skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Okay, I'm one of the people who voted for that "harsh" comment, so I'm going to take a stab at defending it.

Writing anything here requires a lot of time and thought. You can't just dash something off. Careless comments are frowned on, and rightly so. In particular, if I choose to disagree with something, I have to really pick my battles. More often than not, I just don't have the time or energy to get that involved. So if there's another comment that is at least in the same ballpark as what I would have written, I'll just vote that one up instead. Then I don't have to personally join the fray.

I am of the opinion that, while Dustin Curtis' heart might be in the right place, the way he's going about expressing himself in the AA situation is not very good. And if he can dish it out, he should be willing to take it. So while the comment in question is perhaps more vitriolic than I would have written myself, this is a topic I didn't feel strongly enough about myself to get personally involved. So I just voted up somebody else who did.

So, "angry mob?" Man, I really don't think I'd characterize the comment that way. But I'm open to hearing from other people who think so.
Sure. Richard Branson has pictures taken of him waterskiing with a naked woman on his back. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, is an intensely private person.

Richard Brandon photo results:

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&client=safari&...

Steve Jobs photo results:

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&client=safari&...

However I don't think the point of the original poster holds. Steve has said he's done LSD, for example.
Reminds me of that fake Office I heard about the other day: http://fakeoffice.org/
While I sympathize with you, you're a part of the blogosphere and you're acclaimed. With that comes the criticism you deserve.

Would you claim to be perfect in skill and intent? Are your writings brilliant and your designs unilaterally breathtaking? No? Then you should not only accept intensive criticism or embrace it. The simple fact is that if you were flawless, wmeredith wouldn't have felt the need to call you an ass; that he chose to, and that others agreed with his sentiment, implies a fault of your own, and one that you can fix and mature in the process. Pressure makes diamonds and suchlike.

I learned when I was thirteen that the Internet existed to call me out for my bullshit. I have it to thank that I've become as shitless as I am, and I welcome the future negativity that I'm sure will shape me in the future. You can either sulk that people think you're an asshole, or you can figure out why and become better in the future.

The contrast between this controversy with you and the Fake Steve controversy last month is striking. You get called out for bullshit and reply by being smug. You don't even drop the smug in private email conversation, as I found out last night. Then, when people get irritated and slap you, your reaction isn't to lose the insincerity but to get mad at the people who'll call you out for shit. Meanwhile, last month Dan Lyons decided he was pissed off at John Gruber, and Gruber utterly ignored him except when he had a crushing rebuttal. That's maturity. You'd do well to learn it before you try grandstanding the way you did with your American Airlines series.

EDIT: Can whoever's started downvoting Dustin please not? He made an earnest argument, and he's contributing to the conversation.
The point he was getting across is that a 50% increase in signups leads to a 50% increase in revenue, whereas a 50% increase in retention is a 100% increase in revenue. That fact isn't immediately obviously unless you do the math.
Computational Journalism
This is quite seriously the best advocacy of Perl I have seen in a long, long time.
Jquery.mb.extruder
#jQuery #mbComponents: updated jquery.mb.extruder to version 1.5 : http://bit.ly/1GjhlQ major issue implemented
With good software, this could be an interesting gaming mouse. Can't really picture using it for office work though.
Sounds like a good idea, although personally I think a cash game would be more fun than tournaments.
This is absolutely brilliant writing. Great use of dialogue, 'showing' rather than 'telling', painting good pictures of the various characters involved (Burt, 'jolly' director),etc.
Thank you for the link! That's a brilliant set.

I sometimes feel autistic online, because I don't understand how people come up with the need to clutter the way they do. When I design, I start feeling cramped if I've got more than seven distinct stylistic elements. My portfolio includes a header and a footer, and looking at it a a part of me still feels like that's too much to have on a web site.
Going to burning man is not illegal, though. But I agree, he shouldn't do stuff he wouldn't want his employees to do. Doesn't he say he wouldn't even mind SM pics of his employees?
I have my misgivings about Reddit too, but I'm still a fan of the site as a whole. What in particular don't you like?
Who is to say that all clients prefer a CEO in a suit? Some might prefer the other CEO, so one can not just claim that pictures like that damage the company. Maybe there are just 100 potential customers who like suits, and 1000 who like half-naked men.
I would be very careful with gearman.

We tested it at Justin.tv and managed to cause the main process (gearmand) to spin at 100%, stop accepting connections, and lots of other things. Not quite ready for production use, especially if you need persistence and use the memcached plugin.

Also, the python client library is in pretty rough form. Our developers submitted a patch or two, but it still doesn't reliably handle errors, network outages, failover, or reconnects. You probably want all of these things in your job server of choice.
If you're convinced that the world is getting worse and less civilized, it means you're getting old.
I didn't have a Facebook account until... um, last week. Never had any trouble as a result.

