skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Python is my main language, but can understand the attraction of Ruby over Python to people stuck with Java or PHP and screaming out for something new.

Python has stuff in it that's weird until you learn to ignore it. Example - joining several items in a list so they're comma-separated. In python you do this:

print ', '.join( [1,2,3,4,5] )

The code doesn't work in the way someone new to the language thinks about the problem. I've trained two colleagues in the basics of python, and both of them gave me the "what hope did I have of working that out?" look when I showed them this.

In ruby you do this:

puts [1,2,3,4,5].join(", ")

Ruby avoids the whitespace debate but still manages to produce reasonably pretty code. You have to type 'end' (slightly more verbose), but you save on the colon at the beginning of the scope, and it's probably easier to write non-functional one-liners in ruby as a result. (I wouldn't know, I love my lambda :) )

Python's self keyword has the sitting-at-the-plugboard feel to it. So does __init__ - the token is ugly. Then there is the unfortunate 'super' syntax. Experienced python programmers rarely need or use it, but transitioning Java developers think in a way that leans on frequent superclassing. The python __name__ == '__main__' pattern is cryptic. Packaging mechanisms are ugly (again - something Java developers will be itching to use).

I suspect Ruby presents less culture clash if you come to it from Java, and is easier to get your head around if you come to it from PHP. Smalltalk isn't in the same domain as tools like perl, python, ruby. I think rails rode on the back of Ruby rather than the other way around - there was nothing revolutionary in rails, it was an enabler for Ruby.
Wouldn't evangelist be the position where you most want to hire a 'name'?
1. Love the snobbery, both ways.

2. What about the possibility of being passionate but incompetent?
> "wow, imagine if someone came on the Windows team and 'accidentally' included GPLed code..." ;)

I solemnly promise that if that comes to pass you will be credited with planting the seed.

Now, does anybody have a way to get me on the windows team as a developer ?
I think Rails had a lot to do with Ruby being the initiator. Rails introduced enough of a paradigm shift with its philosophy of making development fun, and it had a better level of visibility via 37signals than other options (say, Django for example). The fact that it was also the way to do web development in Ruby for quite a while (before Merb, Sinatra, et al) strengthened its position. Django already had to compete with existing web frameworks and so the market was inherently splintered when it came out.

Ruby has also benefitted from folks like the Pragmatic Programmers quickly legitimizing it (and Rails) with a number of books, and you have to give the folks promoting Ruby and Rails a lot of credit for trying to tackle thorny problems (e.g. migrations, web services through ActiveResource, etc.) incrementally to build a platform that Enterprise is no longer afraid to adopt.

In summary: good implementation, excellent promotion & responsiveness to the market.
I don't see more twists these days in the shows I'm talking about. I see shows dumping tons of information on you and making you deal with it and store it in order to keep up. Have you watched "Lost" or "The Wire" or "The Sopranos"?
Then it's JIT interpreted to object code.
In Prison, Playing Just to Kill Time and Just Maybe to Help Solve a Murder
Population of the Dead
Business war games
Is There Really A Water Crisis?
I apologize. It's been a hectic morning and I took a few things personally when I shouldn't have. I'm going to take a breather and stop commenting for a while. :)
No snark, concern that your new application has more serious consequences of failure: sending a client an inaccurate bill is much less recoverable than a poor understanding of how I use my time.
Most people in France (or Europe) learn English in school, don't they? IMHO supporting anything but US ASCII is presumptuous.
> Microsoft decides to publish its own source

"Decides"? The very gpl license forces them to do so, this headline basically says "Microsoft decides to respect the law". Nothing to see here.
Well, Apple does have a culture of replacing a good thing with an even better thing (e.g., they killed the iPod mini when it was still the most top music player on the market, to replace it with the iPod nano). But more importantly, they're in a position where they can set their own schedule for decision-making. They can take a good long time to think about (or test) changes internally before making them public.
Yes, he lost quite a bit of credibility today. He can't find any flaw to google docs as a replacement to Office? I sure can.

