skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PreScheme has been used in some Scheme implementations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PreScheme

I've been looking into Lisp language implementation recently and it seems to have been somewhat influential, I've seen several references to "this is like PreScheme", most recently in Cola which jcdreads brought to our attention.
It would have been difficult to have written APL in C originally, what with the lack of time machines and all (APL was created in '57 as an abstract notational concept and first implemented in '64 and released in '65; C was created in '72). The interpreter was probably written in S/360 assembler -- just a guess based on the fact that similar but simpler list/vector operations implemented 15 years later in the Lotus Notes macro (formula) language required write-only C wizardry on a truly heroic scope. Somehow I don't see anyone doing it in FORTRAN or COBOL without periodic psychiatric intervention.
This is exactly right. There's a lot of use cases where what's needed are variables, loops, conditional logic, and easy HTML output. In those cases, the winning language is the one that's easiest to learn and to deploy. Problems with handling invalid characters in octal are just not relevant in those cases.

Of course, those cases aren't interesting to HN, but they're common, and PHP legitimately wins in them.

What should die is not PHP but the use of PHP in circumstances where another language would be a better choice.
Vendor lock in is not evil, in of itself. Almost every single product in the world is proprietary. The problem with Microsoft's lock-in is they controlled 98% of desktop computing. I would argue vendor lock-in even leads to better products, since the developer don't have to worry about interoperability.

Monopolies are the real problem. Apple can go have it's little slice of the cellphone market for all I care. Google is getting monopolistically scary though.
If you care only about 99.9% of your requests being on time, it means that one in a 1000 can time-out and die

Your argument is mathematically correct, but from an engineering point of view, doesn't make sense.

Of course in theory a system which responds 99.9% of the time means that it's possible for 1 of 1000 requests to die horribly. But we are engineers. If I achieve 99.99% of my target, it means that it's highly likely that that one request will also behave with pretty good performance, but I can't be sure that it will be 100ms. It might be 150ms. Or 200ms. But as an engineer, I claim that I am not concerned and don't care about knowing precisely that number.

I think this is what the author of the original article misses completely: he is applying advanced math and refuses to consider that engineering tradeoffs are practical. Of course in theory they aren't. But in practice they are.
Meta-statistics for website are typically normal?

I think for one way flow through systems this has a tendency to be true (and so is likely to arise on most test harnesses), but I recall that multi-way routing systems with feedback effects (like, say, IP networks or highways) tend to have substantially non-gaussian congestion statistics: typically worse that gaussian, actually.

Consider B. Huberman et. al.

www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/InternetCongestion/InternetCongestion.pdf

One problem with relying upon standard deviations when you are trying to design a reliable system is that the majority of the variance in many distributions is concentrated in rare events. This is particularly true with long-tails (e.g. a Pareto distribution with alpha <= 2). If you happen to have a system conforming nearly to such statistics, and you keep your eyes on the mean and the standard deviation alone, you'll end up severely underestimating the standard deviation (which might not even converge) and you could be designing a faulty system.

Of course, the real problem, how can one gain confidence in one's statistical analysis. Not so easily, really. So if there's two things people who know about statistics, it's that statistics is critical, and statistics is hard.
I think this is a great point. Early adopters will put up with bugs and crappy tech if the app solves a real pain and makes them happy. It's all about love, not IE6.
Saying this as politely as possible given the content of the statement: You aren't any better than those you attack.

Yes, the (somewhat comedic) irony of Fox News attacking many of Obama's programs is that the seeds of those programs were planted at the end of the Bush administration. But the irony of people like yourself is that you don't see how the same is true of you in reverse (who hated Bush but now love Obama for doing virtually the same thing)

As for all the Atlas Shrugged commentary I do find it kind of tedious. Pointing out similarities between Atlas Shrugged only means something if you accept the premise that Atlas Shrugged is the correct way of thinking. Yes things ended in disaster in the book but the book was fiction so it doesn't prove anything to say the current administration is moving in the direction of the book's antagonists.

Don't get me wrong. I agree far more with Rand than I do with Obama. I just wish people would make the actual arguments that Rand made and let those be debated rather than trying to cast people as the villain from the book.
Think of it as a hedge against any type of electricity
disruption and it makes more sense to me. If they control
their own electricity they gain more flexibility and if
it is clean it makes them look all the better.
If you can't make it to that one you could try Lechuguilla in New Mexico. Also a crystal cave, formed from acid running through limestone, it was featured in David Attenborough's "Planet Earth" series. The prettiest part is the "chandelier ballroom", massive crystals hanging from the ceiling.
Access is highly restricted though, you'd probably have to join a queue and go with an official research team.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lechuguilla_Cave
I'm usually the first one to get mad at dumb chit chat, but I think this guy is the last one who should telling us how to interact with people.

