skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How would one do things right if there are no examples of comparable quality?

By researching independently when given sufficient pointers. I posted a link to Abdul Azziz Ghoulum's paper which shows a full compiler in small baby steps, bootstrapped from the first line!

Research and conference papers are fairly good for learning, almost as good as blog posts.
Aside from those three? C and C++. Those libraries are not "batteries included", but they are plentiful and very mature. I like the "batteries included" part of Python though.

- I don't know if Python on the JVM is stable. Last time I checked Ruby on the JVM and .NET was in its infancy.

- They're not big breaks, and they are, as you say, discussed on mailing lists. The difference is that with a JAR file you can upgrade Java and you _know_ that the JAR will continue to run. With Python the only guarantee you have is that one of your libraries is going to throw an exception at some point after you upgrade. Essentially, you have to keep track of every library you use, and you have to check if it's compatible with the new point release.

- Not forward. Merely backward. Backward compatibility is offered by JAR files. You compile it, and even if the language changes the JAR will stay in place. Because the Java VM is stable you don't have to worry as much about precompiled libraries. I don't think Java is the solution to the world's problems, but at least old JAR files still run on modern JVMs (afaik). You can also design a language grammar in such a way that you leave room for future extensions. That is, to only make previously illegal statements legal. To change the semantics of legal statements (except for the rarest of corner cases) is, I think, a bad (but tempting) idea. You can have forward compatibility if you guarantee that code that uses new features won't compile or even attempt to run on an older interpreter. Essentially, if it runs it works. That is a hard guarantee, and the kind of thing you can build on.

> Define stable? That the language grammar doesn't change. Or more generally, that every version of the interpreter can flawlessly execute code written for version n - 1. 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. The number of man-hours this will take is staggering.

When you're actively developing in a language, these changes are only a minor nuisance, and upgrades come with a bunch of goodies. 10 years down the road you just want things to run, and with Python the only way to guarantee that is by deleting aptitude.
Why the Granny Coder decided to make her first iPhone game aged 77
Exactly. People are being executed to please the community, make them feel safe, prove the system works, give the relatives solace. Injustice is increasing.

People are getting away with murder or more, thus causing innocent executions and perhaps continuing their crime.

As far as I'm concerned, when an innocent black man or anyone else is thrown into the execution chamber for the aforementioned motives, that's murder in the guise of justice: relatives want revenge, any revenge to ease the grief, to hell with justice! Prosecutors want a string of successes.

Innocents end up as scapegoats. Case closed. Everyone moves on. Go read some of those last statements. Some could be lying, but others are there as a result of a judicial system used and abused for anything but justice.
Or lease it ...
Support the Startup Founders Visa with a tweet
Actually, I like Python. I think it has a lot going for it and I use it on a daily basis.

You say that you shouldn't upgrade Python or the JVM willy-nilly. I say: why not? Why do you find it acceptable that languages break existing functionality?
Well, clojure is still a lisp, and java and pascal are still an algol.
We also found that Flightstats was reporting an imaginary airline (Oceanic Airlines).

I guess someone at Flightstats is a Lost fan.
Twitter Unsuccessfully Explains Trends
i can totally relate.
What about after the electricity market in California was "deregulated" a few years ago? Didn't my employer lose millions of dollars by having to shut down its factories during the ensuing rolling blackouts, which in turn were caused by successful efforts to create artificial scarcity and extort billions of dollars from the public?

But you shouldn't read too much into that example either. The lesson here is that buzzwords aren't always useful for understanding the world. The word deregulation means different things in different situations. Airlines are still a heavily regulated industry: Health and safety regulations, security regulations, labor regulations, international treaties, state and local regulations. (You think you're going to be allowed to launch a jet helicopter from your suburban backyard? Your neighbors think otherwise.) But there was a moment when a few of those regulations were removed or changed in a useful way that permitted the market to work better, and that event was named "airline deregulation".

Which does not imply that every action called "deregulation" is going to be equally successful, or even that such actions are especially similar to each other. The devil is in the details. What matters is what the regulations are, and what the situation is.
I have a lot of respect for jasonfried, I'd kill to sit down and have a coffee to chat shop with him.

37 Signals are a company with great marketing and an okay product. Kudos to them, etc.

But its not right [in my eyes] for people to aspire to that. Why would you aspire for that? Are you going to sleep well knowing your product is okay? Aren't most people on Hacker News technology people rather than marketing? Isn't that the core difference - we focus on building great things.

Mint "selling out" is better than sitting on your products enjoying the small profits for the rest of your life.