I'm not able to use Google Docs as a replacement for Word and Powerpoint yet when I'm doing precise positioning of elements. I'd like to use Google Docs, but it's just too limited for my needs.
Neither Moth nor Dust: Software Does Not Fail.
The Frontal Cortex: Expertise
The Last Thing Your Sales Team Needs is a Manager
"* The guys in charge of Tcl/Tk, in about 2000, completely missed out on seeing that the future of Linux UI's was Gnome and KDE, and basically did not touch the Unix Tk look and feel until Tk 8.5. This was a major mistake. "

You're totally right, but also the fonts in particular were terrible blocky messes on Linux (and may well still be, I don't have any Tk apps anymore).
DHH: Think of emails as views delivered through SMTP
How to market your (small) business using Facebook
Will one of you geniuses hurry up and write an open source K interpreter? It's not that complex of a language to parse..
Win a ticket for LeWeb in Paris
I look at http://ejohn.org/apps/learn/#2 and think once again - javascript is a disgusting language to read. Objective-J is nice and all, but what I really want is a self-like syntax for it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_programming_language). I've struggled to learn ometa and wish I found it easier.
This wikipedia entry is a decent introduction, discussing pros and cons of repetition-reducing abstractions (DRY) in a language-independent way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dont_repeat_yourself
You are aware that Algol predates C, yes? This would make it hard for Algol to "just [be] C with some features tacked on", according to any reasonable interpretation of those words.
Hey, maybe they decided to release it for free.
Can you please point out what made the starting comments negative? I actually spent considerable time writing them and then trying to make sure they are constructive and actionable. Clearly I need to improve on that, so I'd be much obliged if you could help as an impartial observer. Thanks.
I think it's the government's responsibility to prevent people from making pirated stuff available to me.
While I agree that using regexes for one-off jobs is not the kind of thing that would summon Cthulhu. I think it's still the wrong thing to do and you would still be better off using a parser.

I think, to sum up this whole drama, we have one group saying "you should use a parser" and the other group saying "but sometimes regexes aren't totally horrible, and this is just a quick job. I don't want to take the effort to use the proper tool."

The latter group sees themselves as being pretty reasonable. And perhaps they are. But the thing that exasperates the former group is that it is generally not quicker or easier to use regexps -- even for one-off jobs --- than using a nice parser like BS or lxml.

Those tools give you a object-view of the document which, as JGC demonstrated, allows you to express what you want to do concisely and easily, even (especially) when you're picking a few tags out of the document.

The reason why regex hacking on X/HTML documents remains popular isn't because it's 'easy' but because it doesn't require people knowing how to use the proper tools, nor does it require people to make the conceptual leap from the document as a long string of unstructured text to the document being a tree-structure of objects.

It's a classic "The Wrong Way" choice made by people who don't have a mechanical or conceptual understanding of the right way.

It's like this. Imagine you come upon someone banging in screws with a hammer. And laying next to them is a nice power drill with a Phillips bit. You say to them "why aren't you using the drill for that. It'd do a better job and be a hell of a lot easier too".

And the guy responds "This is a quick job. These screws don't need to hold very much weight, or for very long. If this was a serious piece of construction I would totally use the drill, but for my needs this is just easier."

Now, you might look at him with some incredulity. No way is his way "easier." It's much harder, on top of doing a worse job. The real reason why he's not using the drill is, quite obviously, he doesn't know how!

So you say to him "seriously, try the drill" and he keeps on insisting that his approach is "totally sufficient" (which it may well be, that's not the point) and that using the drill would be "too much work."

And then that's how we got here in this discussion.
Couldn't they have instead rewritten their code so that it didn't use the GPL-licensed code?
It's actually really simple.

You can't parse HTML with regex.

You can parse text blobs with regex.

If your input looks like HTML but is really a text blob, you can parse it with regex.
It's a great reference book, but I don't think it's a good text book. I had a lot of trouble trying to treat it as one and learn anything truly new from it -- for that, I turned to the book by Dasgupta et al and found it much more helpful.
Count me in! Post a time a place...
The post is a direct response to:

http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles/2009/11/16/sending-emai...

