skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IIRC (untested), a "Hello world" webapp in the Python world is as simple as dropping this into your cgi-bin:

#!/usr/bin/env python
print 'Hello world'

You can do CGI apps just as easily in Python as you can in other languages. It's just that CGI doesn't scale, and so you'll want a framework for anything more complicated than that.

Incidentally, have you tried to setup PHP on a machine that doesn't already have it installed? (Particularly without using a package manager - with port or apt-get, Python isn't all that difficult to install either.) It's a frigging nightmare of building shared libraries, making sure they're in the right place, finding the right Apache config files to edit, and adding the appropriate LoadModule/AddType/AddExtension/whatevers. The reason PHP's easy to deploy is because most webhosts already have it preinstalled - they've done the work for you. If you use a Django-aware webhost like Webfaction, the process of creating a new Django app is reduced to clicking a button on your web-based control panel.
How twitter helped a technology consultant escape from an evil hospital
So just look at UML as a formal way of talking and you'll be fine. The secret here is that pictures can convey bandwidth much higher than words. If you understand that, then UML is just a way to draw pictures without ambiguity.

For communication, a lot of times I'll be describing something to another programmer on the phone -- or he'll be describing it to me. As they talk, I jot down what I think he's saying in lighweight UML. Then I show it to him by email or webcam or something. It identifies a lot of discrepancies very quickly.

For collaboration, many times in a group we'll tag-team a problem by drawing up our idea of what we think it looks like. Either we trade-off, or everybody draws separately, or one person leads until the group replaces him.

For consensus-building, a lot of times you'll have a subcontractor or person who's remote who is proposing some kind of work for the team. They can do a stand-up, or a presentation, or whatever, but the key thing is usually when they communicate their technical solution in terms of a diagram. This is very useful when talking about how a screen should flow, for instance, or about how a third-party tool acts.

For coordination, a lot of times external groups want to be "in the loop" but don't have time to attend meetings and don't want a lot of paperwork. A lot of times an email with a couple of pictures attached can give them the gist of what's going on technically without a 50-page doc being there.

To differentiate between the Cs, ask yourself: is the communication two-way? One-way? Formal? Informal?

Modeling is just a high-bandwidth version of talking, that's it. I can say more in a model in 10 minutes than I could in 4 hours of explaining.

But, like every freaking thing else in software engineering, people become too attached to it and it has developed all these features that nobody needs. And so it gets abused.

To specifically answer your question, class or domain models seem to work for a LOT of stuff. Sequencing is good at showing things in layers, and Activity Diagrams is just flowcharting on steriods. To give a concrete example of using them, many times when the team is estimating a story and isn't comfortable with the details, we'll take 15 minutes or so and sketch out an activity diagram of how it's supposed to work. That usually either fixes the problem or gives us more questions to go answer :)
Thinking we had to move faster than we did...Turns out I was wrong

This runs contrary to a lot of current wisdom.

I often find myself feeling like I'm moving a little too fast, wanting to say, "Whoa, slow down and think this part of it through a little more." Then I feel guilty. Am I crazy or should I trust my gut?

I wish OP would say a little more about his experience. Why does he feel this way now? A few reference points sure would come in handy.
The closest one I know of is Haskell, but where Haskell can be superior in some ways in a single OS process, it gets totally spanked by Erlang when it comes time to leave one OS process, including going out over a network to other machines. And since you really need that if you want high availability, Haskell's out of the running for the systems I use Erlang for.

(Erlang is also much easier for other programmers to read.)

Haskell is also missing OTP. However, IMHO the more fundamental problem is that Haskell doesn't have anything like Erlang's fundamental, simple message passing, including process monitoring. Fix that and an OTP library just as good as Erlang's (or better) will fall right out; fail to fix that and it'll never catch up on that front.
A leap may come when we can reduce the cost of development by off-loading more of the work on to computers. However that is not just around the corner. And nothing to do with web development.
Working link: http://mobilenewsnow.net/mobilenewsnownet/2009/9/3/sprint-of...
If I would his kid, I wouldn't ask the next time.

