skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, but the thing is, productivity is not only about power of the language, but several factors, including proficiency in the given languages, available libraries, ease of getting developers in the given language, etc.

And of course, on the article "A disruptive startup is more likely to use Blub in creative ways, focusing on the idea, not the implementation. Facebook dominated its market - using PHP - which everyone agrees is crap. Google built up the world's biggest advertising agency using Java and C++; Android is a Java-like ecosystem that runs in most pockets these days."

Personally I don't care (too much) about using the fanciest language, but rather something a little more mature and easy to use.

Your startup is not going to make or break because your language support macros in the vast majority of cases. And even then you can come up with a service that encapsulate that part and code everything else in your "normal language"

"The vitriol surronding JavaScript is interesting and revealing"

Absolutely. Everybody hates it, but there isn't a right answer, but it got popular (because of its power) and it works. Every language is going to have something people will hate.
I've put a more complete translation of the non-standard English bits here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9678231
Good news - it's literally right there at the top of the question. "This question already has an answer here:" with a link. It is impossible to close a question on SE sites as a duplicate without providing the question being duplicated, for this very reason.
You may have noticed here on HN that conversations often expand beyond the confines of the article. I'm sorry you're unable to bring in knowledge of this topic from both the article and other sources, and an understanding of arguments pro/con for both European and American rail, into the conversation and provide productive commentary.
I'm wondering if that question was meant to be rhetorical or merely self-referential. :)
You and me need to have a chat, i was where you were 5-6 years ago and i've learned the hard way and also from people like Patrick on how to stop getting beat up like you are now. You've clearly already learned the hard way what your problems are, shitty clients, chasing money, nickel and diming, etc, etc.

You even know where you need to be, but you perhaps dont know how to get there. Well, one of things you've already mentioned, you dont have a personal network. Perhaps you dont want to be going out there and meeting people but its not as hard as you think its going to be and once you do, you'll start getting work.

Also, in order to get the decent money, its about reframing your offering, on your website it says: "Hello! We're a digital agency focused on quality code, deep client relationships and user experience." which sounds like your customer is other digital agencies. What if your customer is a small/medium business? What if your website said instead: "Hello! We're a digital agency focused on showing businesses how to expand their customer base and increase turnover.".

A business owner doesnt care about code quality or understand what user experience in a digital context is. If you instead said to them that you will make them money by using the internet, they understand that and are willing to hear more. I could go on and on forever about this... Shoot me an email.
Go, postcss, microservices
Best places to learn ES6
I want my kids to grow up knowing that hard work is good for you, but smart work is better. Don't know how its going to happen, but that's the joy of fatherhood, innit ..

Send them on a labourer summer job where they have to wake up at 5am moving piles of bricks from one end of the universe to the other.
Show HN: Bitcoin-Ex, Bitcoin Parser/Node in Elixir/OTP
I assume that the quote from Pesachim 50b that you are referring to is "metoch shlo lishma bah lishma", which means that if you do what G-d commanded for your own sake (because G-d will reward you), then you'll eventually come to do it for his sake. This is talking about someone who actually believes they are doing what G-d commanded. I have never heard it interpreted as someone who doesn't believe at all. The talmud says that "mitzvos tzrichus kevanah". In order to actually perform what G-d commanded, you have to realize and recognize that you are doing what G-d commanded. Without any belief in G-d, no matter what actions you do, Judaism teaches that you are not doing anything at all. Judaism is a religion of thought and action. If you have a complete lack of one of those two things, you are not observing the religion whatsoever.
Sounds nice!

But... Maybe it's just a pet peeve of mine, but seeing, twice, images/videos of gears that wouldn't work, is irritating. Such a mistake doesn't look professional to me.
Do No Harm: Short Tale on Versioning
YouPatch a Racket powered startup (video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8psnTEjYIEA
You can experience something like this in any country. I recently have seen almost identical scenario when I was on the trip to Mexico.
You may be looking for Outlaw Techno Psychobitch:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rRbY3TMUcgQ

Edit: this is a constructive parody of Erlang OTP web tech with some NSFW language.
This gives perspective to the phrase "peaked in high school." High schools tend to be incubators of social rejection.
I did that a couple of times. It helped me to understand myself and others a bit better.
Why women make gifted coders
I'm continually saddened and embarrassed by my shit country, Australia.
Definitely looks interesting, but difficult to trust based on how it's been pseudo-anonymously dumped onto github in one commit.
Zermalo-Frenkel Set theory with the Axiom of Choice is not proven to be consistent. One might argue that consistency is a natural requirement for a rule to be a rule. Especially for peano axioms, consistency is a given, so your comparison doesn't hold. Following the incomplefeness-theorem, the (dis-)proof might be external to any of ZFC's descriptions of the world, which believing in ZFC would be the world.

disclaimer: I don't understand axiom of choice.
> Is BASIC more powerful than Assembly? I doubt it, you can do anything in assembly, and BASIC is deliberately limited [4].