My policy on friends is, basically, that unless you're someone who gets all the stupid in-jokes from my college days, you don't get to be my friend on Facebook. Haven't had any trouble from that, either, despite getting an avalanche of friend requests almost as soon as I signed up.
Insider-trading ring acted like Wall Street version of the mob
What did you end up using instead?
I doubt that people on HN would be motivated to write better comments on the off-chance of earning an extra 70p.

I also doubt that people on HN would be willing to tip the sort of money needed to motivate other people on HN to write better comments.

You run the risk that people who don't attract tips will give up writing comments altogether.
Anyone remember those old CAD mice from the 80s? With the custom mousing surface, region-sensitive reticle, and 12+ buttons on the mouse? Those things were so cool...
A little late or early for April Fool's? O_o.
I stayed at the one in SF. Very nice. Smallish room, but well decorated and reasonably priced. Free wifi.
I think it happens when the closing scope stops being local (i.e. at the time the defined function gets returned).
Employees were pissed off that their CEO was an actual person that likes to have fun like themselves?

The day that a picture of Bill Gates headbanging at an Iron Maiden concert gets leaked is the day that the internet will appreciate him in a "wtf, he's a real person" way.
As other commenters noted, they are providing something that a lot of other companies provide, such as the company I work for, Ez Texting.

Here's my plug: we can deliver to the US and Canada, our prices start @ 5 cents an SMS and go down from there, we've got a memorable short code (313131) and we already support a lot of people through our API. http://www.eztexting.com/api.html
I bind mine to modifier keys, like Alt, and Super. Then I can chord-resize windows and chord-drag them from the middle of the window without doing the one-hand-keyboard-one-hand-mouse move.
Thanks, Yeah I should have guessed that people would try and trap people. That seems to have worked out on its own as every wall near the start has been vaporized now.
Worse case scenario you can always just go in and make every one of your pixels blue for your avatar and you are back where you were. But I agree I need like a flashing arrow pointing to you when you first load.
http://www.amazon.com/Coghlans-7870-Magnesium-Fire-Starter/d...
The main issue of the cuecat is that every time you needed to scan something, you wouldn't have your computer around to scan it. Plus the scanning on that cuecat thing was highly annoying, it didn't work on some types of packaging and it required you to put the device up close and slowly scan across it. Sometimes I felt like I could type in the UPC code faster.
What does "real" mean? When you use closures (or not-quite-closures, or however you want to call them) in python, they work just like "real" closures, except for the pathological case of defining functions in loops.
It's too bad that the iphone screen doesn't scan via the laser barcode readers, otherwise it would be great to just show the coupon on screen.
Not sure your list of differences is up to date. We have keyword arguments (with rich user-defined type constraints) and docstrings via Moose and MooseX::Declare. We have generator functions (actually, first-class continuations and coroutines) via the Coro module. I have never had trouble reading even very bad Perl code, so it seems to me like it is "readable".

(There a few list comprehension modules on CPAN, but they are all implemented wrong. A correct implementation is not difficult, but I personally don't see the value and haven't bothered to implement it right.)
Thanks! Let me know if I can help you out with launchset.com in anyway too. Good to meet you in person at startup school.
We're in the process of migrating to RabbitMQ. It looks pretty good, but we haven't really put it through its paces yet.
Using Online Tools to Save Time During the Search
I agree that the title is misleading. But I think his view is really important. Or maybe better said, it's really important that a great man like Penrose comes out and unequivocally makes this statement to generations who have too often been told to "shut up and just learn the theories".

In college it drove me mad that I could not find any resources to question the "absolute validity" of paradoxes that arose in modern physics. To me, a paradox could not represent a universal truth - it must be seen as an opportunity to understand why our tools are insufficient to fully understand the universe. But the response to my questioning was always "who are you to question 100 years of experts?"

Finally I found one physics professor who confided in me that he too had been trying to start a fertile dialogue about these things, but other professors would just scoff. He felt it was futile at best or career damaging at worst.

So I learned that, truly the 'old experts' took modern theories with a grain of salt - it was only today that we took them so literally. But none of my classmates believed it and they thought I was brash and stupid for bothering to think about it.

For a while, I met with that professor once a month or so to try to steer my knowledge in a direction that wasn't jaded by a blind acceptance of theories that were inconsistent with one another. I hated the feeling that it had to be some half-valid historical truth. It made me feel half-way delusional. It made me lose trust that the academic system would prepare me to really truly think.

I wanted to learn about the paradoxes, the holes in our thinking, how we were wrong, because those are the exciting areas that need development. If you spend your whole education learning fundamentals while detached from the burden of these kinds of questions, how can you be prepared to tackle them once you raise your nose up out of the textbooks?

