skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a person who started learning Lisp after years and years of using mostly mainstream languages, I have to at least partially disagree. I will say this, however: Lisp is, at first, difficult to read for many people. But I think it is mainly difficult to read for people who are used to reading programs written in languages with Algol-like syntax (C, C++, Java, Perl, etc). If you've been writing programs for 5, 10, or 15 or more years mostly in languages that all have that common ancestry, it is understandable that your brain will (at first) work against you when reading something like Lisp. However, after using it for a reasonable period of time, I found that it became much easier to read. And now I don't find it any more difficult to read than any of the mainstream languages that I have used in the past.

I think that, in fairness to Lisp, if you take two people who have never programmed in their life, and if each of the two has a reasonable and approximately equal amount of skill and potential for being a decent developer, and taking those two individuals, you teach one to develop in Lisp, and one in, say Java. Given that situation, I don't think the Lisp developer will find his code more difficult to read really at any stage of his learning (more difficult that is, than the Java developer finds his code to read at a similar stage of learning).

It seems to me, from every testimony I've read from developers who have come to Lisp after extensive careers using other more popular languages, that there is a "breaking in" period where it takes some time to get used to things. However, anyone I've read about who put in any reasonable effort to learn a Lisp (or a language related to Lisp, like Scheme) seems to repeat what others like him or her have said -- you get used to the syntax after a while, and then at the very least it no longer bothers you or gets in your way.
Anyone reading the TSA blog already knows they do: http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2009/10/response-to-bag-check-cartoo...
They have a bit of a mission to not dumb down the material. I certainly only get a percentage of it, but have learned a lot. Grab the RSS for a few weeks if you'd like to learn more than the mainstream media presents.
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence 2009 Accomplishments
My first thought was "Is yoga even safe for children?"
I agree in theory, but I guess it can seem more self-promotional than informational, which is contrary to the purpose of these forums.
No, sorry, I considered this before my original post. The Internet is not an example of the government picking winners.

The Internet was just one of many inventions government research produced through DARPA and many other agencies. IP, a portable protocol that a variety of companies simply picked up, won despite any bets of policy maker, not because of them.

The Internet was never the subject of a massive infrastructure funding drive. It was not seen as a technology which would jump-start the economy until people started making money through servers stored in their dorm rooms. No, the boom was not the result of government picking winners here.

My argument: Government doing basic research = good. Government picking particular winning technologies = bad.
Maybe that generalizes, to say that it's the code that lisp doesn't turn into "Fungible Cogs", and so it can't be used by others in a standardized way.

Standardization seems to be anathema to the individuals who are attracted to lisp's power and flexibility. If lisp ever achieved code fungibility, lispers would hate it.
Serious question -

> A death of a single lawyer behind bars or the deaths of numerous enemies of the modern Russian state should never be compared to systematic killing of millions of innocent people.

Could you specify the difference between "numerous enemies of the modern state" and "innocent people"? I was under the impression that most vicious people believe the people they kill/imprison/torture/etc are enemies of the state.
freerice.com for other languages, basically.
I think it's fine to post your own material here. If it's not informational it won't get voted up.
I've always had my greatest success when I scratched a personal itch.

My first released app, iRooster, helped me wake up in time for class, and ended up paying my rent after Apple featured it in a weekly email blast.

My first iPhone app helped me track the daily fluctuations in electoral vote counts between Obama and McCain last year. In the first two weeks, I catapulted into the top 10 paid apps list on the AppStore, spent hours on conference calls with a fair number of bigwigs at Washington Post, and received a very nice writeup from Walt Mossberg.

YMMV, of course, but scratching an itch means you're going to be able to solve a (relatively) real-world problem, probably help other people out, and will definitely increase your long term happiness.

Good luck!
Teahupoo reference:

Beautiful, deadly, gorgeous

"Brad Laird surfing Teahupoo"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfPYVYc0U3M

http://www.surfline.com/surfing-a-to-z/teahupoo-history_925/
Ease of building it yourself compared to learning someone else's system is a major reason Lisp is languishing, in my opinion.

Oh, that why Perl is languishing too. Well, the problem is how hard it is to learn someone else's system in Perl. If Lisp has that problem, well, there you are.
Start with Facebook Connect if you haven't already. In terms of UX its the best single sign-on experience.
It makes sense for hills, though it's not much of a win over a normal electric-assist bike. The energy involved seems like it would be a rounding error.
It's about business.
I program in C++/etc but also in SQL. SQL is terse logical language. Everyone may has SQL but I think given constraints of being a logical language SQL is far more readable than lisp - but I've only read bits of lisp online.
The ICFP Programming Competition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICFP_Programming_Contest
Looks like, in addition to regenerative braking, the wheel gives you all sorts of statistics about your ride. Seems like this could be more easily accomplished with a bike computer (even one permanently attached to your back wheel would be lighter and less machinery than a regenerative braking system + motor).
Apple will buy Netflix.
I've published the "clump" program here:

http://github.com/chkoreff/Clump
Huh? The hypothetical was about religion not about economic systems and/or government/social structures. So you've basically changed the subject as opposed to responding to the comment.

