descriptive title instead of the tabloid style one. Apologies if that seems fussy.
SearchMe saddens me because the tech was really great. They messed up with a terrible UI (= trying to be so "different" from Google) and then (I believe) a lack of funds for marketing.

In their most recent online site, I always felt it was great tech terrible product. Sucks.
I've been using Clojure to "sketch" solutions for a Java project, then translating the results back into Java when I'm happy with it.

This gives me a REPL I can use to type in expressions referencing my existing code base and immediately see the result. Clojure has macros that make typing in many Java expressions require even fewer parens than Java itself! PG came up with the sketching analogy to describe what its like trying things in an interactive environment, immediately seeing the results, then modifying little by little to eventually get the result you want.

When I switch back to Java, on the other hand, I feel like I'm chiseling my code in granite. I need to have all of the boiler plate just so before I can see any results at all, followed by a compile and run or debug cycle. Test driven development makes this a little better, but just a little.
I stand corrected! Thanks for the follow up. Apologies, in the past I have noted that people do in fact delete their comments do avoid downmodding. It would be nice of course after a comment if parent became frozen.
The initial hump in hiring is always the shortlist - you might get a hundred (or a thousand!) CVs and you can maybe first-interview 10 and second-interview 2-3. So the priority is always to get down to a manageable list by rejecting candidates who are obviously unsuitable.

So you are correct, but you could probably even trust your HR department armed with a suitable list of esoteric languages keywords (instead of their usual "Java" etc) to build you a pretty good first-interview shortlist, even if you were after Java developers.
No. Esoteric languages are a fairly clear category of languages created to test the boundaries of language design.

Esoteric languages are not created for real-world usage (or even for usage at all), examples of such languages are INTERCAL, Thue, Unlambda, Moo, Befunge or Java2K. They can be turing tarpits (languages with extremely low number of commands), funges (multi-dimensional programs), nondeterministic (from a given global state A and a current instruction f, the next state `f A` of the system can't be predicted)…

There's nothing esoteric about a language such as Erlang created very specifically to solve industrial problems, or even about languages originally created for research (ML or Haskell), especially when they've now leaked into practical, real-world programming outside of academia.
I think his slides accomplish exactly what you are saying he isn't accomplishing, but "perception" truly varies now doesn't it? ;)
One letter Domains in danger of extinction
That's really, really cool, although from the domain name I thought it was going to be some sort of online potluck organizer (which would have also been cool)
Which shows a potential danger of using more "stable" languages. Maybe the biggest flaw of Common Lisp is that the standard lacks many features necessary for modern development, like networking, threads, and Unicode. I think that the C++ standard lacks a String class (please correct me if I'm wrong).

So sometimes "stable" can degenerate into "frozen solid." Not having new libraries is arguably as bad as not being stable.
@jimbokun
"I've been using Clojure to "sketch" solutions for a Java project," and "When I switch back to Java, on the other hand, I feel like I'm chiseling my code in granite." remind me of this bit from SICP

"Pascal is for building pyramids -- imposing, breathtaking, static structures built by armies pushing heavy blocks into place. Lisp is for building organisms -- imposing, breathtaking, dynamic structures built by squads fitting fluctuating myriads of simpler organisms into place."

It seems that some things never change!
Scala is _not_ some esoteric MIT, CMU language to make a point exercise. Its a pragmatic and practical attempt to "fix" Java so it has all the capabilities of Java with the proper foundational coherence which allows for additional, some yet to be defined or added, capabilities. Java has long ago painted itself into a corner. It has reached its evolutionary dead end.

As someone who lead a team which wrote one of the largest retail websites in the earlier days of Java, and as someone who has spent the last year rewriting legacy business logic in Scala, there is no comparison.

Scala wins not because its the new hipster language, it's distinctly superior across the board. You can write better, clearer, far more robust, far more scalable and far more easier to maintain and modify business logic at higher levels of productivity. That and its ability to work with legacy Java code makes it ideal. This is from direct and in-depth experience.

My concern with gizmo's post is its complete lack of claimed experience. No context of based on my experience where ... so we ... and then did a POC comparison with ... and found .... and concluded ...

