skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always been disappointed by du Sautoy's TV programs and writing. They always seem completely unengaging. In this article he writes:

"Messiaen consciously exploited the asynchronicity of the prime numbers 17 and 29 to create a sense of timelessness in the Quartet for the End of Time. In another piece, Île de Feu, I cannot believe he was aware that the two twelve-note sequences he uses are the basis for generating one of the strangest symmetrical objects discovered by mathematicians in our mathematical journey through symmetry."

It's very poor to mention someone without helping the reader a little. I was not aware of Messiaen and had to look him up. And then he doesn't explain what he means leaving a non-mathematical reader confronted with sort of math-babble that is off putting.

Would it have killed him to explain "synchronicity of the prime numbers 17 and 29". What he means is that there are two sequences of notes 17 and 29 notes long in the piece. They start at the same moment but they don't 'meet again' (starting at the same note) until 17 x 29 repetitions later.
+1 for Prgmr.

I've been with them for 6 months now and their service has been excellent. I've had no problems with them.
TimeGT has been live for about one week now and paying subscription is something user probably wants after spending some time with TimeGT. So it's probably too early to say anything about viability.

As of today we have more than 150 signed up users and we are super excited about that!
I've heard the community around BDS tends to make the Linux community look like a bunch of happy go lucky hippies.
If you have evidence that it's lack of understanding, rather than lack of liking (coupled with a snarky, hyperbolic style), perhaps you'd care to present it?
I tend to just search at http://www.freebsd.org/ports/
It seems odd that Craigslist doesn't readily open itself up to developers. What they've achieved so far is incredible. In this talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAk1MX3ES_g) Fred Wilson estimates that Craigslist is doing around $100 million in revenue with fantastic margins. He guess that classifieds in newspapers were bringing in a lot more revenue but with much worse margins meaning that, although the classifieds industry has collapsed into Craigslist, the amount of profit being made might not have changed too much.

How can Craigslist grow?

They have all the data and destination site that has insane traffic. In order to really be everywhere they're going to have to open up to developers to allow their content to spread all over the web. It's what Google has been doing for years and it's what Facebook is trying to do now.

I really hope Craigslist start championing efforts like Flippity. Awesome work guys!
A decent used bookstore is a wonderful place. I can imagine wanting to support them if I lived nearby.
For some reason, that article bothers me. I'm not sure it it's due to the content (Let's show people more ads! They aren't ignoring them after all!) or the tone (We need to defend our industry!). Also, very very sparse.
I was surprise to read that you shouldn't tell VCs about "Other investors you are talking to". Although I've never approached VCs, I can imagine that the quotation below is pretty close to reality:

"(VCs are like high school girls: they're acutely aware of their position in the VC pecking order, and their interest in a company is a function of the interest other VCs show in it.)"

http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html

If you let them know that lots of hot, cheerleader-VCs think you're kind of cute then that has got to help your chances of picking up.
A Synaptic-like package manager? It's really easy to use and self-updates the system every time there is something new without need to make the human attached to the computer go and check.
I can't recommend Slicehost enough. They're not cheap, but my sleep is expensive, and I can't remember the last time I lost any as a result of hosting with them.
The virtual goods that lie beyond Facebook ("part 2")
Happy slicehost user here.
To be fair, Facebook hasn't released its own payments platform yet. It's been severely delayed and a long time coming but I'm excited to see how linking your social network and payment credentials will work out.

Once people are able to "Buy with Facebook" rather than just "connect" with it, a lot of interesting things can happen. When my friend is able to pay me back instantly for that crate of beer I bought him using Facebook I'm immediately incentivised to hook my payments details up to it so we never have to do a bank-transfer again. If the friction of a transaction is reduced to a single click and a confirmation then I would say it has the upper-hand on any mobile-phone payments system.

Mobile payments will no-doubt be awesome for all kinds of things. Whether they will transfer power from Facebook I'm not so sure.
I like that with TimeGT I can easily organize my projects how I want. It's like the software adapts to me, instead of me adapting to rigid rules.
My most common use of Perl:

$ someCommandChain | perl -pe 's/because sed regex sucks/'

Maybe I could spend some time learning a new regex dialect to avoid perl entirely, but for the time being this works for me.
I've met some multiligual people. One spoke about a dozen languages (fluently, but far from perfectly, AFAICT), and I think he had a college degree in the humanities even. Worked as a car mechanic, so I guess the answer might be no.
The phrase "love me, or hate me, but don't ignore me" is a serious marketing mistake, in any context.

OK, but don't think that one blog is the voice of the Perl community. One blog shows the opinion of one blogger; nothing more. Amazingly, "the Perl community" does not have one single voice, as it consists of tens of thousands of people all over the world.