It isn't really possible to respond in any substantial way to the mis-mash of ideas you introduce with your anecdote but I will say that free speech is not an absolute right for US citizens never mind for non-citizens.
OP is exactly right. Facebook wants to be a one-way valve, much like Microsoft.

They also don't like the idea of people "polluting" the social graph, either by adding spurious contacts a la MySpace or by removing random nodes from the network.
"There are very few examples that you could point to where privatizing a public good has been successful." I suppose that depends on how a public good is defined. After all, airlines for some countries were considered to be in the national interest to the point that many were owned by their national governments - ditto for steel plants, etc.

These days, I'm not sure the issue is black and white what with quasi public/private partnerships where an infrastructure project is owned by the public but leased to an infrastructure firm, or capital is raised using bonds sold to the public.

I think it's a bit naive to think that in the hands of government, rent seeking behavior doesn't happen - it is possibly even worse with contracts developed and awarded based on political connections/favor or in building roads/infrastructure in places that neither need it or even want it in some cases. There are however good and bad ways to privatize as well. I live in Ontario and the privatization of the 407 has been highly successful (both profitable and useful for private users and performs its function admirably). I try to avoid it during rush hour because of the cost (as is encouraged) but it's quite well maintained and built. Can you provide a few examples where roads have been privatized but made public again because "rent-seeking behavior and slow decay while the current owners try to wring every last possible nickel and dime out of users before reselling the husk down the line to someone else who thinks they can squeeze a few more pennies"?
Palmissano on Google World Domination: "No."
trapper, this study might be in the flavor of what you are seeking. http://www.flownet.com/gat/papers/lisp-java.pdf (2000)
How to read? How to read more? How to read uninteresting material?
Any tips on reading longer, faster and assimilating more?

I can't read for very long, I get intimidated by big books and barely even try to attempt them; how do you go about reading/reading more/reading boring material?

Motivation to learn specific material alone isn't enough, you must have a secret.
Well, like 50 billion in TARP funds were paid back in the past few weeks and in response the government is looking for ways to spend the money. So I think the answer to your question is no it won't because the government is apparently dead set on squandering the money one way or another.
Changing sprintf to snprintf calls? Really? While useful and necessary, thats all busywork and rather dull to hack on. Certainly not something I would want to (or happen to be) work(ing) on during my current break. Possibly minus reading other peoples code (but that depends on what type of person you are).

But, "I read the $x's codebase" isn't exactly the sort of thing that one would put on a resume (which I think is the OP's goal). At most, something to mention in an interview; "oh, $y would be good to do here - I saw it used in $x's codebase and it works quite nicely."

My suggestion to the OP: Find a service you use fairly often and make some sort of an addon for it. Maybe analytics/graphs for relationships between people Twitter? Who knows, it should be something you find interesting.
Just watched the surprisingly good "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"

"Your life is defined by its opportunities... even the ones you miss.

It's a funny thing about comin' home. Looks the same, smells the same, feels the same. You'll realize what's changed is you.

Sometimes we're on a collision course, and we just don't know it. Whether it's by accident or by design, there's not a thing we can do about it.

For what it's worth: it's never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There's no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again. "
As a cyclist, I just find this creepy.

I like technology but my bike has nothing on that I can't understand at a glance. Keeping it that way is good.
Please pardon my ignorance, but why would Apple buy netflix? It doesn't really fit with their brand.

(This is an opinion)
I think someone needs to stand up in Congress with a table of the top 50 causes of death in the last 5 decades, coupled with the current spending to combat each of those. They should then debate until each of those investments is perfectly balanced. Transportation security would end up with about $4.50.
21st century electronic systems can't even do fluid layout properly. How ironic.
I would say that it depends on the audience. I have to agree with xpaulbettsx, for some users it might be a problem to get the concept. However, I like OpenID idea a lot and plan to use it in my project.I just hate having 73 different user accounts on 57 different sites (I forget passwords and not all sites have nice tools to reset it).
Document Collaboration on Abiword, abicollab.net
We Start With the Customer and We Work Backward.
Yeah, it looks like something that exists so that people can feel like they're changing the world by buying something, rather than doing something that requires recurring effort and runs the risk of occasionally being boring.