In the first conversation, the person he's talking to is justifiably defensive. Usually when you ask when someone is going to be free without telling them why, it's because you're trying to coerce them into doing something they don't want to do.

In the second case, okay, that other person is being mean. But you did just ask them a really stupid question. You're wasting their time, not the other way around. They're making it clear that next time you should look it up on Wikipedia. And you should.

The third case shows how really socially disabled this guy is. This person is trying to be friendly. They're trying to entertain you and therefore build camaraderie with you. They're being nice. And you blow a gasket because you didn't get whatever you wanted from them fast enough.

You might want to take this test http://www.glennrowe.net/BaronCohen/AutismSpectrumQuotient/A...
What happened to grammar --- like word order? Did it not drift?
That is a very good way of sketching it, but even the last part is sometimes not the easiest to do.

I've written a 'media-player-annex-file-sharing-service' ( http://mxchg.com/ ), the thing has a web based front-end written in PHP and a C based back end for audio fingerprinting (so you don't end up storing 10 copies of each possible audio file).

When the time rolled around to write the scripts that glue everything together in the back-end I chose to do it in PHP instead of python for several reasons:

- it reduced the number of dependencies

- it removed the need to rewrite part of the code in yet another language
(mostly library stuff)

- it removed the need for yet another skill in people wishing to modify it
do you ever start planning what you're going to code next while you're falling asleep, or when you take a toilet break or walk somewhere? or when you go to a meeting and sketch out that new module or whatever?

reminds me of a hemingway hack. it's hard to sit down to my computer with no specific goal in mind, or just the high level "i have to finish this story" in mind. it's easy to slide into other things.

but if i've been visualizing the code i want to write, or if i have a sketch of the data or algorithm, then i don't waste time.
I would agree with your heading.
Found this interesting article.

http://blog.firsttuesdayjournal.com/?p=2231
The problem with this is when someone's kid is killed by a repeat offender and the parent lobbies for increased jail time. So politicians increase jail time. But almost everyone is a criminal so you can't actually put that many people in jail for common crimes. So the justice system let's people slip by with a rather than send people to jail... And then the cycle repeats.
That was a very interesting read. Thank you.

Yes, it seems like improv, is really good at emphasizing and making explicit human interactions. This might be applicable to AI agent research and design.

If you do your write-up, I will gladly read!
That's got to be some of the most unsafe workshop practices ever.

Never ever do it the way those guys in the video show, always use a push stick, and NEVER rely on a safety device to keep your ass safe, save it for the unavoidable.
Cool, I think I edited an early version of that page and added some tables with numbers and a small discription. It looks much improved from how I left it.
"Everyone else made hundreds of millions and we paid money to not be a part of it," Richardson said. "It was brilliant. I come up with these strokes of genius from time to time. That was my best."

I love that quote. It makes me think I'd get along really well with him.
Is it the dog owner or the dog who determines how much dog food gets bought?
Yeah, I'm going to call BS on this. I work in the Mental Health Industry and I've gone through the hurdles that exist to using iPhones in the health industry and they're significant. From documentation to security of data it would take a lot of effort on Apple's part and that effort would be contrary to their established culture (Government likes open solutions from companies that bend over backwards to accommodate)

I have no doubt it's something Apple's considered. The one place Microsoft's TabletPC has gotten any kind of traction has been in hospitals. But Apple's culture isn't conducive to meeting Federal guidelines and that's not something that can be changed on a dime.

(Also, the sheer fact that he mentions the Obama administration shows this guy doesn't know much. Government sadly doesn't move that quickly so rushing to market with a tablet would put it out there years before any action the Obama administration takes would go into effect)
Don't have anything to relate about the truth of the rumor, but my dad is a family doctor who has been begging for a clever tablet for medical forms for about five years now. The two key wins for him are (1) not having to fetch and replace physical charts, or find a terminal to look up info, and (2) the benefit of a really good autocomplete system that could let him write down a common diagnosis in a couple taps.
The write-up reads like an advertisement for a weight-loss product.
I think it has for me. At least, it's given me an excuse to keep in touch with my inner child. My sons and I play with lego's together. Watch cartoons and kids shows (I love What's New Scooby Doo), etc.

Of course, I'm not sure what's gonna happen with all that as they get older. :-( Maybe I'll really become an old man then.
> It's naive to think telling people "they are full of shit" won't have repercussions.

Yes, it does have repercussions. It usually doesn't come to that. But the benefit outweighs the repercussions. It creates a level of trust between us, because we cut through bullshit and passive aggressive "fake niceness". We yell at each other, but then we also apologize to each other.

We mitigate the repercussion by screening heavily based on personality when we hire. When we hire people we make it explicit that this is the environment. Candidates spend a whole day with us, we go to lunch together, we do a debug session, we ask them to participate in some mock-up or simple design spec with a group of engineers and white-board.