In fact it appears very much to be a direct quote of from the preamble from the "Enterprise IT Managers Survival Handbook For Those Without Experience Or Knowledge Of Software Development Fundamentals"

Privately I've played with all of them. I love the shear outrageous power and beauty of Scheme (PLTs impl) and Haskell, the base competency of SML, and I've even used them in the enterprise in isolated in very few situations where the situation demanded it.

However, never once did it cross my mind to even "think" to introduce any of them into the enterprise (well a brief fling with Python for our operations group, it was found to be too hard).

Scala deserves to win. It is decidedly superior, however, lots of deservedly good things, in fact most, never see the light of day in IT.
Does the FF nightly work for you? It doesn't for me at the moment, at least not with those samples (link to my post below, in case this discussion gets big: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=831988).

Any tips appreciated. I'll have a few hours free this afternoon, so I may muck around with this!
In case someone gets into such a situation:

I've seen that many handcuffs can be opened with a strong, thin wire by pushing the hook, which keeps the ratchets from going back, back and pulling the ratchet out. Source was some documentation about a certain military operation where someone explained how he got out of a police station.
Cache is not working for me :(
You know, sometimes a jet engine is just a jet engine
> If you think Python and Ruby have extremely good libraries your standards are pretty low.

.Net, JVM, Perl. Apart from these, which lanngauge has better Library than Python? Python is available on two of them. Ruby one one of them at least. (I dunno if ruby is avaialble on .Net)

> CPython itself is stable and well documented, but it's frequently breaking backwards compatibility across versions.

No. Afaik, Python has never broken backward compatibility in a majot way on point releases, and even minor details are dicussed ad infintum on the mailing list. Py3K was discussed for 8 years, before being released.

> Python 2.6 libraries almost never work in 2.4

Neither do Java's library which use generics or Autoboxing work in Java 1.4. However libaries comaptible with Java 1.4 work in 1.5(or 5.0 if you will), and so do libraries which were written for Python 2.4, do in 2.5 and 2.6. Languages can only guarantee backward compatibility. I am not sure which language you work in that guarantees forward compatibility.

> and Django is unlikely to patch security issues for Python 2.4 by then. In other words, I either have to spend a week upgrading stuff that already works

Django has a stated security policy. All security bugs must be fixed for 2 point releases prior to latest release. 0.96 got official security upgrades till recently. People have backported it to 0.95 and released.

> How can we write solid and stable software if we don't have a stable foundation to build on?

Sorry, but what you are asking here is again forward compatibilty. What will you have, Django never move to 3.0?

> Python exists 20 years now and the spec is still not stable.

Define stable. Python has 1. A reference implemntation. 2. Mutiple VM implemntations, targetting the popular ones. 3. Others, (Stackless, Pypy etc). Unless you use platform specific functions, your code will run on any of these. Fyi, the reference is, http://docs.python.org/reference/introduction.html .

Probabaly you hold a problem with this philosophy, from the reference (While I am trying to be as precise as possible, I chose to use English rather than formal specifications for everything except syntax and lexical analysis. This should make the document more understandable to the average reader, but will leave room for ambiguities.) But this is a debated, and concious decision.
Lack of funding? They write in their document that total investment into the company was $45 Million
That might work if their concern is deployment of his code. But if their concern is actually maintenance (you know, patches, updates, bug fixes), than I don't see how Clojure, Scala, JPython, etc. would be any more acceptable. The concern is probably having legacy code in a language that nobody else on staff knows how to program in.
They are not in danger of extinction; there is almost assuredly someone willing to pay the 500 EUR price.

That person just isn't you.

Is it lame that nic.nu is doing this? Absolutely. Just pointing out they won't be extinct.
Google is not the Library of Alexandria
The Future of Journalism - Twitter Times
Erlang, Yaws, and the deadly Tornado
Check out Tim O'Reilly's (http://twittertim.es/timOReilly) content is very close to HN's, or at least to my reader's where 80% of links comes from HN.
Hm, while the python style guide is interesting and contains good advices, I am missing a reference to PEP8.
If you can't afford it, sell it :-)
I'd say putting corporations on the level of a sociopath is giving them undue credit. Their level of intellectual sophistication is probably more on the level of an insect. It makes no more sense to apply human rights to corporations than to honeybees. Both are indispensable to modern society, but we don't talk about the free speech rights of honeybees.