So yes, it's misleading to make the title, "String Theory and Quantum Mechanics are wrong." But I hope his important point doesn't get lost, that it is also wrong to say that String Theory and Quantum Mechanics are completely right - end of story - no questions." Thank you Roger Penrose for taking this stance loud and clear.
Perl or C server?
What recovery? Unemployment shoots past 10 percent
Are you now using Beanstalkd instead?

What kinds of jobs were you submitting? I've also run into problems using the python client handling errors, failover, and reconnects. But no issues with the C API, processing about 5 million jobs a day.
I think you should read it more carefully. It has nothing to do with NNTP. (Also: sarcasm of this stripe hardly contributes to quality discussion.)
Don't know if you'll see this, but:

Reasoning about lock-free algorithms is hard because there is no mutual exclusion. Locks enforce a critical section; you guarantee that only a single thread will execute in a critical section at any given time. This allows you to change state local to that critical section without worrying about other threads interfering.

Lock-free algorithms have no critical sections. All threads can execute all instructions at all times. This means that when you update shared state, you have to think about the implications of what happens when another thread touches the same state this thread is trying to update. Keeping this level of concurrency in your head at all times is difficult, which means that reasoning about the correctness of an algorithm is difficult.
"Hard to maintain" is true of code written in any language. Software is generally hard to maintain.

Perl has had this stigma forever and the community has compensated in many ways; Perl Best Practices, 100s of Test:: modules, Moose, etc., so you actually have a pretty good chance of writing maintainable software. One feature I consider key to good OOP are "roles", and only Perl, Smalltalk, and Haskell really have those.

People like to repeat things they hear, but if you think about it, Perl is not at all unmaintainable.
I have been trying to resist responding to you.

At least ten of your comments in that thread contained petty negative personal attacks as well. You do not know me, yet you have created a very negative image of me in your head after reading an angry rant I posted to my personal website. Come on.
Playing Quake with a real mouse
The Organic Incubator
Py3k has been in the planning stages since 2000, but that doesn't really capture the differences in development between Perl and Python over that time period. Python 2.0 was referred to as Python 2000, and so the next logical step was Python 3000, which was planned to be a backwards incompatible release. In the meantime, Python made seven major 2.x releases, adding a ton of features, such as:

1. New Style Classes
2. Closures
3. List Comprehensions
4. Generators
5. Decorators
6. The With Statement

Those are just the big ones -- there are a lot of other changes as well as tons of library improvements.
I meant to add; there is nothing wrong with using Ruby. You do not need mathematical proof that it is better. If you use it and it makes you happy, that is all the "reason" you need.

It would be amusing if people argued over colors and ice cream flavors in the way they argue over programming languages. "Chocolate is dead!"
To clarify, Gearman is not meant to be used as a message queue, but instead it's a job server. The example in the post is an interesting use case (and convenient for us because we were already using it as a job server), but not really what it's designed for. I'll follow up with a post on how we use it to do work.
Which is better motivation? People betting against you or betting on you?
Installing sage (http://www.sagemath.org/) addresses the installation effort pretty well. You get a giant binary of everything bundled together and working. It addresses the programming environment to some degres (it gives you a "notebook" similar to Mathematica). I used to be a hardcore matlab guy, now I find some tasks are easier in python.
Seems to spin up the evaluation in a new thread with a certain max runtime:

for(0 until 100000000000){
print(".")
}
error: Server Timeout - possibly an infinite loop in your program.
I wouldn't know what to do with the OOMouse's extra buttons, either. 18 buttons is more than I could remember, much less reliably click.

For a few years I've been using mice with "only" 2 extra buttons, mapped to CTRL and ALT. Because they are close together on the thumb side, it's easy to click either one or both together. This is especially nice for gaming, allowing access to the C-, M- or C-M- equivalents of a key without moving the keyboard hand. This matches office application use cases such as selecting text and operating on it, whether both hands can act in parallel.
I really don't have that negative an image in my head of you. You're talented at what you do, but you don't do much in terms of functionality, and the way you style your articles constantly strikes me as sensationalist rather than logical. You go for things that are striking even when your selections don't enhance what you're writing, in other words.

Further, the way that you present yourself, both here and there, suggest to me that the things you write are neither sincere nor passionate, even when you design them to look like you care about them. I come from a writing background, and your writings strike me as dishonest. But that's the only dislike I have for you, and all the comments I posted were to that effect.

As I wrote in reply to somebody else in that thread: I was glad people were calling you out, not because I dislike you, but because in most threads talking about your stuff I felt that were I to interject by saying "Dustin's writings seem insincere", I'd come across as either needlessly negative or outright douchey, and it's something I'd have felt awkward emailing you about. So I like that I can say what's been on my mind for a while. But it's not like I hold a grudge: If you ever start writing earnestly, I'm sure I'll love to see what you have to say. Until then, I'll keep judging you by the insincerity you put out for me to read.
We can definetly get a cash game going afterwards once people start busing out. Good idea.
Russia Leads Nuclear Space Race After U.S. Drops Out
We used the C gearman server from gearman.org, and it was highly unstable and very slow (added an extra 10-100ms to a job, which was noticeable in the UI), and did other crazy things like return data from other jobs when the frequency got too high.