Чем унижаться и просить, лучше спиздить и молчать.
Especially when you've got a parent who really believes in drinking age. Duh, I have a bridge to sell.
I'm curious fast message sends need to be to be considered "fast". IIRC, until recently Erlang used a separate heap and mailbox for each process, so each message send required a full copy of the message. That fast enough? Otherwise Erlang didn't really have Erlang-style concurrency.

I think that Erlang now uses a shared heap for messages with message passing just being a pointer copy into the receiving process's mailbox. But concurrent shared-heap GC is much harder to get right than per-process heaps, so I'm asking mostly to simplify implementation of my own concurrent programming language. :-)
That is a harrowing story. If it's half true, the hospital really is evil.
I decided to keep asynchronous, non-blocking web servers only. So I removed both Unicorn and Thin.
I agree, but remember, it's not Cocoa, they use Carbon for SWT's OS X look and feel.
Why capitalism fails
Newspapers and other media are losing my money, and probably others', because they mostly don't sell anything I want. How hard is that to understand? Heck, they're mostly not even giving away anything that I want.

HN gives away exactly what I want, which is links to interesting or important content, and intelligent discussion of that content. HN gets whatever HN gets out of my visit to HN; whatever that is, it does not take a single cent away from the linkees, because I would never get to most HN linked articles without HN.

As Jarvis states, it's up to each linkee to extract whatever they want from my visit, and to get me to come back directly. If a site is relevant to me I might come back, but it's no failure for a site not to be relevant to everyone. Given relevance, it's up to a site to be worthwhile. Whining and roadblocking is not an effective business strategy.

If you want to make money in a space, make sure that space exists, and be excellent at working in that space. Otherwise, sell vacuum cleaners.
Also, try using "fine" as a way of consenting to something rather than "yes"

It conveys the same certainty and closure as "no"
This has been a point of contention for quite a while now -- see, for example, "Deep Hot Biosphere." Wonder what the peak oil folks will say...
I agree, web vs. desktop is a false dichotomy.
Request for Beta Testers: TweetHook.com - twitter search webhooks
I am getting ready to launch my new startup - http://tweethook.com - and am in need of a few more beta testers for the site.

Specifically, I am looking for a few people that can test the webhooks using Python and Ruby endpoint scripts and perhaps provide simple example scripts they write to be featured on the site. You will get a fully functional beta preview account.

If you feel you can help me out by playing with it in the near future (say, starting today or tomorrow), please drop me a line at "chad at jazzychad daught net" and mention Hacker News and your scripting language somewhere in the email. Thanks!

Addendum: If you want to use another language, let me know. I have plenty of PHP testers, so I suppose I should more generally say I need testers of "non-PHP" endpoints.
Clickable link - http://tweethook.com/
Would using Siege radically change the results?
True. The guy who brought his kids up with a proper understanding of rhetoric definitely did a better educational job.

The kids of Dr. No, however, will grow up being people who can't express themselves, and inevitably provoke conflict by being obstinate and seeing themselves mostly in the right because of their authority.

They will not value reason.
Photo site Shutterfly goes mobile, acquires Tiny Pictures for $1.3M
According to the author, the story is being used as fodder by both sides of the healthcare debate. All I can see is the perverse economic incentives on display.
I guess the difference is that when I'm using a Windows machine, it's just a dumb terminal. I don't actually use that machine to develop or experiment, it's just how I access the machine that I actually use.
The story really doesn't involve Twitter much at all.
"Doubt is born out of fatigue and loneliness, and there is a lot of both when you are running a start up. Hang in there and keep your feet moving - there’s still a lot of time for you to change the world."