Discussed here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944686
Why Can't I Pick the Technology I Use in the Office?
It's a thought-provoking article.

But I don't embrace the culture of free as much as Tim. If he gets his way, no company would be allowed to profit, everything would be open. Somehow, Google would be the only one to survive in the environment.

Tim is not shocked that Google is giving away for free the GPS software and therefore killing the GPS device makers. It would be anti-dumping if software had a fixed cost, but it doesn't...

Where is the fine-line between playing dirty and being a great contributor to free technologies? Think of it this way: if Microsoft had done the same 10 years ago, they would have immediately been sued for abuse of monopolistic position.

The thought-provoking part of the article is what Tim leaves out. What does an open world look like? Can the world be 100% open, or will there always be large companies fighting to control it? To me, it sounds a little bit utopian to hope or assume that 100% open is possible.
Here's the beginnings of an idea: show it only when you move the mouse near the top of the frame:

(defun menu-bar-show-hide-helper ()
(if (< (cddr (mouse-pixel-position)) 20)
(menu-bar-mode 1)
(menu-bar-mode 0)))

(defun menu-bar-show-hide ()
(run-with-idle-timer 0.1 t 'menu-bar-show-hide-helper))

It's not quite right, as it seems to require some other event to happen before it triggers.

I went ahead and published that here, in case anyone wants to track it:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2009/11/16/emacs-fiddling-show-th...
One of my parents was laid-off years ago because they wanted to get rid of one guy, a VP (so they closed his entire group)
Other things that can and have been traded in Settlers of Catan when I play with my friends:

Future production. Your next resource, next specific resource, all resources for next X rolls of the die, resources from a specific tile, or settlement/city.

Future rights. Right to trade at a certain rate in the future. Right to choose robber placement in future.

"Equity" in a settlement. Contribute resources to another player building a settlement in exchange for some fraction of the resources it will produce in the future.

And I'm sure as we keep playing more things will be added to this list.

For a slightly silly but still fun variant. Settlers with Nuclear Weapons!
http://albertsun.info/misc/nuclear-settlers.pdf
Hey, I know a grand total of four (Vaynerchuk, Arrington, Huffington, Jake & Amir)! And I actually read a grand total of zero!

Does that say something significant about me or the list? (Maybe add “in the US” to the title?)
Golf always seemed to me as a way to do networking. If you go alone you are usually grouped with 3 others for foursome groups which gives you a chance to meet other people. If you go to the right courses you stand a good chance of making useful connections that you may not have been able to get otherwise. Settlers seems like a great board game but I don't see it as a networking tool the way golf or other competition card games can be like poker. Unless we start hearing that business deals are formed over a game of Settlers I don't see it as taking the place in business that golf currently holds.
I'm neither stretching it nor hanging out in the historical section of bookstores. I live in Taipei.

Not having gone through the cultural revolution, character simplification and various other imposed measures, top-down writing is much, much more common in Taiwan, and HK. The same is true to a lesser degree in Japan.
One paginated page per company is absolutely annoying... Thank you for posting them here.
Good points, but I'm not sure about the last one. There are plenty of people who use pretty much just Tcl and don't dive into C. This even surprised Ousterhout when he was still involved with things; he thought of it as a glue language when he first created it (in the late 80ies).
Open Letter to Joe Hewitt: Become a Gardener
And meanwhile, the whole debate may get t-boned in the intersection by the banning of net neutrality. Only those (large?) partners that make deals with (large?) ISPs get their applications to work fast and smooth (if at all?).

It seems we have several fronts to watch/defend...
Whether the company is YC related or not is not relevant, that was some pretty good feedback there, almost all of it within the realm of the fixable. If I would have been in the recipient position I would have done my darn-est to make that person a happy customer.