(Also, if blog noise was a good measure of langauge popularity, it would be clear that the most popular programming language right now is Go.)

Believe me, if people wanted to pay attention to your project, they would find a way to do so. And if your project is being politely but firmly ignored, and you're not getting the message, it is not the audience's problem. They've responded to your message. That response is somehow not getting through to you.

One thing I've learned from social news sites is that this is not correct. People mostly want to find ways to justify their insecurities. If they don't know very much about programming, but pick language X, they will hang around people that like language X and that say good things about language X. Then they feel smart by association, and since they have lots of friends saying lots of good things about language X, they can feel good for "making the right decision". Being down on language Y and language Z also help reinforce that feeling. If language X is unpopular, then they're clearly in the so-much-smarter-than-everyone-else majority. If language X is popular, then it's clear that it's the best. If it weren't good, why would it have so many users?

And so on.

These are not technical arguments, they are just emotion. Confusing them with technical arguments is quite silly.

Yegge's essay, cited elsewhere on this thread, is five years old. I suspect he has little to add to it, and neither do I.

It's worth noting that Perl has changed significantly in five years. All of that criticism has resulted in many major changes in how people use Perl, such that the criticism is probably no longer valid.

But of course, people like to recycle that criticism because They Picked Something Else, and drunken rants from five years ago make them believe that Something Else is the right choice.

(I am not sure how valid it was five years ago, actually. It was more a criticism of Amazon's hiring practices, or perhaps a note about how poorly managed the programmers were. I would love to write an essay about how bad Python is, because I have seen some absolutely horrible Python code... but I realize that it's bad because it was written by someone who didn't know how to program, not because Python is intrinsically bad.)
I took my a while to discover how they did the telemetry, but it appears that used the Argos System which is a a satellite-based system for very remote telemetry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argos_System
"[Incidentally, since the analysis was done, I'm getting more emails from Amazon.co.uk that lead with my name: "Mark Brownlow: Save up to 70% on..."]"

Using somebody's name has got to be a pretty smart tactic. I always hear my name in a crowded, noisy bar. Similarly, I always feel that it's my name when I'm reading something with it in.
Maybe I could spend some time learning a new regex dialect to avoid perl entirely

You should also cut off your nose. It would totally spite your face!
FreeBSD also has a binary package management system, see http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/packages-using..... The ports take precedence, though, in that they can have newer versions and not all packages on all architectures may be available as binaries.
If you're going VPS, use a company that built its business around VPS, not a company that built a business on seeing how much it can oversell its shared hosting.

I use Linode personally, and it's rock solid.
That's quite the story, I'm no longer a kid so 'science news for kids' will have to do with a stow-away from now on.

Excellent article and a really nice accomplishment, especially the modifications to engine and fuel to make it that efficient. Is there more detail available on the guts of the plane ?
I have a buddy who's on Dreamhost, and he seems to be mostly happy with it. I'd still go with Linode, Slicehost, et. al if you know a thing or two about sys admin.

I'm on Linode, and I haven't had any issues with it that weren't my fault. Pingdom has yet to report the server down in the six or so months that I've been with Linode, save for a few times I messed with some config files and made the site unreachable. I'd suggest them, but I've also heard very good things about Slicehost. I went with Linode just because it was cheaper, but I'd imagine the snazzy interface and integrated backups are pretty nice.
> Using monospaced fonts, like Ymacs does, is cheating.

It was cheating, initially, but now it supports variable-width fonts as well, as you can see by selecting some other font from the menu (right-side). Of course, some serious hacks were needed. ;-)
Greens gone wild: America's first eco-fraternity
When you go to school in Sweden, you get taught a Swedish grammar that is also slightly wrong, but one that makes Swedish to be closer to Latin than what it is. The purpose of this is to make it easier to learn the other big European languages like English, German, French or Spanish.

However, if you take linguistics at university level in Sweden, the first thing they tell you is to forget everything you were taught earlier, because a lot of it is wrong.

I'm really curious if this actually works, if it really makes it easier for kids to learn the other languages by learning a wrong version of grammar for their own language.
Oh, where to start with this one...

* No agile method stops you from doing a bit of design thinking before you code, when it is needed. Agile is against Big Design Up Front as a matter of course because it so often fails to be good design, or appropriate for what the business ends up wanting.

* Lots of automated tests done while coding that allows you to think sooner and better about your code. decreasing the need for big design up front, and better suiting the design to what you actually find your needs to be. Not thinking beforehand is a risk for sure, but producing a big, inflexible, unsuitable design is another risk. I've seen it, you may have too. Thinking without testing the thoughts in code is bad too.