Do something awesome, life is too short to be mediocre.
One of the proponents of Thorium nuclear came to google to give a tech talk. The video describing the technology can be found here, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8
So far no one has requested it, I am guessing it's because people have the list above and can google it themselves. I am gonna take a look at the papers and see if any of them have clauses about free redistribution, if not, you should have a tarball on the front page RSN.
Obama names IIT-ian Arun Majumdar as America's Green Czar
that isn't enough to build the technology and market it. I think the CEO said they needed ~$30M to build it, ~$30M to market it.

> it was going to take at least $100 million, half to build the back end across thousands of servers and half to get distribution (maybe more with Microsoft spending $100 million on Bing advertising alone). What we didn’t plan on was the terrible downturn in the economy which made it impossible to raise another $50 million to get distribution (mainly through toolbar deals). In this economy nobody wants to invest that kind of money in a company that is pre-revenue, even if the net result is potentially a multi-billion dollar company.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/24/searchme-may-go-offline...
I used to be able to do this when I was flying back and forth to London every 8 weeks; but I don't fly enough now for any carrier to really care about my business. I probably only fly about 3,000-4,000 miles a year anymore.
While thorium is easier to use efficiently than uranium (the LFTR on the page you linked is brilliant), I'd like to point out that we can use uranium orders of magnitude more efficiently than we're using it now, by building breeder reactors like the Integral Fast Reactor or similar things.

The big reason we're not is because we have plenty of uranium-235 right now; there's no compelling economic case for efficiency yet. The key thing to remember is that "nuclear waste" is just another way of saying "slightly used nuclear fuel", and by stockpiling it in dry cask storage, we're building up a huge fuel reserve for future generations.
the offending line is: var gl = canvas.getContext("webkit-3d");

I tried to change it to all the values I found on developer's blogs and even in the Painting the Web Oreily book.

"3d", "-moz-webgl2.0", "webgl2.0", "webgl", "gl", "moz-gles11"

All got me the same NS_ERROR_ILLEGAL_VALUE
Why virus writers are turning to open source
The Three Types of Diabetes
> I once passed on a story to TC that had one upvote on HN

The meaning of this is completely changed if you parse it like:

I once passed on a story...
I can't speak for humanity but I'd guess we're less satisfied with all the great stuff we have rather than less happy in an absolute sense. As greed and entitlement grow, so do the chances for feeling let down.

Also, it's easier to measure people's discontent nowadays thanks to mass media - who surveyed the miserable folks of antiquity? Improved communications and the mass media also make it easier to compare ourselves against others. Once upon a time I might have deemed myself the best woodworker in the world (if all I knew were the people in my town) but as soon as you get online, you get put in your place!
Woa there! They embedded an entire flight sim in Google Earth ? That's a lot of work and pretty impressive for an easter egg, even when coming from Google!

I wonder how they justify the effort put into those things.. 20 percent time perhaps ?
I'm confused by your previous two comments. You seem to be advocating that government's failure to regulate/enforce effectively in the past implies that it should continue to do so.

If Apple ends up being the one hit first, so be it. I expect the goal of well governed policies would be to extend a specific case into reifying expectations and enforcement of others.
ygtffffffff
Why Believe That P=NP Is Impossible?
"I am not sure which language you work in that guarantees forward compatibility."

Lisp? :-)
Isn't the only way to fix the competition problem more administrative grey goo? I have worked in this industry. There is a nice history of buying up all competitors... Especially when the competitors used to be parts of you.

Did you forget the governments attempt to break up AT&T already?
I wrote a long reply then decided against it. I will ignore that "C is on all machines" fallacy, because it's not. People are accustomed to downloading viewers and codecs for even the most basic documents and multimedia files; witness the trouble people go through just to make an audio widget play on their MySpace page, or an MS Office version X template in version X++. Compiler users should be bloody well sophisticated and have no trouble installing the necessary runtimes; it couldn't be harder than installing Flash, Java or .NET, really.

Forget the word "compilers" for a second. Pick the most powerful language you can find for experimenting with graph algorithms.

That's it. That's all it boils down to. Compiler bloat, running speed, start up time and other stuff is just a programmer's wishful thinking. How many machines in the world run your software? how much of your user's time have you wasted by not implementing a piece of software as efficiently as you could? (would your users trade delivery time for startup or running time? i.e. do they want to start using your program today, even if it runs 300% slower than the machine allows, or do they want to use it next week and expect it to run at maximum speed? :-)
Note that I primarily object to the "let's do a startup with language FOO, because then everybody can see how cool we are and every smart programmer will want to join us because the language is so awesome!" attitude.