Feedback comes in many forms, it is a data mining process. Just like you don't look a gift horse in the mouth you can't really complain about getting good free feedback in a format that you don't like.

And just speaking for myself I thought it was phrased very nicely, there was a sense of disappointment but nothing that even borders on 'hostile'.
Also, I don't know how just open sourcing the code is fine by the law. An example, If I stole money from a bank and then brought it all back the next day, and the bank had no net loss because it didn't do anything with the hard currency anyway, wouldn't I still be prosecuted? Not likening Microsoft's actions to stealing money here, it's just an example.
I don't think this blog post does the original SO answer credit at all.
Update: tech support got back to me this morning and assured me the data is in the system, it's just some rogue filter getting in the way.

I'm eager to learn how much time I spent on this issue. :-)

EDIT: update on update - the data is back after clearing out cookies. I spent 2.25 hours on this thread :-(
I couldn't get beyond the second paragraph; asserting that your main character is a Super Genius living in a Perfect World is not a good way to make me care about what happens to him.

One SF author (Damon Knight?) once said that when he has an idea for a science-fictional world, he asks himself, "who does this hurt?" and that becomes the main character of the story.
This article came at a perfect time for me. Thanks!

Edit: Nothing in it is anything especially new it just reminded me of a simple fact.
So, the story has some potential. I would like to see what comes next.

However, you are severely limiting your audience in many ways. Most people don't know what it means to index a database. Many don't know what lisp is, or even what a programming language is (even worse that you call it a language and not a programming language). Etc... Ask someone who has never written a line of code and is afraid of computers to read this and they will come back confused.

Also, at the end, the character doesn't mean much to me. By this point I should feel the characters's passion for the question. I need to want the answer as much as he does. Giving him the feeling that its important to find out and conveying that will help a lot.

My guess is that something will be "undone" and thats the point of the story. If so, you have a neat idea here, but you need to keep the reader engaged. Take out technical details, flesh out the character, make me care about him and the world around him (whats good about it, whats bad about it) etc...

FYI - I don't mean to fully disparage your idea here. I think if you re-wrote it with the suggestions people here have given, it can be really good.

Also - nice idea having HN review a story. Its a nice change of pace.
It's better once you realize that % is the division operator, and math always has right-to-left precedence (3*2+5 yields 21).

edit: there's also \:/: which is a cross-product, and ' (single-quote) is like mapcar. More explanations here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=266101
I love that game!! It's a perfect amount of strategy, but not so much that it is not a relaxing diversion.

Another fun game in the same genre is Stone Age.
You're focusing on the small surface details.

Also, the words "begin" and "end" were used in ALGOL and PASCAL and no one had much of a problem with them.

Concepts > languages/notations
It is only the same if you throw out the extremely relevant difference that the software is under copyright. You do not hold the copyright on a book just because you own a copy of it made from ink on paper. Why do so many intelligent people not understand this?
Things get more interestinger once you realize that it's all just degenerative cases of bidirectional cyclic graphs.
They're spelled "Foucault" (ggp) and "Eco".
Microsoft had four options:

1. Stop distributing the utility

2. Publish the utility's source code under the GPL

3. Arrange a separate licensing agreement with the owner of the GPL'd code

4. Remove the infringing code from their utility

Nothing about the GPL "forces" the infringer to divulge their code -- that's simply one available option.
Does Voulez Bar have a table for 10? - I suggest the terrace on top of "Pizza y Espuma". It's across the street from Voulez Bar and could accommodate a larger group.

http://www.guiaoleo.com.ar/detail.php?ID=4130
pizza y espuma on cervino - http://www.guiaoleo.com.ar/detail.php?ID=4410
Chrome and AdBlock Plus are running nicely at the moment. :)
I don't know Don Dodge, but he seems to be a very cool guy, and the tone of his microsoft-fu (get the joke :-) seemed just right.
Coin-operated Borgocrat goes to Google, acquires whole new set of opinions
Why is it better?