Some otherwise good engineers didn't end up working for us because we didn't like their personality, some were terrified that we threw the "f" word around too much, some thought us as not too "politically correct".

So far this has worked for the company for 20 years, I've been with them for 3 years and I really like it.
So what do they mean when they say "it's online?" It's obviously a web application, but why is it one (other than that being the paradigm the author is most acquainted with)? What's the advantage of using this over, say, a desktop tool like WriteRoom/OmmWriter plus a scoring script?
There need not be any relationship between the schema, which is purely logical, and how it is implemented. In practice, there is, but why this is still the case is baffling.
Amen. Also, your "simple question" may have 2 or 3 varyingly complex answers, and I don't know how much info you need, and the context for your question can make it much easier for me to give you an answer.

However, I try to explain that when I ask, "Why do you ask?" so people know I'm not just being a dick. Still bugs my wife, though.
The placing of those semicolons inside control structures gets me every time.

I just don't do enough of it to make it in to an automatism.
Hello Maxwin

thnx for yr reply .. yes you are absolutely right , we can create groups for that ... but if someone has not created it and his friend list is more than 250 then this problem will arrive.
I entirely agree with you. In fact, there are still people doing arbitrage on eBay, although eBay is now an established site visited by millions. An example: some people look for misspelled items being auctioned (an auction where the item being auctioned is not spelled right, attracts a lot fewer bidders), buy them low, and sell them high at another auction. Looks like a truly classic arb! Of course, there's still the risk that the item one has just bought will attract no bidders...

In exchange-traded financial instruments, arbitrage is now incredibly more difficult than what it was 100 years ago. Computers and communications killed most of the arbs. But it's still possible to find arbs in structured products :-)

And, although sports betting sites are shady, I would bet there are quasi-arbitrage opportunities to be found in online sports-bettings these days...
On a scale of 1 to douche...
I don't understand the throwing money away idea about renting. Are you anticipation appreciation (good luck for the foreseeable future)? Is it the home mortgage deduction you're so excited about? For most people, unless they're sure they're gonna be in their home for a long time (10+ years maybe?) I'm not sure how purchasing is worse than renting.
I use a firefox addon called refcontrol (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/953) for all these paywall sites. Don't even have to search.
I really liked this. I've written a shell script that does something similar, but there isn't any chart generation or word tagging, for example. This is nice and polished. I'm always overjoyed when someone works on something I want. :)
The developers of PHP created the most popular language on the web. They built a language that is not only preferred by people with no programming background, but also powers some of the most influential and popular websites (eg, Wikipedia, Facebook). They did all this with zero-or-negative hype around them and while competing in a space that some of the richest companies in the world (Microsoft, Sun, IBM) have poured massive resources into.

So, yeah, they did screw up here and there. But very few projects were remotely as successful as theirs.
I just want to add that the guy who designed the Finnish (same as Swedish) keyboard layout obviously held a deep grudge against c programmers -- most non-letter symbols that you need are just awful to access. Backslash is [Alt Gr] amd [+].
Perl may have had a better runtime, but PHP was effectively faster since it had an easy to use apache module and most perl code was being run as cgi scripts, which is hardly performant. I remember trying to configure mod perl and mason circa 2002, and it was an excercise in poor documentation and pain. PHP was dead simple to setup. That said I still stuck with Perl (eventually moving to Ruby), and I loathe PHP.
Bingo! Exactly why I often choose not to answer a question... suspicions about what following imposition is going to be attempted by the asker (and require more energy to bug out of once I've already admitted when "my flight was due in."

[Yes, I can be unsocial at times: but -sorry- sometimes I prize my quiet time for creative restoration and reflection to donate it to a garrulous traveling companion.]
* Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours (using Haskell): http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_H...
Looks cool but I wish you could publish your writing.
And some Perl for evil mangling. (At least the last time I checked.)
The parser combinators like Parsec (for Haskell) are also quite pleasant to work with.
Hacking status (linked from an interesting HN discussion)
A related question was explored on LtU recently: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3754.
And it would be actually a sensible thing to write a C compiler in Python. C is not a very nice language to write complicated programs in --- and compilers don't need C's speed. They just need to produce (correct and) fast code, but they do not need to run bleedingly fast.
To those who haven't read the book in question: I recommend never reading it.
the guy that made it:

http://busterbenson.com/

Bottom of the page, 'rules to live by', good stuff!
For us, our lawyer is an advisor, and he's a lawyer who only works with startups, so we like to hear what he has to say. We include him on board emails, meetings, etc.

