skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
" lousy IDE support, "

This is valid in a sense, but it is also important to remember that a lot of software was built with emacs and vi or even more ancient editors.

"If you're serious about software, concentrate on writing something that is reliable as hell and easy to maintain and install. "

That is terrible advice, not so much the sentence itself as the "stay away from powerful languages" spin you give it, as in

"Messing around with unstable languages is a lot of fun. It's educational too. But don't build your business around it. "

There are profitable companies using Haskell and OCaml (and Lisp and J and .. )!

You make a decent point then spoil it by stretching it too far, to the point of farce.

One situation in which you should definitely not use advanced languages is when you know you have (or intend to hire) very dumb "programmers" who won't be able to warp their heads around the "exotic" language, which probably doesn't have a "Learn in 21 days" book to go with it.

Many companies doing outsourced software do hire these "middle of the curve" programmers and will do well to stay with "stable" languages. If you have a bunch of bright programmers doing something innovative, it is a completely different situation.

By your logic PG wouldn't have built Viaweb in Lisp, FlightCaster wouldn't be using Clojure and so on.

Taking just one example, Clojure is evolving very fast, which for you would be "unstable". I know at least 4 startups using Clojure, one using Scala and no one's yet complained of "instability" and lack of IDE support destroying their productivity. There are tradeoffs (IDE maturity being one, if you are an I-can't-program-productively-without-my-IDE kind of guy ) with any language selection, but the consequences aren't as dire as you make it out to be.

As I said, this is bad (or rather very one sided, which amounts to the same thing in practice) advice. There is an excellent rationale for building certain types of applications in powerful languages, what PG calls LFSP - languages for smart people.

PG and other people have made this argument more eloquently than I can, so I'll refrain.

"Python/Django and Ruby/Rails are only barely stable enough to work with."

heh heh! Sure, What do you use then? COBOL? Should be "stable" enough for you I guess.

Somebody should tell all the stupid programmers using RoR or Django to run companies that they are being foolish, using "barely stable" software. ;-)
He'd wear it inside out.
Jane St likes it because of the rock-solid type system, but they've been eyeing Haskell compiled with -Wall for the same reasons.
I emailed the guy and got a response.
I think that's a harder case when it comes to large-screen televisions. Do we really expect that people will buy a new TV every few years like they do with iPods, phones, and laptops?

It's going to take something really significant to convince a whole block of TV watchers to upgrade their sets. In the US, it's only happened with the advent of color broadcasting (1960s) and HD/digital broadcasting (2000s).
Any unix source distribution could serve that purpose, I don't see why Tunix would be any different.

Smaller ones are probably easier because you can understand them completely.
Why Hyphens are better than Pipes for SEO | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
EBay Loses Dior Trademark Case in France
Here's his bigger brother:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHJJQ0zNNOM&feature=fvst
Free startup idea: T-shirt funding pool for leaked documents.
It's a darned good thing they got that export exemption otherwise there would have been containerloads of Firefox held up at the border and storeowners all over the world would be screaming that they didn't have enough Firefox for the Christmas rush.
EchoSign Reaches One Million Users For E-Signatures
too many innocents being executed. That's murder or manslaughter in my eyes: http://www.google.co.il/search?q=site:http://www.tdcj.state....
Anyone HN left with a sense of humor? dranke apparently lost his.
The Perfect App To Start Your Weekend Off With A Drink. Fast.
Can Condoms Save Us From Climate Change?
Ever since the Zimmerman case I wondered how they were going to actually enforce this. I understand if you have a corporate presence in the US that it helps to play nice but the amount of encryption software that is available in repositories all over the planet basically means that this whole encryption-is-a-munition thing is ridiculous.

It always was, but if the intent was to restrict encryption capabilities to the current definition of 'the good guys' then it utterly failed.
Fat Burning - How to Burn Fat Better
Nice. Doing some work I can apply this to right now actually.
Let me ask you this: is your opinion of dental insurance in any way related to your age and lifestyle? You have a strong opinion but, from an outsider, it seems that this is one of those, "This works for me therefore it must work for everyone" cases.

You're wearing your "voice of reason" face, without actually adding anything to the conversation. I believe I've made my position pretty clear about why insurance for trivial expenses is a bad investment. But I guess we'll go over it some more.

From seeing my own grandparents and parents expenses, I'd guesstimate most elderly spend upwards of $10-$30k on dental work from 60-80.

That's not even plausible for "most elderly". My dad has always had serious dental issues, and is in his sixties now (as is my mom, though her dental issues didn't start as early as my dad's and have never been as serious). Combined they spend less than $10k per year on dental care, without dental insurance.

