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antigravityon Ask HN: If you were starting from scratch again, what language would you learn first?

Python, then LISP and (SML or Ocaml), then C and assembly and compilers, then Python again.

Though I like what Norvig said in http://norvig.com/21-days.html

"Use your friends [...] Keep it simple. [...] Play. [...] Given these criteria, my recommendations for a first programming language would be Python or Scheme. But your circumstances may vary, and there are other good choices. If your age is a single-digit, you might prefer Alice or Squeak (older learners might also enjoy these). The important thing is that you choose and get started."

antigravityon Poll: What experiment to run on AWS mechanical turk?

You mean keep tinkering with the study until it "works"?

If you're not careful, you could get http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias on a massive new scale...

It would be interesting to try to find scientifically optimal ways of doing study iteration, or approaches to interpreting the complete (experiment_rev, results)-list from another researcher...

antigravityon Ask HN: Best debugging war stories?

http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

antigravityon Jim Hefferon's Linear Algebra: A free textbook with fascinating applications

(1) Axler's "Linear Algebra Done Right"

...a nice introduction to abstract linear algebra, but not quite abstract or terse enough.

(2) These course notes: http://www.math.mcgill.ca/goren/AlgebraII07-08/AlgebraII.htm

...good, though the duality section is a bit lacking. Riesz Representation Theorem FTW!

antigravityon Can you say this about your startup?

no, yes, yes, yes, no, yes

antigravityon Five Years (doing mostly PHP) is Enough

I'd recommend doing a startup and/or side project involving interesting functions of massive datasets.

Technology-wise, at least consider...

- learning SML or OCaml or Erlang

- learning Python

- going deeper into Python. It's a fantastic way to express oneself. It beautifully offers (generators, coroutines, multithreading, subprocesses, and networking) for piping and distributing your computation, a flexible blend of functional and imperative, and its syntax is the most conducive to elegance, simplicity, and rereadability of anything I've tried.

...then building the core algorithms in C/C++ with SWIG wrappers, the tip of the iceberg with Django, and everything else in pure Python.

A must-read: "Generator Tricks For Systems Programmers"

http://www.dabeaz.com/generators/Generators.pdf

antigravityon Ask YC: What great mac-only software do you recommend?

TextMate, DTerm, MacFusion, Quicksilver, Jumpcut

Life without DTerm... why, it seems absurd!