It's fine to take a calculated risk (Scala) if the direct benefits are measurable and significant. I'm not claiming that people should dogmatically stick to languages from the 90ies because they're safe. I'm saying that you need a very good reason to use a language with an uncertain future.

Also note that I (deliberately) didn't put Scala in the list of foolishness that contains Clean and IO.
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).

Microsoft's ActiveX has been around for a long time. And I remember a little something called VRML that was supported by the major browsers of the time.
I'd rather get a .dmg than a .zip with an executable in it.

most of the good ones have a "drag to applications folder" shortcut inside of them inside anyways so I don't see the problem with that particular convention.
NYC-based GoodCrush looking for CTO
GoodCrush started in 2007 as an intra-Princeton, Valentine's Day program drawing nearly 30% of Princeton's student body within 24 hours of its launch. Now, GoodCrush provides web-based and mobile anonymous matching services to all college students. GoodCrush has just received pre-seed funding from an NYC VC firm and was selected for FirstGrowth VN: http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS150853+10-Sep-2009+PRN20090910.

GoodCrush is looking for someone passionate about the idea and its potential join the NYC-based team full-time in the CTO/lead developer role for at least 8 months to manage web development, a/b testing, and the integration of mobile development (which we may contract out). The CTO will have a large degree of autonomy and decision-making in what will be an incredibly exciting venture. We are open to working in PHP, Ruby, or Python. Prior social network, Facebook connect/app, LDAP, Google Maps API, and mobile development experience are strong pluses but not necessary. If you or anyone you know are interested or interested in more information, please let me know.

Best, Josh josh@goodcrush.com
If anyone's interested in a similar project written in Haskell, a few months back I wrote a compiler for C-Minus, which has a similar syntax. It uses Parsec for the front-end and a custom backend that targets a simple virtual machine (this was a school project), so no LLVM unfortunately. An LLVM-based backend wouldn't be cool to add though.

Anyways, I figured someone may find it interesting.

http://github.com/michaelmelanson/cminus-compiler
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=831375
This functionality already exists! It was one of my first times futzing with javascript so it's slow and clunky and could be done a lot better.

http://www.imageboard.net/921/slideshow/
or stop being a pussy and fight for your rights.

I bet there are some laws against raising prices that way for continued services and rentals. I know that in Brazil there are.
Don't change the terms of the discussion. I'm not advocating for anything. I'm saying that what Apple is doing is the same thing other tech companies have been doing for 10+ years without getting sued by the FCC; the only reason we're debating Apple is because they waved a red flag in front of us by giving us any kind of real dev environment.
I'd like to have that scooter. That one looks cool.
I believe instead of exporting Advanced Heavy Water Reactors, India should http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOOT them to prevent nuclear proliferation.
Microsoft had a monopoly. The DoJ went to huge lengths to prove Microsoft had a monopoly. You can't have a monopoly in "iPhones"; you have to have one in smart phones. Look at the numbers.
Correct: they will not be able to program in clojure. But they should be able to interop java with the classes created in clojure. No REPL environment and all code compiled is a requirement for this kind of legacy work, but it can be done easily. (Or "should" be done easily.)
Is there no number portability in the US?
And yet, even with Python and Ruby well established, he still felt the desire to build his own language. And the language he chose to build was Lisp-like rathar than Python- or Ruby-like.
I'm looking more for something community-or-compatibility driven. The web community pushes for certain things; when everyone except IE gets on board, Microsoft should strive to pursue those standards.

Poor word choice on my part: Microsoft has innovated before, yes. They're innovating now in various spaces. But they're dragging their feet in areas that could really boost the web as a platform, and that slows progress.
How do we un-support the founders visa? Because I don't think VC's should have any say in who can immigrate to the US, and I don't think the government should be in the business of annointing VC's.
I never thought the word esoteric would raise any eyebrows. I have no idea how it can be interpreted as an insult. It's meant as the opposite of mainstream; languages you won't find at IBM. I hope you don't work there, otherwise you might feel insulted again!
reedlaw - I just read a recent quote which illustrates my point nicely:

>The "biggest driver" for the more intense opposition to his administration's proposals, Obama told the network's "This Week" program, is more likely to be from people who are "passionate about the idea of whether government can do anything right."