Anyway, my position is, and will not change with age, that insurance should be for catastrophic events, not day-to-day expenses. Insurance is designed to pay for the occasional rather than the regular. Insurance is not designed to save you money...it is designed to help you get over the major bumps in expenditures that come up every now and then, by surprise. Dental care is, generally, a regular, mostly predictable, expense.

Do you believe insurance companies are doing what they do at a loss? Are they giving everyone more than they pay for? If not, it's unwise to pay them for things you can pay for out of pocket, because in the long run, the insurance company always makes money. Buying insurance is like gambling. When it's something like health care, which can explode into hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of expenses, you must accept the bet; otherwise you're risking your health and risking bankruptcy. When it's something like dental care, which can never be more than a few thousand dollars (cosmetic dentistry can add up to more, but that's never covered anyway), unless you expect to be the very expensive outlier, it's a poor investment.

If you like making poor investments, or if you are the outlier that requires frequent and expensive dental care, then you should get dental insurance. Otherwise, you're paying for both your dental care, and the profit margin of your insurance company (and probably for some of the outliers that require a lot of care, since insurance distributes cost, as well).
Facebook Settling in to New 150,000 sqft Headquarters
Now I don't agree with his points exactly either. But you and I know full well what he meant when he said "Esoteric Languages". Arguing with people by intentionally misinterpreting their statements just makes you look stupid and it lowers the tone of the whole discussion.
I think these guys use O'Caml as well: http://skydeck.com/
Very impressive how it handles that sideways shove, especially in the slow motion segment you can see how well it anticipates what needs doing.

Even on the icy patch it manages not to fall (1:45).
Sorry, this is also wrong. Why is it equally likely? A high spike will be when they buy and a low when they sell. As a low freq trader you'll get worse prices buying/selling on average as a result.

Your notion of the existence of a precise right/correct price for anything is an illusion, forget about it,

This is why it is best to start with big picture reasoning - in this case that they make money and ergo others lose/make less in a zero sum market with only tangential impact on real economic activity.
ParAccel TPCH 30TB results challenged
If you prefer Rails, there is a very similar tool for Rack, called Rack::Debug: http://github.com/ddollar/rack-debug. I believe it was inspired by DDT.
If you think Python and Ruby have extremely good libraries your standards are pretty low. CPython itself is stable and well documented, but it's frequently breaking backwards compatibility across versions. My production servers can't get anything newer than Python 2.4, and the servers are barely a year old. Python 2.6 libraries almost never work in 2.4, and when I do upgrade to 2.6 I know a lot of my own code is going to break. If I used Perl instead of Python this would be no issue, because Perl _is_ stable and reliable as hell.

In two years time most libraries will move to Python 3.0, 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, or I'll have to use insecure libraries. I don't like those options at all. How can we write solid and stable software if we don't have a stable foundation to build on?

C++ code I've written a dozen years ago still compiles and runs fine. Executables still run when double-clicked. If I scpy a Django directory to a different server I'm __surprised__ if it just works. Doesn't that say enough?

Python exists 20 years now and the spec is still not stable. 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.
TOR hidden service - then publish the onion address with tor2web.com

A bit involved, but about as secure as it gets these days.
So, I'm a little confused about the root issue here. Can anyone explain what's so special about Google Voice compared to Skype? It seems that Apple has approved an app with a similar functionality in Skype for the iPhone. Is there something extra special about Google Voice that I'm not seeing? If the two apps are functionally identical maybe Apple is hung up on some aspect of the implementation. The whole "Apple believed the application duplicated the core dialer functionality of the iPhone” sounds like it could be more of a technical issue vs a functionality / religion issue. (Religion being Thou shall not make phone calls without glorious At&T)
A day at the museum - how much do children actually remember?
Building FlightCaster's Frontends for the Web and Smartphones
Yo Yan, I ma really happy for you, I'll let you finish, but Kaiserama had one of the best comments of all time, OF ALL TIME!
For more detail:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=806910