* "Tests after the fact" refers to QA. Agile also emphasises unit tests before and during the fact. "Tests after the fact don't do enough to lower the number of bugs" is something that any agilist would agree with, but would recognise as an argument for agile.

* Rapid release to QA allows actual users/sysops to see where you're going much earlier, hence mitigating major risk of building the wrong thing/right thing but not scalable/performant enough/etc.
And what pointers are.

That's OK though. What I really love about the Internet is that Perl sucks because it has pointers, but Haskell sucks because it doesn't. It's almost like people throw around the word "sucks" without actually understanding the concepts that they are discussing.

"Thinking is hard! Let's go whining!"
Python is better than Perl because it runs slower, and has fewer features and third-party libraries?
If you've successfully ignored it, how do you know it's an abomination?
It is quite convincing that bad management pushes people to become entrepreneurs - but on the other hand if we had perfect management we would not need so many different enterprises.
Very interesting study. Look at the number of articles which were tagged in under half-hour even though they did not meet deletion criteria. That should tell Wikipedia management about the serious problems they have on their hands.
I'm an odd duck when it comes to reading habits, but the Kindle I got two months ago pretty much revolutionized mine. Previously I read about 5 novels a month and bought roughly 60% of them through Amazon. Since buying my Kindle I have bought 22 novels, 20 of them on the Kindle.

(And if they had trashy Japanese sci-fi available I would have gotten the other two on it, too.)

I've also bought a LOT more books from new authors than I usually would have, since a) it doesn't threaten to waste my trip to the bookstore and b) "First book in the series is free" is freaking genius and should be written into the standard contract for all sci-fi and fantasy authors (who live and die on selling the same people 1+ copies of every book of each series they are following).

While we're at it, can we drag authors/publishers kicking and screaming into Internet marketing? I'll give you my email address in return for a free book. I've spent probably close to $1,000 on Terry Pratchett books and yet I'm left to my own devices to discover that a new one just got published. What the heck. I should be getting my semi-annual update from Terry in the inbox complete with a sample chapter and his affiliate link to Amazon. (Hint hint publishers: cross-promotional opportunities abound.)
It would be very interesting to see this list from the perspective of other languages. This list only shows their "distance" from English and not from each other, but would it for example be easier for a Chinese person to learn Japanese or English?

And if you take it further, could you make a generic ranking list and see which languages are generally the easiest to learn?
Please stop using Perl.

Perl has been my startups' secret weapon, and I'd rather the competition didn't know about it.
Perl let us deal with large volumes of data, at high throughput (there are several ISPs, Universities, and fortune 500 which use our product to protect their mail infrastructure from DDoS and Spam). At a former company it let us collect, parse, store, audit, and make predictions against millions of web hits per day, in close to real time, with cheap infrastructure. Perl has been solidly stable - it just runs - keeping our ecommerce infrastructure making money.

It has had few security issues over the years. It has had few backwards incompatibilities between versions over the years. As a component of our products, it's given me relatively little pain in performance, reliability and security.
Development wise, I can't count the amount of time we've saved over the years thanks to not having to reimplement something because it's on CPAN, with a sensible license, with doumentation, tests, and in an easy to find and search location. As for code quality, Perl has great support for testing, support for automating code review (Perl::Critic), and a community of developers that are constantly making things better - but without breaking things that worked in the past (Moose has done amazing things for refactoring ugly OOP code, and you can use it with any of the other older OOP stuff).

I use it because it works well, seldom breaks, and causes me less hassle than anything else I've tried (C, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby). I've spent serious time with this language; I've maintained ugly old code from 10 years ago, and giant million++ line projects written in it. It has warts, sure, but what doesn't? I don't care; it's reliable. Big jobs, little jobs - it gets the job done. And that, to me, is more important than high minded ideals about aesthetics and purity.
This thread gives me serious deja vu. It seems like every time someone says they like Perl, the exact same arguments usually show up in duplicate. Someone posts Yegge's "I hate Perl" article. Three or four clever souls post something like, "I ditched Perl 100 years ago and never looked back". Then chromatic comes along and says something not-negative about Perl, and someone else asks him for conclusive proof.

Anyway, I can't find words intense enough to describe how I am feeling right now, but it seriously disturbs me. It feels like the Universe is recursing on itself, and I am in two of the Universes at the same time. I had to check the date on the comment three times before I believed that it was real. Then I had to do some tests to make sure I was not dreaming. I can't breathe under water right now, so I figure I must be awake. But I can't believe it. This. Again.
World's 10 most outrageous CEOs
Very good info!