What I needed to hear right now. Right now we're facing very similar competition and finding it hard to crystallise why we are different. Maybe it's time to throw in the towel but sentiments like this keep you going.
Does anyone know why this is not implemented within Python, Perl, etc.? I don't think the article mentioned...
From what Sussman has said about the subject, it is pretty clear that politics had nothing to do with it.
I saw a presentation a while back which indicated there was a bit of erlang creeping into the mix behind the scenes, too.
There is no contradiction - understanding user's mental model helps both marketing and code structure. It pays to structure code in such ways as to ease absorption of new requirements, and the DCI claim is that they have a better idea how to do this compared to MVC or other approaches. I recommend reading the linked article, it's long but worthwhile.
Each point had me saying "ok tell me more!". I wish he had elaborated more on each point.
Don't worry so much about the competition. How many operating systems are there? How may databases? How many bags of chips and loaves of bread and accounting systems and types of yogurt?

Build your stuff to last, keep your customers happy, slowly accumulate more and more and be tight with your money so you don't die.

That is how real businesses are built and have been built for centuries. Just because we are using "bleeding edge" technology doesn't change anything. How many different technologies have come out in history? Automobiles? Airlines? Television? VCRs, dvds, laser disk?

Focus on your business and your customers and your survival. Most of your customers don't even know your competitors exist and even if there are 10, then odds are if you are all the same, you'll get 10% of the market.

Go to wal-mart and see how many shampoos there are and pain killers.... all those companies are doing fine.
It's not. Twitter ended up having to move the guts of the service off Rails to handle growth, back when it was a small fraction of the size of a typical Yahoo property.

Also, the comparison doesn't really make much sense. ORM is at the heart of Rails, and the framework has a very intimate relationship with a backing data store. At a company like Yahoo, PHP is used as a kind of presentation layer that communicates with various backend services that do the heavy lifting. It's a different architectural model, designed to avoid precisely the kind of problems you get scaling Rails (or Django, or your favorite framework).
But that's not true. It describes her as using Twitter throughout the ordeal. Most importantly, it was through Twitter that she met the ethical neurosurgeon who saved her.

Incidentally, her title references "social media" rather than Twitter, which I think is right; it's not hard to imagine, say, Facebook playing the same role. What's relevant is that she got word of her plight out to a network of people in a way that would be harder to do otherwise, and that feedback from this network led to a fundamentally different outcome than that experienced (I imagine) by most people with broken spines who are having unnecessary surgery and narcotics forced on them against their will.
Yeah, sometimes. I took out the image and made Try It a link. Hope that's better.
Tenori-On Teardown
Gold proposed that the Earth may possess a virtually endless supply – suggesting as much as "at least 500 million years' worth of gas"

Wow.
Yep, I'd expect it to halve the requests per second for every test. Paul Jones (created the Solar framework) periodically releases some pretty authoritative benchmarks for the major PHP frameworks, and here's what he has to say on the topic:

http://paul-m-jones.com/?p=421
The links is offline, read the
http://www.yosefk.com/blog/extreme-programming-explained.htm...
in the meanwhile.
"The deal is a loss for investors, who had pumped in a whopping $12.2 million into the company"

That's quite a loss...Their $7.2M Series B just happened in Feb '08. What did they do with all that money?
Not entirely true. He could void the contract, but then he'd have to turn over any profits made to the guy he bought the code from (unjust enrichment/quasi-contract).

Just because there isn't a remedy under the contract doesn't mean there isn't a remedy at equity. Usually, the equitable remedy is worse (from the minor's point of view) than the contractual remedy, b/c the equitable remedy is not limited to losses/gains/terms under the contract -- it is limited only by what the court deems is "fair".
Ask HN: Best way to get an internship in Silicon Valley or Bay Area
What is the best way for a foreigner (in my case German) to get an internship in Silicon Valley. In a startup, of course :)

Where should I look?
Who takes you with with a Visa Weaver Programm (VWP)?
AFAIK about this it's not as controversial as it sounds, with the caveat that the current rate of generation is way below what once was, or what we're consuming right now. In other words it's a very interesting scientific issue but with little practical consequence.
> It's captured subexpressions and backreferences (well, really just captures) that turn it into the gadget we all love. And as you point out, that is not achievable with the simple state machine engine we all remember from class.