I'd wondered about much of this myself
I'm going back to port 70, guys, sorry.
I've found that the language (new or old) doesn't matter as much as the experience and depth of the user when it comes to well designed maintainable code. Learning times may vary, but these users try to do things well in any language.
Only if you're on .NET 4 beta.
Reminds me of the "Anus Laptops" saga:

http://www.thescambaiter.com/forum/showthread.php?t=109
reedlaw - I think you're too caught up with ideology. I'm now more libertarian than I've ever been, but I temper that wonderful ideology with real world considerations. Historical events in the U.S. have caused such imbalances that simply making "a level playing field" now, in many situations, would never self-regulate everything back into balance solely from free market principles. Even Ron Paul who is against pork barrel projects ideologically "brings home the bacon" with pork projects for his district because that is part of the reality of how government currently works. He would take heat for staunchly passing on it all. The best he has been able to do is purposely draft pork into legislation he knows will pass, then vote "No" on it himself for symbolism only. If we admit to ourselves that the world we live in is not perfect (and unlikely to change soon) then we ask ourselves should legislation be sensitive to that or guided only by ideology?
... and in some parts of the world still with no trial!
What an interesting claim! I can tell you wrote it on a computer.

The imagination is too elusive for the rigid construct of a word processor. I can get into the zone without drawing. However, the more difficult or creative problems always solve better on paper. How is it that a supercomputer cannot help solve these problems as well as a piece of paper?
Apple could easily reject Google voice app with their "thy program shalt not containeth an interpretereth" loophole in the iPhone SDK agreement section 3.3.2... they've done this with at least one app that I'm aware of (http://toucharcade.com/2009/06/20/full-commodore-64-emulator... and http://www.manomio.com/index.php/blog/important_update).

How many programs nowadays of the complexity of Google voice don't use some kind of internal state machine interpreter or domain-specific-language to simplify the programming model?

So they could use that loophole in a negative way to hinder competition whenever they choose to do so, not saying they "would" but they certainly "could".
Yeah, didn't think about that one. Good one.
Looks like a bit of backward reasoning. The article starts out talking about fish and shellfish in general making up half of the consumption, but the payload concentrates on salmon and fish fed on fishmeal.

From what I've seen of fish farming locally (catfish) and in the Philippines (bangus), the feed is corn and grain based.
That's not the official site just a reseller btw. pimsleur.com

Awesome stuff indeed.
The Coolest 20 Visual Goodies of the Week
Go easy on the sarcasm and ridicule; it doesn't help you make your case.

PG built Viaweb in Lisp because there was no Ruby, Python or Perl back then. When there are no libraries to chose from, you pick a language that lets you write libraries quickly. Today we boldly go where many have gone before, and that means that we can benefit from technologies others have built. Standing on the shoulders of giants, and all that.

I'm arguing that if you want to run a business you should be pragmatic about the language you pick.

The second half of your post seems to consist of mere hyperbole and strawmen (COBOL? Right). If there is excellent rationale for picking an esoteric language, I'd love to hear it.
Dan Ariely: The Curious Paradox of 'Optimism Bias'
Hans Rosling: Why the Statistics Point Toward Progress
If you were a .NET guy, would you consider building your startup on F#?
Apple lied in an official FCC inquiry.

Can someone point out the lie to me?
From another perspective -- for public speaking, I find that handwritten notes are indispensable because of the fingerprint they leave on my brain.

Hand-written notes don't need to be necessarily 'well-designed' in the same way a website does; you aren't going to be using them for the first time, so it's sort of like code you're writing for yourself that you know you'll never have to use after tomorrow.

But it's important that they be usable, in that they should answer "where-am-I-going-with-this, how-does-this-tie-together" questions for you. Because I participated in that tactile process of writing the notes, they can do that more effectively than something I typed; an interesting squiggle can express my intention to myself better than any comparably terse character on my keyboard.

I'd bet we take and make ugly, idiosyncratic notes for the same reason that we start out writing ugly, idiosyncratic code: it's memorable. (In lisp, 'idiosyncratic' code is close to idiomatic code ;)).

When I'm trying to think about something and am stymied, I need to doodle as well. Of course, there's very little transference with something that's ugly and idiosyncratic, so his notes do nothing for me and mine, likely, would do nothing for him.
Evolution takes time. Give it a few generations and pen and paper will fall by the wayside. People can see there are significant advantages (search, share, organize, remote collaboration, etc...), even if its awkward at the moment, which sets up a constant push to continuously improve. But it takes time.
A side note, but the pitch of that blog post is so odd:

>>Scott Cook from Intuit here. OK, I’m about to date myself. Long ago (27 years ago in fact), I watched my wife complain about paying the bills. That gave me an idea. And that idea became Quicken. Check with your parents – they might use it. Maybe even your grandparents.

>>But probably not you. For many of you, Quicken is a 20th century product in a 21st century world. It’s like the car your parents had growing up. So you turned to Mint.com. Because it wasn’t Quicken.