Doesn't this definition make the "power" of all Turing-complete languages equal?

> In other words, Lisp was the Flub of its day. A few years ago Flub was Haskell, and recently the new contender appears to be Rust, judging from the buzz.

If the author thinks Haskell and, of all languages, Rust are most powerful, I think he has significantly misunderstood Graham's original essay.

Among other things, they are statically checked with relatively difficult types that can take a long time to get right. That is obviously not the kind of language Graham had in mind for agily prototyping around corporate behemoths.

The author seems to define Flub as "the most popular language among the elite". Lisp was rarely even that, however, and we also have painfully obvious evidence of the most popular not being the most powerful. As such, I think a large portion of this essay hinges on a strawman: he dismantles a definition of Flub that Graham never used.

> The Flub Paradox can be stated like this: although Flub is self-evidently more powerful and productive than Blub, relatively few people use it and its effect on the real landscape of innovation appears minimal.

Is this really a paradox anymore? We have so many examples of inferior products dominating through inertia that I've completely lost my faith in humanity at this point.

I could add a few more points, but I think that would only be unnecessarily negative. I do like some points from the essay. I agree that we should take another look at Paul Graham's power continuum: for instance, the power of Lisp scales with lines of code (with low LOC, macros don't really enter the equation, and using a "batteries included" language with comprehensive libraries is probably faster). Haskell is easier than many agile languages to refactor, another important dimension to consider. And so on.
It's four hours by ferry, or 2 hours 45 by fast catamaran ferry, from Liverpool. It's pretty close. It used to be a big tourist destination in the Victorian age when there weren't cheap flights.
“Answers” for a Not so dead/cool software market
I'm from the other (right) side of the Pennines but that all looks pretty good to me (and it's not a million miles away from the "lanky twang"[1] either.)

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lanky-Twang-How-Spoke-Minibooks/dp/0...
Hacked this together this weekend. I was inspired by Coinbase's Toshi implementation but I was unhappy with some aspects of the performance and architecture. As I wanted to give Elixir/OTP a proper go, what better non-trivial deep dive than to implement a bitcoin protocol parser and node? This is my first non-hello-world Elixir lib/app and I'm hoping this is useful to others in some way. Discussion, pull requests, and "well, this sucks and here's how to improve it" always welcome. Cheers HN!
Let me take your point even further: it is some principles of functional programming that make these languages a great fit for "refactoring" and "breaking apart the monolith".

Myself I'm more into Haskell. I see similar benefits in both Haskell and Erlang. A nice thing of Erlang is that you have to structure you application as a bunch of services from the start.
Is it really limited to processes? It seems to support unordered lists, like in this board: https://kantree.io/b/553f546c63-setup
Should Harvard accept and enroll more students?
Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Becomes Reality as Agreements Secured in California
I live in Leeds now, but grew up in Nottingham (70 miles south, also coal-mining country) and we said "owt" and "nowt" - but pronounced like "oat", not "out".

Also your stereotypical Yorkshire would shorten "the" to "t'" (going down t'pit) - we would drop it completely "guin' dahn pit".

Sometimes I reckon Yorkshire folks think I'm taking the piss the way I say things.
Good point, it's becoming harder to know how to establish trust in projects. Particularly things like security-related software, and software which opens network ports on your systems, where there's increased impacts if it turns out to be malicious/insecure.
That's a good point, which I didn't address only for the sake of brevity. Yes, there are exceptions. No, they don't change the value of the statement as it applies to the matter under discussion.
All knots work by friction. Try to imagine any knot working with friction-free rope (which doesn't exist).
Serenity now...
Static site extension for Mercurial
God no, do not put anybody through that.

We had to study the book and watch the movie for GCSE English.

The writing is florid nonsense. The movie is worse: only one professional actor used throughout (the school teacher), and it shows.

Oh, and spoiler alert: the story is you can't have nice things, because even once you've found something nice you enjoy your brother is a dick and will kill it and put it in the bin.

Horrible, horrible, horrible book and film. Awful.
China deploys drones to stamp out cheating in college entrance exams
> Currently, 80 per cent of software programmers in America are male [...] Liukas believes that the profession only became dominated by men after people realised that it was well paid and highly creative.

Well, no. It became male-dominated when it became a subject of tinkering, so
one could do that at home. Now that it's established that it pays good, it
started to gain attention from women.
Subtitling error for an accent the subtitler was unfamiliar with?
This was my concern too. I was hoping another HN'er might be able to shed some light on the reputation of the authors.
Website as command line console
I'm a software developer, duh. 30+ years and still going strong .. still, right about now, getting out there and building a house, brick by brick at a time, seems like it might actually be better for me at the moment. I must be getting old.