Did you read [0]? It demonstrates that submatch extraction can be (and has been) implemented with DFAs:

"The extraction of submatch boundaries has been mostly ignored by computer science theorists, and it is perhaps the most compelling argument for using recursive backtracking. However, Thompson-style algorithms can be adapted to track submatch boundaries without giving up efficient performance. The Eighth Edition Unix regexp(3) library implemented such an algorithm as early as 1985, though as explained below, it was not very widely used or even noticed."

[0] http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html
Good to know for future reference.
A contract signed by a minor is voidable (can be cancelled without penalty) by the minor, but is not void (legally inoperable as if it never existed).

HOWEVER, if a contract is cancelled, both sides must return anything they received the other side party to the contract.
How does tornado on twisted perform relative to tornado?
It never occurred to me that carrying high-level heath insurance would mark me as a candidate for unnecessary surgery.

Perhaps this is exactly why health care costs have gone up so dramatically. We have insurance, so the doctors take advantage of it -- needlessly. We very well could be spending a lot less money for the same amount of health care.

I think the solution to the health care problem is for someone to start saying NO, like in that other article on the front page now. No to more test, no to unnecessary treatments and surgeries and non-generic drugs.

Say no!
Maybe not, but PHP code tends to be of lower quality. It'd be like comparing a Lego house to a real one. You can build a Lego house quicker, but so what?
Doubt the doctors are the evil ones. If they're using an outdated procedure it means they haven't been kept up to date on the latest treatment protocols. The hospital beaurocrats trying to keep their accredation and earn big bucks, those are the evail ones.
This lua paper looks interesting, though I don't like the way they pass code as strings:

http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache:G3KOwdPfnsAJ:ww...
Keep in mind that it's not a day off, just a holiday as in "notable calendar date".
Which makes me happy that "Engineer" is a protected title in Canada.
For people familiar with Oracle, 11g has caching built-in called result cache. it's transparent and works well.We saw a 400-800+% increase in performance in our application by just turning this feature on, without any change in our application.Also note that you can still use memcached on top of result cache for even better performance/scalability.
Did not expect to see EM-httpserver kicking ass.
Decades old crank theories are now hacker news?
B/c music covers are explicitly covered by licensing laws. Videogame covers are just unimaginative copies (which may also violate copyright laws covering derivative works).

If you want to make a game, make it like the game you are copying, but make it unique. Change the graphics. Add new enemies. But don't make the same game.
http://almost.at/ is very slick

I tried to do a similarly pretty UI with my Ajax app - http://gambolio.com/#/library/
They are evil because they were thinking of themselves before the patient and using lies to intimidate her into agreeing with them -- when they were wrong.

That's evil. Unfortunately, it's a story repeated across the nation every day.
The article talks bout helium being present. How did it get there?
I think some iPhone game developers are already doing that!
Isn't nitrate run off from chemical fertilizer a big polution problem for rivers and lakes?
Interesting to note Lycos looked a lot more like google in 1996 than it does today.
This kind of hopeful news comes out every time there is an oil shock. But it doesn't contradict the math behind peak oil. It is getting harder and harder to find oil.

Perhaps it could be argued it is because of our incorrect assumptions about the production of oil that we are looking in the wrong places, but I don't think so.
I think some of the article is compelling, but when he's talking about service personnel he just sounds like a jerk. A waiter who asks whether he wants fresh ground pepper is "attempting to dominate the transaction"? Taking care of you is a waiter's job.
Um... Helium's the second most common element, by a huge margin.
Flagged for using a URL shortener.
We very well could be spending a lot less money for the same amount of health care.

... not to mention greater actual health.

When health care was the leading issue in Canada a few years ago and every politician was going around promising to expand it, I remember wondering if I was the only one thinking we need less of it, not more.