(Also, 200+ lb. bike commuters represent!)
Infographic: World Map of Remoteness vs Connectedness
If economists were so smart, they'd be running a startup making a web 2.0 photo-sharing website :)
Even if the author is responsible for misery and destruction, which is debatable, it still doesn't mean we should marginalize his accusations or condone the actions.

If everyone is doing it, why does the hypocrisy matter?
I think that my friend Steve has the best minimalist blog design that I've seen: http://dekorte.com/blog/blog.cgi
Peter Norvig, Lisp As An Alternative To Java: http://norvig.com/java-lisp.html

Peter Norvig compares Java, C/C++, and Lisp between 38 programmers and himself. All were asked to write the same program, record how many hours it took, how many SLOC, and then Norvig analyzes the results.

EDIT:

Norvig also links to a couple other "studies" and anecdotes done by others:

+ Tcl, Python, Perl, and Rexx: http://wwwipd.ira.uka.de/~prechelt/Biblio/jccpprtTR.pdf

+ More Lisp/Java: http://www.flownet.com/gat/papers/lisp-java.pdf
That's how I interpret it as well, but in order for Blub to be an interesting thing experiment it makes the assumption that languages form some sort of continuum of power/ease/abstraction/usefulness. Generally, the only one of those four people can agree upon (sometimes) is abstraction and that's not even necessarily the most important of the four.

I personally think one of the most interesting dimensions to analyze a language would be in how quickly one could prototype a problem. Lisp often is said to score well here; the Cs are thought to fall short; Arc was more or less designed to optimize this technique in online apps; and Haskell somehow manages to perform here despite a lot of criticisms in its design. So there's a hypothetical contiuum. Prove to me it exists and then you can pick your Blub.
I think what the commenter meant was the cathedral vs the bazaar model of development. Would'nt FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc all be in the same boat as Linux? Granted that Linux has a benevolent-dictator-aka-linus, but that does not make it deviate too much from the bazaar model.

Most other kernel development teams operate with a considerably more conservative approach ("the cathedral") than is engendered by Linux and specifically enabled by dvcs/git ("the bazaar").

In Eric Raymond's essay, he contrasted the two development models as such (quoting wikipedia):

The Cathedral model, in which source code is available
with each software release, but code developed between
releases is restricted to an exclusive group of software
developers. GNU Emacs and GCC are presented as examples.

The Bazaar model, in which the code is developed over
the Internet in view of the public. Raymond credits
Linus Torvalds, leader of the Linux kernel project, as
the inventor of this process. Raymond also provides
anecdotal accounts of his own implementation of
this model for the Fetchmail project.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar

I'd say just about every other kernel available today is developed in "the cathedral", although even then I think that Raymond's comparison (and judgments) are a vast oversimplification.

For all its flaws, git (and github) are becoming the preferred choice of hackers everywhere

Some very vocal people, but not what I'd say "hackers everywhere". As a regularly user of hg and git, I'm not particularly convinced that dvcs provides significantly compelling advantages outside of Linux's development model.

If any, Solaris is the only counter-example to Linux - not FreeBSD.

I'm not sure why you'd say that is.
Being sane is overrated.
Perhaps high-school or college students are poor evaluators of a language. I am not only interested in how productive you are after 1 year of using a language, I'm also interested how productive you are after 10 years using that language, or with 10 years of legacy code.
Take a big idea and bite off the smallest piece of it. Preferably a boring(or boring to most people!) problem with one or more obvious solutions. Why boring? Because programmers have a nasty habit of wanting to jump to interesting, challenging problems at an early stage, before they have properly evaluated real requirements of the particular domain. Hence there are lots of dead projects with a fancy internal design and nothing working or useful about them. But, on the other hand, many programs can eventually reach a stage where the programming problems become simultaneously interesting and useful; it's just that you can't do this instantly because you don't know the real requirements yet.

Instead, you can build prototypes to find those requirements. When you're solving "real world" tasks, a proof-of-concept solution can often be done as a weekend to two-week project. It'll look trivial and do trivial things. It's the progression and accumulation of little features and fixes that move the program from the proof-of-concept or prototype stage into a real, useful app. Eventually the accumulations overwhelm your original design, and at that point you'll have the information necessary to do things "the right way" - how much performance is necessary, what features are relevant, if the language and platform are appropriate matches, etc.
Of course, I meant "There is nothing so permanent..."
That would undoubtedly be qualitative, though you're right that it's probably the closest thing to programmer productivity you can measure.