We've since moved to the original Danga Perl daemon (rather than invest time switching message queues), and it's faster, uses less memory, and more stable.

Next step is to move to a different MQ. In our application we don't need persistence especially, so I'm thinking zeromq.
This is exactly what I'm doing with Bill On Site, an invoicing application I launched earlier this week. The online invoicing market has many big players in it with excellent applications (Ballpark, Freshbooks, Curdbee, Ronin, just to name a few), but of all of them, only Freshbooks caters to the mobile market, and they only support iPhones.

It's early days yet, but we're getting some good reviews from sites that have tried our app out with various mobile phones and found it fast and intuitive.

From here we scale up traffic and drive conversions, and oh, BUST YOUR ASS FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS.

Differentiation is good and all, but the #1 thing I've read that helped grow a business is being there for your customers when they need you most. Answer emails ASAP, fix your product ASAP, offer discounts, extended trial time, everything you can to make your customers super-happy.
What do you mean by insincerity?
> In the meantime, Python made seven major 2.x releases....

In the meantime, Perl made five major 5.x releases, adding a ton of features, many of them inspired by Perl 6 and documented in "Milestones in the Perl Renaissance": http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2009/07/milestones-in-the-... .
DevCentral Top5 11/06/2009
I spend my time writing code (or watching TV, or whatever) rather than maintaining Ohloh stats for each of my 100+ open-source Perl modules. Most other people I know do the same.

Perl is the 5th most popular programming language on github (in terms of unique non-fork projects that contain some code in that language). It is ahead of Java and PHP, for example.
Or you just don't get wasted and make an ass of yourself if you don't want people to think that you sometimes get wasted and make an ass of yourself.
The list of things to do seems shortsighted to me. I can't imagine guys like Donald Knuth or Linus Torvalds caring much about agile methods and the new language of every year. I think it's more like a list of things to do that worked for him.

Other than that I agree with the main idea of the article...
In pretty much any language which has a gettext implementation, "_" is the name used for the function/method/whatever which marks a string for translation. This is just as true in JavaScript (at least two JS gettext implementations that I know of use "_"). It's one of the few truly cross-language naming conventions I know of.

But libraries which expect to be able to use "_" for something other than gettext break this convention, and not only run the risk of screwing interoperability but also cause confusion for the (large number of) developers who are accustomed to "_" having a particular meaning.
Someone actually created a pyramid scheme for Twitter popularity.
The way you write make me feel that you're writing more for the publicity your writing will get than you are because you have a personal itch to write. It feels very corporate. Your first few articles occasionally really interested me, but sometimes you'd write a shallow article and cover it up with a design, and your last half-dozen or so have seemed either empty or deliberately attempting controversy. I really liked your article on sleep, for instance, because the design fitted what you were saying, ones like your article on your brain were overwrought and made me feel that you didn't really find the subject interesting, you were just writing for page views and Twitter follows.

I have to think about how to better phrase it—that's just my top-of-the-head reaction—but I had the same feeling last night when we talked, like you cared more about the image I had of you than you did about what I had to say. We didn't have a conversation last night so much as we had a PR session, and that rubs me the wrong way.
I like web.py for this because it's tiny, fits HTTP real well (try doing REST with Django), and it's "just a library" so it's easy to mesh with Lamson. Also, I was bored.

What I don't like about web.py is this:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/webpy/+bug/435370

I have to hack that fix in to every web.py install because they're too arrogant to actually fix it properly, even when given the fix.
I don't consider these as being particularly interesting differences. With the right modules, I can write code that looks like that in Perl. (It's not idiomatic, though, so it is worth exploring other languages to see which idioms you'd like to steal. I stole monads and applicative functors from Haskell for Perl in MooseX::Data, for example. Monadic control flow is not a common Perl idiom, but it is perfect for my asynchronous CPAN client.)

I am talking major differences, things that are so fundamental that you can't really steal. Looking at Haskell, I see things like lazy evaluation, purity, static typing and type inference, etc. Very, very different from Perl.

In Scheme, I see the "call stack" as a graph of frames, not as a linked-list as in C. This is quite radical.

But in Ruby and Python all I see are different built-in functions, some with special syntax. (Generators, list comprehensions, etc., etc.)

I know Perl far, far better than I know Ruby or Python. But I can't easily reach for the abstractions in those examples within Perl.

I can. I hope you are considering CPAN as part of Perl, because "core perl" is a very, very outdated and broken programming language. I think I would even prefer Java!