The reason is that people confuse the corporation with its component members, ie its personnel because the corporation can't be visualized the way a bee can. As such visualizations become more common, I think people will see more clearly that giving corporations human rights is ludicrous.

That isn't to say that we shouldn't give them certain privileges, but the power to regulate a for-profit corporation should be absolute, since it owes its existence to a government charter in the first place.
No, I've found that too. My fork on github [0] has the necessary patches to make the "should this be enabled" function make its decision on the basis of a GET parameter, so you can do ?toolbar-enabled=1 and ?toolbar-enabled=0 or whatever.

[0] http://github.com/durin42/django-debug-toolbar
Google Announces Upgrade to its Ad Empire
Easy, just use "import evolution".

But really, the source code of that would be really cool to see.
It's great to see a moderate, experienced voice weigh in on things. Several months ago, a lot of doomsayers were getting more credence than they should have from the geek community (the US is going to descend into chaos within 6 months crap, etc - give me a break) but as always, the "middle way" proves right. Even if we've lost a stackload of wealth, we're still better off than 99.9% of the rest of humanity who came before us.
As a test app for his programming language, of course. Not because it's the best tool for the job. He essentially built an entire language for this website -- that won't give you a highscore in the productivity hall of fame :)
Haha, yes. I find that if I'm presenting ideas in a flowing, narrative fashion, simply writing works. If, however, I'm trying to connect dots, come up with new ideas, etc, it has to be paper. Most note taking falls into the latter category for me.
Fernandoprats.com - imágenes @ festival of brown, perre
As I understand it, the point of the presentation was highlighting the incidental complexity arising from the implicit instability of mutable state. If an immutable snapshot of the whole program state was an implicit parameter to functions, that wouldn't be so bad. It's the fact that anything can pull out the rug from under your feet at any time that creates the need for paranoid constructs in most classical concurrent programming.
Does anyone even care? Even if there was Google Voice on the iPhone, would you use it?

Having said that, the TC headline may as well be right. This is one nuke that Apple is going to find hard to swallow.
No eyebrows = you’re less recognizable [pdf]
I saw no new terms to add to my dictionary in that presentation.

If you looking for new ideas to add to your language, then look at the world:

* hibernate mode decreased computer boot time from minutes to seconds. Is your new supper-pupper language supports that? Can you freeze your program and distribute it in that frozen mode?

* web-applications provide instant access to ready to work application. Is your new supper-pupper language supports that? Is your language support instant access, like built-in access to SQL data base or XMLRPC service?

* Is Map-Reduce supported directly by your language?

* Is your language has support for regular expressions in language?

* Can you create parallel constructs with ease, like "foo | bar" in shell?

* Did your language supports built-in tree system ("boxes", "DOM", file system, etc.) and ICRUD, XPATH, CSS for these trees?

* Can your language automatically take corrective actions in case of error? Like "on SQL error FooBar: rescue database OR restore database from backup OR switch to new database".

* Can your code depend on something? Can you write "Class FooBar. Requires application mysql >= 5.0, external resource myapp-application-scheme >= 1.2. Conflicts with module FooBarBaz. Provides fooBarBaz. Obsoletes FooB."?

* Can you upgrade your application on the fly without restart and losing data or breaking anything?

* Can you compose program without editing files, just by creating and copying of files and directories? (dot-dir pattern)

And so on.
You really seem to be missing the point. Yes insurance in general is currently not in the best shap, but it still does work for some people. It seems to me that you have been letting the negative connotation of current situation of health/whatever insurance go to your head without seeing that it currently does have benefits for some people right now. Yes right now. I too think the insurance industry sucks, but if it can benefit a particular person, then why not use it. It makes no sense not to.

The perfect example being that dental insurance can work in some instances. I have personally used it successfully in the past in have saved a lot of money using it on a fillings procedure. And that is just one example.