He seems to deliberately and at every opportunity play up what an out-of-touch old fart he is. You can almost hear the fake twang as he sits on his rocking chair...
still, not much of a trial if justice isn't being served: in fact injustice is increasing!
Really? Contradicting something another company has said is "A Nuke"?

A nuke would be Google search blocking iPhones.
> Arguing with people by intentionally misinterpreting their statements just makes you look stupid and it lowers the tone of the whole discussion.

Yes, because purposefully using terms which don't apply to the subject just to insult other people or degrade languages you don't like clearly doesn't.
> some esoteric languages, like Haskell, the ML family, Erlang and so on have deep roots

None of Haskell, ML or Erlang is an esoteric language.
MP3 Rocket Inc - Add My Stream
DOJ asks court to reject Google Book Search settlement
Mike Arrington said so.
I'm more frustrated that the transcriber apparently didn't want to take the time to proof their copy. That interview is hard to read. Many typos, missing words etc.
Except they "didn't". They've already listed their reasons (http://www.apple.com/hotnews/apple-answers-fcc-questions/) and to my knowledge have never used the interpreter rule in anything remotely resembling the way you describe.
I think you have a fairly high bar for esoteric :).
What library is it that you're missing in Haskell but have in Java? What libraries do you feel are unstable? Have you actually programmed anything in Haskell?

The Java language in its current form is from 2004. The Haskell language in its current form is from 1998. Both originally appeared in 1990. Lisp is much older.
Link explaining the Zimmerman case, for people who are curious too:

http://www.gimonca.com/personal/archive/philzima.html
Justice is not revenge.
Maybe 'better' in some academic sense, but C is what all machines have. If you want to write a good native compiler userful to people without massive dependencies, you write it in C/C++.

Writing it in ML may be nice, but nobody wants to install ML just to get at another language. The kind of person that would do this is probably aspiring to a good language implementation of their own that could be considered a /peer/ of ML (or Perl, or Python, or Scheme, or Java, or....). High level languages written in yet another high level language are more of an academic curiosity than a tool anyone's likely to use.

While, yes, you're talking about prototyping, that assumes doing so in ML is much simpler. Maybe for you, but not for a C/C++ coder who doesn't know ML. There are a very, very large number of such coders.

Why write a prototype then have to rewrite the whole thing in C to have a "serious" language implementation? For small languages, the effort spent in prototyping then rewriting is going to be more effort than just writing a good stand-alone implementation from the outset. My hobby "prototype" compilers are small, portable, fast, depend on almost nothing, and integrate with the system and command line nicely. If the language was to become useful embedded in some program, say, I could do so immediately because I wrote the implementations to be good from the start. As a user, I'd take that over something I have to run in ML or some other massive high level language any day...

Would it be nice if the system's language was something better (somewhat) like ML? Sure. Is it? No.

Anyway, from the implementation point of view, when it comes time to write your GC, or any other low level details (parallelism?) writing in something like ML is a severe handicap. As far as performance goes, LLVM makes /fast/ code, and a lot of work is constantly being poured into it by a lot of people to make it even faster. This is a HUGE amount of work (i.e. far beyond what one person writing a language, or the people involved in the projects you have mentioned, can or will do), and it's already been done for you if you use LLVM (of course LLVM does have ML bindings).

Anyway, the point is, if you're trying to "prototype" or do PLT research, and you know ML well, and all you care about is the language itself you're implementing (and not the qualities/bloat/dependencies/performance of the implementation); sure, using ML probably makes sense. However these things are certainly not true of everyone writing a compiler.
So you agree that it's a penis? ;-)
And yet if I go to http://dev.perl.org/perl6/ I read that "Perl 6 is the next version of the Perl programming language."

Read the FAQ on that page and follow the links, and try to see them from an outsider's point of view. You and I know about the relation between Perl 5 and Perl 6 and the rough status of projects like Rakudo. But for someone who hasn't been following the development, it's extremely confusing and its not their fault, its the Perl 6 community's fault.
Not really. When I wrote this post, 3.5 was not an available UPGRADE for 3.0. You end up with both 3.0 and 3.5 on your system, and still do.

I have no issue with the name.

The issue with many Linux bigots is that they think the rest of the world is somehow stupid and not as smart as they are, as evidenced by some of the other comments on this trail. They seem to believe that the things that the rest of the world wants (which they see as unimportant) are in fact worthless (like the comment about docking stations).
The documents released yesterday indicate that Google was informed of the rejection of the current Google Voice application during a phone call with Phil Schiller on July 7th. Plenty of room for ambiguity in that.