However, we gave him some equity and his participation is otherwise free in this regard. We certainly couldn't pay someone hundreds of dollars an hour to give us advice right now.
* The crash is not intended to symbolize the killing of those who oppose capitalism but to show the folly of loose, whimsically held beliefs.*

Yes, A is A. If you are a capitalist then you may not have any ideological compromise at all, even if it appeals to you, and even if there's strong evidence that it's a smart political and economic decision.

A is A. The world is black and white. Anybody who sees shades of grey must be killed.

Fucking nonsense, IMO.
I'm implementing a language of my own design in Python right now. I chose Python because I'm familiar with it and I can piggyback on Python's strings, hash tables, and garbage collection.
Alternate title:

Apple Tablet To Replace Clipboard
This question comes up a lot, but to me it always sounds like "Why eat at a restaurant when you can cook at home?" The main reason people do it is that simply to have someone else do all the work other than the eating, or in this case, the writing.
Back in the 1990s, I remember a phrase that circulated. It's memorable because at the time it rang so incredibly true. It was a remark about how the market and industry regarded the Titan Microsoft, and went: "Whenever Bill Gates throws a dart at a wall, everyone races to the wall to paint a target around that dart". Yes, M$ had gained such stature, and Bill such celebrity, that many a blind eye was turned toward their technology, marketing practices, and other less-than-wonderful aspects.

Today, Google (peer'd by Apple) is the new Microsoft (IBM is the new General Motors, but that's a different topic). And yes, everyone again seems to be racing to draw targets around the arrows they've shot.

It's not amazing (though bitterly disappointing) to see consumers accept limits from vendors: changes in rules of 'ownership', accepting lock-in with cell carriers, etc....but it _is_ amazing to me how developers accept (and even embrace) Apple's re-definition of software development and platform control. Maybe it's a generational thing -- but, a _vendor_ decides if you get to write/sell software?!!?
And yet, this RCT shows that it has no effect.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19296870
> This is pretty cool. The compiler figures out the order of execution

Yes, indeed. You might also like Haskell and Clean that also do this.

> and parallelization of your code for you

And may soon do that as well.
Maybe it's time to add a new food to the list requiring Vitamin D, not just milk.

Potato chips maybe? (Semi joke.) Some food with oil anyway.
Um, what? You want your compilers to be very fast, otherwise you end up wasting a lot of developer time (and thus money) waiting for compilation.
Yes, also (usually kinds of) object-orientation and (nice) static type systems don't go together well.
8% of Human Genetic Material Comes from a Virus
It's not that much of a claim, if they implicit parallelization works well. Also some functional languages are getting very nice optimizations like deforrestions / fusions that make them really fast.
Perhaps posting the source code and allowing people to host it on their own terms would be a bit more realistic. If someone is to write as 750words intends, spilling their deepest thoughts; I don't think they want to attribute their facebook account to it, let alone entrust someone they know nothing about with that very data. It would be interesting to know if they changed the authentication procedure + made it anonymous, how much the conversions would change.
I was actually going to try it, but I simply do not have a facebook account, and have no intention of getting one. I kind of get that one might want to avoid writing all the authentication stuff, though.
A interesting essay. Given there was a bit much introductory praise, I'll excerpt the crux of his criticism:

"In short, complaining about the quality of Google’s scans distracts us from a much larger problem with Google Books. The real problem - especially for those in the digital humanities but increasingly for many others - is that Google Books is only open in the read-a-book-in-my-pajamas way."

He also comments on the conspicuous absence of Google Books on their Data Liberation Front page.
I don't really get it. The speed of your compilation target may matter --- but the speed of your compiler is completely irrelevant to the speed of your language. (This is why native compilers are so fast: they compile to assemly.)

About which are you talking? You confuse me.
That's rude.
First, you don't know me.
Second, you assert that I hated Bush but "now love Obama for doing virtually the same thing." You have no evidence to back that up. Plus, I'm actually pretty neutral on whether there are "czars" are not -- I think in practice they are just another kind of government employee that has some responsibilities delegated to them by somebody above them. In other words, pretty common and nothing new or malevolent.

Also, I disagree with your statement that the seeds of this were planted in the Bush administration. From my reading of history, it's just a trivially different variation on something that's gone back hundreds and possibly even thousands of years. Nothing revolutionary. I'm pretty confident I know who is behind Fox News so I'm beyond feeling any irony when I hear of something new they've said or done. I just expect it.
Further, the folks that think "Obama is evil" would be hilarious in my book if I wasn't sad/afraid about the fact that their vote counts just as much as mine. Democracy fails if the "demo-" are dumb. (Side note: see Idiocracy. A funny-but-true movie.)
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I'm guessing you didn't watch the video. Sure, the lower your net caloric intake, the less weight you will gain. However, the types of food you eat have different effects on how much you want to eat. Therefore, if you eat different foods, you'll be more likely to lose weight.