A rule of thumb: the cheaper it is, the less energy it took to make it. Some more details: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=346912

Be aware that less energy is not always equal to better for the environment.
One thing that's always puzzled me: surely in the winter, when you have heating on, it doesn't really matter how efficient your appliances are - 'waste' heat from inefficient appliances will just replace heat that the heating system would generate otherwise?
Awesome comment - useful info! I noted that change too.

I now choose not to participate in any form of public protest or demonstration for fear that actions by others that might result in disorder could lead me to be arrested and harm my work and private life in the future.

I'm the same, except it's because I've come to realize protest has no effectiveness against anything that the powers that be really want to push through. Life certainly became less stressful for me once I realized my political opinions or actions would have zero impact or relevance on a national level - so now I get on with more interesting stuff that does make a difference directly to me and my family :-)
Only if you have electric radiators. If you heat your home in any other way, you're wasting some energy, since electric energy is the least efficient to use for simple heating.
That's why your Language Of Choice is missing many of Perl's features. But hey, at least it has a lot of smugness.

(Smugness solves 0% of my programming problems, but at least I feel good about not solving them.)
I agree that a lot of Perl bashing is thoughtless. And ideology when it comes to programming languages is just stupid.

I'm sure there are plenty of cases where Perl is the best tool for the job. I know it's very good for large quantities of string parsing, for one.

You seem to know a thing or three about Perl- do you have advice on other cases where it's the best tool to use? I think that might be the most effective form of countering the arguments you dislike, and it would be very practically useful too.
Well that seems kind of obvious: Amazon customers already are a very specific subset of all the book sales, and I bet they are far more willing to read an ebook than the average book reader.

For an article that promises the death of the printed book, I do find it strange that it almost solely focuses on the increase of ebook sales, rather than the decline of print sales. Could there perhaps be a new audience of people who would only read ebooks and no print editions? The only real information provided about this in the article seems to be a quote from an author who assesses he will earn more from ebooks than from print sales in 6 years time, but this is just one example and can depend upon the audience of the author: I bet ebooks will do better for SF fiction than ancient history literature.
If you do Google Trends searches for "perl programming", "ruby programming", "python programming", and "php programming"; you'll notice that they all show a downwards trend.

So I think there is something deeper here than "everyone is moving away from Perl".
Would you care to share some of these realizations?
Are you aware of how often "undefined behavior" happens on the trading floor? :-P
The point of the article is not so much in the death of the printed book, it's in the emergence of e-books as a viable business model for authors. But I don't think that much really changes here -- instead of signing a traditional contract with a publisher, the authors make new ones with Amazon, who is actually a new kind of publisher.

Just like traditional publishers, Amazon has a vested interest in the success of your book (the more you sell the more they earn), so they do (or will do) all the things that traditional publishers used to do in terms of promotion and marketing, except that they have the tools and technologies allowing them to be more efficient and handle more titles and authors simultaneously.

Also, they own the platform at this point, but this will change in time (Kindle is a great product, but others will soon follow). We've seen it all before when there was a monopoly (medieval monks) of the platform, but the underlying standard (latin alphabet) was open and new technology (printing press) allowed others to produce more final products. And the effect was that the publishers appeared as middlemen between creation and production.

So yes, the printed books are going the way of the dodo, just like previous technologies which were replaced by better alternatives, like steam engines, CRT monitors or black records. But the business model remains the same, and as always only those players who can adapt will survive; so there isn't much of a revolution here.
Sad to see that a redis database is still limited by the available RAM. This seems like a bigger showstopper than durability...
Software to Help You Set Prices
I bet ebooks will do better for SF fiction than ancient history literature

Why?
Python produces more readable code, in my opinion, mostly because the sigils in Perl are too easy to get wrong. Also, the lack of some language features factors into this, too.

Speed-wise they seem to be pretty much a toss-up, at least for these benchmarks: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...

Admittedly I have much more experience with Python than Perl, which certainly factors into my "readability" assessment. But, thinking back, I definitely felt a lot happier about the first Python script I wrote vs. my first one in Perl.

Agreed on the 3rd-party libraries. Perl's pretty hard to beat there- although I don't think there's a Perl equivalent to scipy/numpy, is there?
But the difference between Perl 5 and Perl 6 is much more significant than Python 2 and Python 3k.
You heat your home with electricity?

Seriously, look into getting that fixed before you do anything else to lower your carbon footprint.
"For the first time in history, the discovery of writing talent will depend more on skill and persistence than on luck."

Really? Sure, the selection process will be less centralized, less monolithic. But way too many authors will still compete for way too little attention. And to win they will still need luck. Hopefully less, but still.
Because of the audience: I suspect the average SF fiction reader will be more tech savvy than the average ancient history reader. Since ebooks are a new development, I think it's fair to say that they have a better market penetration with tech savvy people.