Again the only reason why I am asking here is to find a solid company that a lot of others recommend. It looks like the latest comment is one of them.
Have you poked around the (Java) source for clojure's data structures? It's very readable, and if you have any ideas for improving their memory footprint, I think a lot of people (including myself) would appreciate hearing about them.
I can see paying off my your parent's mortgage [if I could], they did after all give me free board and food for ~18 years etc. I do after all owe them. I'm not sure about friends and other family, they'd probably see it as an insult - I'd probably offer to help them get training/education either as a loan or a gift [again if I could].
"And how would a corporation publish a prospectus without the right to speak?"

Bear in mind that the corporation is free to do anything that isn't prohibited. What we're talking about here is whether a corporation can avoid a legitimately-enacted regulation by claiming immunity based on a fundamental human right. Corporations can go right on publishing prospecti. And corporate officers are immune from liability (except in certain extreme cases of wrongdoing).

This will be the case as long as government (ie, we the people) decide it's in our best interests. If for some reason government (again, us) decide it's no longer in our best interest, then we can prohibit publishing a propectus without fear of violating some imaginary entity's rights. We can already prohibit the formation of corporations entirely (ie, withdraw the privilege of immunity that corporate officers enjoy), so it is simply silly to say that we can't regulate them on some bizarre human rights claim.

The reason this comes up in the election context is that corporations want to double dip: all of their personnel can give to the individual limit, then give again in the name of the imaginary entity. It's a shell game, and it's good to see Sotomayor is smart enough to see it.
Google easter eggs
Nice to hear that the progress is that steady.
Prevent credit cards fraud
Making payments options secure for eBusiness and rendering credit card fraud protection to online merchants to curb revenue loss on account of chargeback’s, fax 1-800-482-6767.
if the $20 bought part ownership and a share of any future sale, then I think more people would be interested.
And they definitely used some of it for marketing. They had billboards all around the SF area.
Trying to avoid sounding like a fan-boy but your python bashing goes a bit far, imho.

CPython itself is stable and well documented, but it's frequently breaking backwards compatibility across versions.

I think you are over-dramatizing this. The big transition to Python 3.0 is still ahead of us. I'm using python since 2.3 and the path to 2.6 has been much less troublesome here than CPAN or the jar interdependency hell have ever been.

I especially find your claim that Perl is "stable and reliable as hell" amusing. CPAN has always been hit & miss for me and I've seen much greater variance in the quality of 3rd party perl modules than in python land.

If I scpy a Django directory to a different server I'm __surprised__ if it just works. Doesn't that say enough?

I think that says more about your deployment methods than about python or django.

Any Python library written today won't run on the computers of tomorrow. That's a pretty big price to pay for a print() function.

That's simply not true. Nobody stops you from running python 2.4 or older on computers of tomorrow. Just like you don't upgrade JVM versions willy-nilly in production.

Python has it's quirks and problems like any other platform. But the particular issue you're going at here (backwards compatibility) is really far from our biggest concern.
It is the latest commit identifier. Dont bother about it, its a normal, tar.gz file.
I remember back in the early 90s, before I left Australia, I downloaded PGP from MIT before I read all the warnings about the legal impediments. After reading them, I was wondering when the CIA SWAT team was going crash through the office windows. Obviously, I'm still waiting...
A lot of statistics say that we are getting less happy over time. Sure, numerically, we are living longer, infant mortality is declining, but we are less happy.

Isn't happiness the goal? Are we really better off if we are unhappy?
i own rt.fm and since it's a two-letter domain, it's now considered a "premiumplus" domain by the .fm company and would cost $5,000 just to register it again if i were to let it lapse. luckily the renewal is still "only" $100/year so i'm just kind of hanging onto it now.
FluidDB Weekend of Code
No, because Glenn Beck will still have the right to be on the air. There are a couple of 'real' reasons for denying corporations free speech: the government may want to more tightly regulate truthfulness in corporate speech, since the immunity we give corporate officers prevents us from suing a spokesperson if they lie outright about their product. Another instance where it's important is the subjet of the case at hand: election law. Corporations want to double dip, allowing their officers to give to the legal individual limit and then give again anonymously under the corporate banner. And of course, the immunity doctrine helps shield the officers in the event of campaign finance chicanery.