I think you're wrong that reductionism can't find an interesting gem buried below. Productivity is something difficult to measure because it takes a long time and has a lot of influencing factors, but if you can split it apart just a little bit and lose some of the confounders you might be able to give at least a little quantitative foundation to claims shown anecdotally.
I suspect part of your dilemma comes from too many CS students having the same problems. There are already a zillion webcomic downloaders, blogging engines, etc. You have other interests, yes? Perhaps you're geeked about baseball card statistics, blackjack, typography? Scratch an itch. Run with it.

What tools would help solve (or even explore) your problems? Make them.

That's one side of "real programming experience". Another side (which you won't learn from small - but ever so useful - projects) is how to work with other people on a common codebase under pressure, both writing clean code and interpreting other peoples' frantic twilight hacks. Kernighan and Pike's _The Practice of Programming_ is as good a style guide as any, and just practice reading code from open source codebases. Good code (Lua and the BSD userland utilites are good for bite-sized pondering) and bad code will teach you different things.
Tasteless and a tiny bit offensive, but definitely not worthy of a C&D, in my opinion.
lol!

Hey in yovile you gota send messages to friends for cash. So... What everyone winds up doing is sending "asd" messages to everyone on their friend list every day.

Sure, thats not spam, its "asd".
"Current detection technologies can't really detect explosive substances ..."

There are plenty of direct explosives detectors, such as the ICx products: http://www.icxt.com/products/icx-detection/explosives/
I'm curious how much that thing weighs. If it adds a lot of heft to the bike that is going to make it require more human effort to drive it to begin with.
I don't think Lisp has that problem. Rather, it has the "problem" that it's easier to build the 20% you need of that library than to find the library, understand enough to do the bit you need in the face of that inevitable impedance mismatch between your abstractions and the library author's, figure out how including it impacts the rest of your system including the dependencies...

In other languages, this is just something everyone has to live with, and because of that, libraries face strong selection pressure to be one or more of simple, fast, standard, etc. There is no particular pressure like that in Lisp, since there's a much smaller domain where it's easy to understand why you need a thing, and troublesome to build it. To a much greater degree than mainstream languages, then, there are almost as many "language + standard library" sets as there are Lisp developers. You can see this same effect at work in Python web frameworks, I think.
My point is that both are way ahead of your typical Java shop, and way ahead of Windows, and that FOSS and Linux do not deserve the beating given to them by the author of the blog post.

I think that's a bit unfair to Java shops. =)

AFAIK CFS is considered >= ULE2 by most people, and I'm not aware of significant regressions introduced by CFS, so the high degree of conservatism you pointed out in the FreeBSD project wouldn't have been warranted in this case. I don't have the background to argue the finer points of this issue, but it's off topic for this thread, anyway.

CFS is based on knowledge gleaned from years of work on earlier schedulers by Con Kolivas and Ingo Molnar. In the meantime, the scheduler was replaced several times in the "stable" tree while they "figured it out". It took just as long, made a bigger mess, and ultimately cost more to produce (not to mention all the flamewars and bad blood engendered in the process).

Whether CFS >= ULE2 is a very nuanced question, but it's fair to say that the schedulers are much closer.
Running through these papers, the Prechelt (Tcl/Python/Perl/Rexx) paper probably comes closest to producing the kind of analysis desired, but at the end of the day they're all begging for more controls.

In particular to some of the Prechelt paper's most interesting results (LOC, comments, time spent) are marred by the collection methods ("script" languages were not sampled under controlled settings).
Nah, I think it's the git that Torvalds wrote when he decided that Monotone had some pretty cool ideas (the whole distributed VCS thing) but was slow and written in icky C++.
Websockets Specification
Historically, it's been dominated by OCaml, Haskell, and C++ (!) people.

Is it just me, or has Lisp not placed once in the eleven years of the contest?

In a frigging academic contest for functional programmers?

Where they were beat by assembly and TeX???

Ouch!

(In all fairness, they still have _Lisp in Small Pieces_, _Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming_, and _SICP_. Even if nobody uses the language for real programs, it's still in the running.)
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1894453/development-time-... should be helpful.

SPOILER: Ada and Haskell get high marks.
http://lawandorderinrussia.org/
I think MS posted this.
Http://www.mbt-shoes-sale.com/mbtlamibirch-p-9630.html
Adventures in Cocotron (cross-platform Cocoa apps)
People seem to assume that there's a linear continuum with a "best" language, rather than thinking that certain languages' designs make them better suited to handling certain kinds of problems.

For example, sometimes lazy evaluation greatly simplifies problems, and sometimes it makes them vastly more difficult to reason about. The language is just a tool to help clarify and solve your problem, and a language that doesn't fit can make it worse.
Realized my mistake here, sorry for the misinformation.