I think HTML parsers have their place, but I don't understand why people think regular expressions are not a valid tool for getting data out of HTML. HTML parsers are only an appropriate solution if the HTML is valid, well structured and mostly semantic.

If you are dealing with invalid, code generated via Frontpage 2000 by some bureaucrat with little HTML knowledge, regular expressions will almost always be a better option.
While I hope and believe that the headline is accurate, I'd feel better if the article showed examples of seed and early rounds. A startup that raises round C for $10M is not really sending the same message as 4 YC startups getting angel funding.

The amounts would be less impressive to the uninformed, sure. But much more encouraging for everyone about to start.
At first I thought this list was bogus because of all the tech names that were left off.

But when I really thought about it I realized people like Robert Scoble, Jeff Jarvis, and the rest look big because they have the whole self-referential circlejerk happening. But if they said "Do this because it's great" I don't know of anyone who would then go and do that based on their recommendation.

So I guess they aren't really influential at all.
Very interesting. This very topic was hit a number of times at last week's GNU hacker's meeting in Göteborg. If we were to come onto the scene now, as it is, and re-found the GNU project, what would the biggest priority be?

To a number of us, it seems that the priority would be to protect user's data and computing experience from the growing centralization of the web. Something like making distributed web applications, with p2p-distributed asymmetric cryptography replacing behind-the-firewall databases, and apps running in sandboxes on users' machines, in the context of their secrets, replacing e.g. facebook.com.

Someone at the conference said it best: it seems that user freedom is really at odds with the client-server model of computation. The corrolary being that net neutrality is necessary but not sufficient -- we need to increase equality of all nodes in the net, including nodes that are now just "end users".
Copyright infringement is a civil, not criminal, law. It's up to the copyright owner to sue, if he wanted to.

Not that it would do much in this case -- worst case, a judge places an injunction against Microsoft and they're not allowed to distribute the utility. The author would have a very hard time proving damages, since both the original code and utility are distributed for free.
For a transformation in the opposite direction, here's a first draft interpreter for J (a related language) in J-ish C.

http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Essays/Incunabulum

It segfaults, because it's written in rather non-portable C that assumes sizeof(function pointer) == sizeof(int), among other things. It's an interesting piece of code, though.

I don't completely understand it - I'm confused by the concept of rank in J, and haven't worked with the language enough to get over that hump. (IIRC, K avoids "rank" entirely, and just uses either an array or an array-of-arrays for multiple dimensions.) I've only been a tourist in the APL family of languages, but what I've seen has left me quite impressed.
Well that's too bad, b/c I can actually beat my wife at golf. Seafarers of Catan? Not so much.
>>Most people are ignorant of how bad most of the HTML on the web is, it is simply unparseable.

And somehow using a regex to guess at all the possible combinations of "badness" is the correct way to go? You seem lost my friend. Everything you're saying is backwards to what someone who actually parses a lot of HTML "in the wild" would say on the topic. It sounds more like you're trying to cuss your way into being correct.
Most people are ignorant of how bad most of the HTML on the web is, it is simply unparseable.

If that was the case the web would be unusable. Any decent web browser will parse almost any garbage you throw at it. It can get complicated because you find yourself guessing at what the author's intent might have been or moving things around to make it semi-sane, but it's not only possible; it's done every day.
Some comparisons seemed odd to me. Outlook 2010 has conversation view, and MS has office web apps now, as an employee he must have had access to the above.

He has my wishes for the future. Hopefully, he would continue doing great work at Google
I cannot agree more. Too often I see writers go at great length to define and describe anything but the story.

Also, not everything should be stated explicitly. Sometimes it's good to make people figure it out.
Favorite bit from the article: If you're not falling at least once per day, you're not trying hard enough.

There's a saying in football that's more funny but the point is the same: If you're not cheating, you're not trying.
What is the "minimal" set of primitives needed for a Lisp interpreter?
It made me think of that phrase too, but because he heaps praise and gratitude upon his former employer. I didn't get any bitterness. But I don't know who this guy is. Maybe I'm missing some context.