;)
ABBA is mentioned:

"Like ABBA, there is a well of melancholic emotion, even paranoia, in the Bee Gees’ music."
Javascript didn't get popular because of "its power," it got popular because it was the only option* and because of inertia (all legacy scripts on the web were/are in Javascript, because it was/is the only option).

Edit: * Yes, I'm aware of VBScript, Flash, Java applets and ActiveX, and I'm aware they were all worse than JavaScript. Doesn't then follow that JS is good, or that it won on a level playing field. Frankly, it says something that for all its many faults Flash was often the superior option until the late 2000s.
> The problem is that consulting will take a lot more time out of your life than even a regular job.

I think this is a key bullet point people often forget when they idealize the whole notion of becoming a freelancer/consultant. Essentially you are taking on several jobs at once, which are generally staffed by full time people in other companies, while also burdening yourself with all of the risk that comes with running a company. Once you become a consultant, you are the company, and there's quite a bit more to it than just filling out the paperwork for the LLC application.
The coal mines were tough places way back when. I know a few old boys from the mines in Wales and Lancashire, less so over in Yorkshire.

Hard. As. Fuck.

Almost fearless. Grateful for a quiet life now they're out of it.

I know one guy who bought a very small mine in the High Peak which he and a mate thought there was 3-4 years work left in for them. Just them. On their own. Tiny, tiny seam. Off they went. Utterly bonkers.

I grew up in a mill town myself, and all the local towns have stories about kids being put to work and the odd one being killed. My school trips were to Litton Mill, where the working conditions were once so bad there was a Parliamentary enquiry into the child deaths there.

What I'm getting to is, I am unbelievably lucky to live in the age I do where I get to work with my brain, I was able to get a decent education despite relatively modest beginnings and I would never, ever, ever look down on a manual labourer like a coal miner: they were tough bastards.

And it is of course now mostly past tense - not many mines left in the UK, despite there still being plenty of coal down there.
First, scientists predicted that if we kept emitting CO2 the planet would warm up, because physics. Then we emitted lots more CO2 and lo and behold, the planet's warming up. That doesn't strike you as a bit too much coincidence?

For more detail see Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren, which describes:

- The physics of the greenhouse effect

- The contributions to global warming from CO2, methane, black soot, etc

- The geological record that shows how the planet responded, when things like this happened before
The tech probably kinda-works, was what I took away from that.

If you use it on a new battery you're likely to get worse life out of it, if you use it on a rechargeable it might damage it, but if you use it on a 'dead' alkaline you might get some more life out of them. How much will depend on the tolerances of the device you're using them in.

--edit-- oh, and it will do an end-run around any battery gauge your device has.
The fact that it's relatively light on features is one of the things that makes Trello great.
I believe an important reason why Arch is easier to maintain has to do with its minimal package customization:

Applications already have their own learning curve, custom packaging only adds to this. Just reading the documentation or googling for answers may not be enough, one also needs to understand how and why packagers have changed things to be different from upstream.

Personally, I prefer the Arch way of keeping package customization to the bare minimum. Combined with the very simple package format and powerful tools, Arch is a winner.
When I was ~22 I had a brief spell of unemployment. My dad, who was a malt whisky distillery manager, said I could work for a bit at his distillery as a warehouse man to fill in for one of the workers who was off sick. The job mainly entailed rolling filled casks from the filling store into the warehouses, unloading empty casks delivered from the coopers, moving and loading casks of mature whisky into lorry trailers, internal cask movements and cask "dipping" and inspections.

Dad was a real stickler for time keeping and we had to be on-site and in the rest room for the day's briefing by 0800 on the dot, not a minute later.

I had been sailing pretty close to the wind for a few days and then one Thursday night went out and got quite drunk with pals, eventually getting to bed at around 3am - and yes, there was whisky involved. The next morning I had a stinking hangover, slept in, and arrived a whole five minutes late at the rest room. My dad said nothing about being late except for suggesting that it was about time I learned the ropes on filling whisky barrels.

For the next two hours (and for my sins I suddenly realised) I filled whisky casks. This was done by hand. You basically have a big hose with a nozzle and a tap. The flow rate is quite high which means there's a high speed out-gassing of very strong whisky fumes that hit you right in the face. The last thing you need with a whisky inflicted hangover is to be around the smell and fumes of more whisky, especially when it's hitting you square in the face like a small gale.