The president similarly told NBC's Meet the Press program that it is an argument "that's gone on for the history of this republic – and that is what's the right role of government? How do we balance freedom with our need to look after one another?"
I think IBM employees can still use MS Office Web Apps http://blogs.msdn.com/officewebapps/archive/2009/09/17/98964...
I only skimmed this one but I didn't see any replies from Bradford Cross, and he's one of only two guys on their team doing the Clojure/Hadoop/etc back end. So maybe they were talking to the front end guys this time?
I think you are getting to caught up in the logistics of how the Visa administration will work. The actual delivery of it is going to obviously be more thought out than Brad Feld's blog post.

Any effort to address the problem is better than nothing.
How do you fix the competition problem without regulation? Isn't this one of those cases (like roads, power, water, etc...) where it's more efficient to provide infrastructure (bandwidth) once instead of 10 times?
How about better regulations for international VC investments?

Or maybe, if you want to start with baby-steps, some pamphlets to VC guys telling them about the world outside california.
I'm not entirely sure how machine code(or LLVM bytecode, if you'd prefer) produced by a program written in ML is at all inferior to the same machine code(actually, probably less optimized machine code, given that ML is a high level language in which it's easier to code optimizations than in C) produced by a program written in C.

Comparing ML to Perl or Python is ridiculous. There are a number of native optimizing compilers of ML. ML is closer to C++ or Java or CL performance-wise than to those languages.
"Note that I primarily object to the "let's do a startup with language FOO, because then everybody can see how cool we are and every smart programmer will want to join us because the language is so awesome!" attitude."

(a) no one ever diplayed such an attitude on this discussion or put that argument forward. Strawman.

(b) This is what you said.

"Messing around with unstable languages is a lot of fun. It's educational too. But don't build your business around it. Python/Django and Ruby/Rails are only barely stable enough to work with. "

which is different from reacting to the non existent "everybody can see how cool we are if use language foo" argument.

"I also note that I (deliberately) didn't put Scala in the list of foolishness that contains Clean and IO."

But you did say " Thinking that using Haskell, Clean, IO or Lisp will be a net benefit to productivity is foolish."

You never really showed where the "foolishness" is.

Also, from your original list that still leaves Haskell and Lisp as languages that don't "provide a net productivity gain", which is a very strange (and as pointed out by boskone above, unsubstantiated) claim. There are profitable businesses built on both these languages (lisp is a family of languages but still .. ), and very capable programmers being massively productive using both.

You said something stupid with nothing to back it up, got hauled over the coals and are now backtracking trying to make a less objectionable claim.

You then claimed Perl didn't exist in 1995 (!) and that's why PG used CL for ViaWeb (!).

quoting boskone "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"

Indeed.
So is he proposing simulated annealing for finding the best occupation in one's life ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing

A person looking for for purpose in life might have much more limitations than a hill climbing algorithm. He/she also has different advantages than such algorithm, so I do not think this is very good analogy.
This reminds me, I have written a fairly good, fairly generic hill-climbing "library" for Python. I did it because I needed something specific quickly, and it's gradually grown over time. I haven't found anything generally available that does the same thing, and I was wondering if anyone here can suggest some existing libraries/modules that I can compare/contrast with before thinking about tidying up and releasing.

Suggestions?
JQuery (mb)Gallery: Image Gallery With An Inline Thumbnail Browser
That's a terrible analogy. Good analogies should provide an honest insight into a complex situation using a simple imaginary construction. In this case, there's no reason to assume that anyone's objection to founding a startup has anything to do with short-term versus long-term goals, and even if there was, the analogy of the "hill problem" doesn't address that objection at all.

I think it's much more reasonable to guess that this guy's reluctance to do the startup dance is the result of more complex considerations. His current job is safe; not glamorous, sure, but safe. He's probably making good money, and even if he doesn't really enjoy it, he's just found out that other people actually want him. That can be a powerful motivator by itself.

The startup thing is risky. Talking about it is all well and good, and we can make startups sound really sexy because they're what we prefer or need to do, but that doesn't mean that they're really for everyone. People might like the idea of startups, but when it comes to the actual risk, guesswork, and extreme hard work associated with them -- not so much.

I mean, hell, I'm working on my second one now, and I couldn't imagine working for anyone else ever again (or sitting in a cubicle). On the other hand, there are definitely days that I would love to not have to worry about whether or not I'll find enough business to pay the rent a couple of months from now. I haven't had a real get-away vacation in I-don't-know-how-long, and my average work day is probably around 11 hours long. I honestly don't know how my girlfriend puts up with it. And, I'm constantly thinking about one business or the other; it's not like I can just "punch out" at 5 or 6 o'clock each day and not think about work until the next morning.

So, yeah. Startups aren't all roses, and maybe some people are smart enough to figure that out before they jump into them.