It might be helpful if we used a more accurate label than "health care" (perhaps "disease industry").
And the ultimate lesson of all of this: If your friend jumps off a bridge, are you going to jump off of a bridge too?
The theory is predictive. It can be used with 67% accuracy to find new oil deposits. That is both falsifiable and HUGELY practical. The bulk of expense in oil extraction is finding the oil in the first place, which is why the Middle east is so attractive, it's all at the surface, shallow drilling and easy testing.

If this theory pans out, and as he says that oil is distributed all over the world; it means that oil gets MUCH cheaper and unstable regions can go F@#$ themselves, we'll just drill somewhere else.
Right, capitalism has been a huge failure. Let's dismiss the meteoric rise of human race since Americas founding, and judge capitalism on a market correction.
When dealing with service personnel one can morph a simple "no." into a "No, thank you." Polite but similarly final.
Medvedev has 2 mice?
Peak oil theory and short-term supply/demand cycles have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Peak oil theory was created by M. King Hubbert in the 1950s and accurately predicted local peak oil production for the US around 1970 (it has declined ever since since). It predicted a global peak "in about 50 years" - and there are strong indications that despite all efforts and high prices, global oil production has been stagnating or even declining for about 2 years now.
It's interesting that you try to absolve the doctors by rendering them passive ("they haven't been kept up to date" - whose responsibility is that? and how did they react when presented with correct information?). Most evil happens by default. The same is no doubt the case with the hospital administrators.

The interesting characters in the story (again, assuming this is all true) are the sympathetic subordinates - nurses and so on - who supplied information about what was really going on.
Where did you get that 67% number fromß
This is essentially the thesis of Arnold Kling's "Crisis of Abundance":

http://www.amazon.com/Crisis-Abundance-Rethinking-Health-Car...

Except for a few blockbuster interventions (antibiotics for bacterial infection, orthopedics, reading glasses), the expected return of many health care interventions is negative; they cost so much, and have the potential to do so much harm, for such uncertain good, that we're better off avoiding them. The only reason individual consumers subject themselves to so many negative-expected-value treatments is that they do not bear their full costs, sharing the financial part of them with their insurers.
I've not participated in either program.

The difference to me stands out as committee vs opinionated.

With YC a small handful of people give you advice and nudge you in the correct direction. Seedcamp has dozens. One participant boasted to me that they had met 100 mentors in a week.

I much prefer opinionated software over committee software. I imaging the same is true for startups. Surely 100 mentors will give you 100 conflicting pieces of advice. No matter how smart those mentors are (and everyone I know who is involved in SC is smart) they can't help you out if you are confused, disoriented and overwhelmed.
It's because the standard 'Regular Expressions' include highly irregular language features -- Backreferences in particular are a huge bitch.

The clean transform in Thomson's algorithm only works for Regular Languages.
And 2 keyboards and 2 monitors.
Skimble Helps You Plan And Track Your Gym Workouts and Outdoor Activities
It mentions that those languages tend to have added operators(like backreferences) to regular expressions that make matching them NP-complete.
I thought it was in Rails judging by the url schema (the .format notation, and yaml), but the headers and cookies differ from the usual Rails ones...
His assertions are not confidence inspiring:

http://paul-m-jones.com/?p=413#comment-410123
Bittorrent and Google Search. Audiogalaxy was pretty cool too.

I'm a fan of the UIs-that-don't-actually-exist paradigm, if you couldn't tell.
Are people that responsive on Facebook?
Aneurysms grow much faster than the surrounding blood vessels, but that doesn't make them good. It makes them bad. It may be the extreme growth that capitalism enables and encourages that is the reason it is a failure. It makes us focus on growth above all else. But why is growth in and of itself a good thing? Why isn't stability better? Growth is risky. Financial analysts focused on the long term are looking for slow stable compounding growth. Long term investors know that rocketing growth is unsustainable and is not the goal.
Psychology and human nature play a tremendous role in economics - something which folks seem to discount completely.
I still don't see the 4 arms thou...