It took all of my being not to be sick, or faint (pardon the pun), and was probably the best lesson on time keeping and not partying on his watch I've ever had. He never said anything that day except for a knowing wink and a wee grin that he gave me from the window of the weighing office as I silently retched and struggled to maintain my composure surrounded in sickening malt whisky fumes :)

We still have a laugh about that to this day yet.
You say that as though exercising like a competitive athlete is necessary for good health or weight maintenance. It isn't. It's much simpler to understand the insulin cycle and work with it rather than against it.
Yesterday's discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9676390

And the more substantial discussion from the day before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9669945
This is why I never had problems with multiples of 7. 8's on the otherhand can still give me pause...
> And? Does that give your argument more weight?

I'm likely to have to live with results of this. I already do to some extent.
I agree.

The article has to lack data as that's the reason for why we are so impressed by creativity. 'True creativity' (as opposed to opposed to the shallow "We have to think outside the box" type of creativity) can not be measured by definition. That's what makes it so intriguing! As soon as something can be fully measured it becomes debatable whether it is still a creative effort or not.

If you accept what I wrote above then the headline of the article appears even more bonkers: How can something that is so complex that we can not fully measure it (yet) be caused (mostly) by a one-dimensional factor? I mean, sure, you could find a single factor if it is very vague one but that's not helpful. I.e. I could say: Being alive is a key factor for creativity. What's more, social rejection is surely also a key factor for becoming a dull person who watches TV all day.
On-call rotations are a team sport
I'm actually intrigued, what you'd propose as an alternative.
A lisp? A smalltalk? Dylan? or even something like Factor?

The goal of swift seems to nudge programmers further down the immutable, functional path, while still giving them the impression of staying away from the scary FP stuff.
Why are writers bad at relationships
... And that's why you always leave a note!
Not everybody in the UK has an exhaustive command of regional accents, including people who work on BBC dramas. It's very possible they just made something up and hoped to get away with it.
Two modern day groups who honor Emperor Norton:

E Clampus Vitus -- http://abc7news.com/archive/7288186/

And Heirs of Norton -- http://www.heirsofnorton.com

There was a movement to have the Bay Bridge renamed the Emperor Norton Bridge -- http://www.emperorsbridge.org
Essential tips for startupers to survive and success on the digital market
What about Rust though?
No, it's not. It's a rant written with absolutely no value whatsoever. jfaucett gives a good summary detailing why this is a worthless submission.
> Because I really find it unbearable boring what most people do and think.

This is not a healthy attitude to have, really. If you care about people you also care about the mundane stuff in their life. Because that's part of what makes them who they are.
> major activist investor: Nelson Peltz

I wish the press would do the responsible thing and use the proper words for those things: "corporate raiders".

Giving into establishment's newspeak is not doing anyone a favor. And let questionable people do the toxic thing they do (destroying companies for his own interest) while feeling good about themselves.

For now, I chose to keep away from any media that uses those lying words (such the ones one would use to cover up for torture, bombings, etc).

Noted: Fortune is in the no read list.
If you have time, and I completely understand if you don't, could you elaborate on the authoritarianism thing?

Why on earth would that turn out to be a good thing this time?
paraphrased from the reddit comments:

››after washing your adult hands it would look no different (maybe more diverse)‹‹

edit: link to some pictures about it (but remember to keep your kids dirty :) it's good for them http://safesmokedfish.foodstandards.gov.scot/assessment/5126

Nice detail: see the white big blob in the bottom left? It's probably producing anti-biotics, keeping the other stuff at a distance (how did nobody see this earlier?)
probably because home computers became much more gendered and i suspect the change to IT being an engineering graduate entry might have something to do with it
The post struck me as an incomplete thought where the author ran out of steam. My hunch was correct when I got to his advice:

'Attempting to “solve” these problems means that as a
company you have to throw away everything that you know
and start from scratch.'

Feel free to go die on that hill, with HR further above in fortified gun nests.
But Matlab users love it! oh wait..
Make hard coding your default choice
> Doesn't then follow that JS is good

Of course not, and, sure, Flash was a better alternative for a lot of time (but mostly for things outside of JS like HTML5 capabilities)

C is not great as well, but between something good that doesn't do what is needed and a bad one that does guess what is used in the end.
Not really. I thought of installing gcc 5.1 through its binary package and it tried to install gcc-ecj 4.5 along with it. I ended up installing it through the ports system, disabling Java support.

Its ports are where FreeBSD really shines. They're something in between Arch's ABS and Gentoo's portage. I just wish there was someway to say "install binutils via pkg, and only compile gcc itself".
Texas Police Officer on Leave who pulled gun on unarmed teenagers at pool party
It could have been more descriptive, but I'd say it's pretty low on the scale of headline obnoxiousness. And the story is well-written, detailed and touching, I thought.
Massachusetts Lottery Cash WinFall High-Volume Betting [pdf]
For another look at the Bee Gees: Winds of Change.

I had a friend who was an all-out Bee Gees fan (he even tried to look like them) who played that song for me and it made me re-consider the rest of their work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haknxM7FGfk