skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not saying that newlisp is to be avoided, but:

Lisp's power is not in its lack of 'syntax', but in the specific way that the code is structured. You can write code that writes code. The regular structure of the code helps this, not the specific syntaxes.

The Fexpr vs. macro comparison is bogus.
In common lisp (or scheme or Clojure) you will normally not be macro-expanding the macro more than once (when you compile it).

You will notice that compiled versions (cl or scheme) of these tests trounce newLISP soundly. Eval is to be avoided because most of the time there are are a lot of more structured ways to do exactly the same thing. Evaluating arbitrary code is very clever and can lead to a very big headache.

I don't know about the rest other than that 'we have fork' is probably not going to buy you much from clojure folks.

I think a better argument for newLisp would have been:
1.) It is lispier than python or C.
2.) It is simple and good for scripting, and therefore good for lisp newbies (you don't have to get your head around macros or the intricacies of eql eq equal, equalp and =).

I think that the CL community appears so abrasive because the language is so complex (this has nothing to do with syntax, but simply the size and complexity of the spec). You have to make serious effort to understand/know it before you can even begin to ask reasonable questions about it.

Even people who have been programming CL for years can get things wrong answering from the top of their head. It is not poorly documented, it is just huge and in some respects complex.
So does pretty much every closed-source license. But the liability always seems to be limited "where permitted by law".

What is this law, and which jurisdictions allow this? I wonder if there is someone here who knows more on the subject.
Stylesheets are not loaded for me either. I'm using FF 3.5.7.
(If you are looking at my solution and wondering what that monkeypatched Array#sum is doing there - it's a red herring, abandoned early on.)
Very nice. I was thinking about writing a "web service" version of this exact idea, but this will do in the meantime!
Why the Netflix/WB deal isn’t a bad thing
The Ray Kurzweil Reader - 30 essays
E-Ink Is Dead, Pixel Qi's Amazing Transflective LCD Just Killed It
Why I wish Spring IoC was not marketed as a DI framework
Cache locality: especially with open addressing and linear probing.
I'd suggest looking ath the labels of the axes on the graphs. They're zoomed into the middle, so the bottom is as far from "nothing" as the top is from the bottom.
Quoted from the article:

> Under the lawyer's rules, Colour is not a mathematical function of the bits that you can determine by examining the bits. It matters where the bits came from.

Unless one end of the bits source is from blackbox countries, like China. If you finally get some international cooperation done perhaps the work is already unpopular and no one really cares. Enforcement takes time, and technically in today's unpefect world copyright can be dragged to an unworthy degree.
CEO needed for LinkedIn Killer
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The part I find particularly silly is where he writes:

For example, assume that the hash table implementation
shrinks the table if the number of full buckets drops
below half, and grows the table if it becomes over full.
If the table starts out with 100 buckets, and the number
of buckets falls to 49, the size is shrunk to 50.

I've never seen a hashtable that actually works this way. It's common knowledge that performance of hashtables degrades long before the "full" point. (I particularly like the explanation of that here: http://eigenclass.org/R2/writings/separate-chaining-vs-doubl...)
Self-Feeding Robots: Robots that Plug Themselves Into Wall Outlets
you don't think differently at all...

find a customer = sell something today (22)
satisfy their needs = support customers maniacally (7)
get their money = recognize revenue consistently (19)
use their feedback = decide with data (17)
improve your software = improve product daily (18)
hit your deadlines (nice addition)

"never give up" is "persist through downturns" (16), but I'll give you this one for improved wording
As a mathematician, I find evidence-based arguments very convincing... where do you think that QED comes from, the planet of magic unicorns?

Purely mathematical proofs are nothing but supplying a pile of evidence, in the form of theorems and facts that both the proof-reader and proof-writer agree on, to support the argument that the proof is attempting to make.

What you have done in your article is this:

"X implies Y, QED."

And when people pointed this out, you balked, rather than writing a follow up that looked like this:

"X may imply Y under many circumstances. Take X. A, B, C, and Q are very common implementations of X, and all of them do Y, based on the following analysis..."
Ah, okay, so during those 28 days, people who don't want to go out to the store and buy a DVD of the movie will simply torrent it.
Watch your back.

(Sorry, I am a lawyer).
There's a very good Ted Talk on E8. I don't understand how the appearance of Phi suggests E8 (if someone here understands this, please explain), but the first thing that came to mind was whether Garrett Lisi knows about this news yet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-Gk_Ddhr0M

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E₈
I think it was a reasonable discussion, it just had some faulty conclusions. Using binary trees for overflow buckets is silly. They may be O(N), but the O can be much larger if you keep them balanced. A much better strategy for dealing with pathological cases is to keep some simple statistics such as the maximum bucket size or the average size of occupied buckets. If you see a pathological case change the hash function and rehash. No need for seeds, or trees or all that.

The discussion of the cost of reallocation seems somewhat overblown. Everyone here knows that if you are going to have a million or billion entries, you dont start with the default allocation or give a fixed increment. Anyway, a good implementation should keep track of the allocation pattern and make adjustments along the way.

He does make a good point that you need to pay attention to your hash function. A good function should try to smear the bits out so that the beginning and end of (say) a string make similar contributions to the hash.
This is just a more obfuscated version of the incorrect "BitTorrent isn't infringing" argument.

Distributing half of a copyrighted work is probably still infringement, so whoever is operating those servers would be in trouble.
Second time I've seen something on this site in a week, and my first impression stands: difficult to read with the mint toothpaste background.
AppMakr Makes iPhone Apps Accessible
A reason not to use Python: To avoid being identified as a kid that love language wars.

I motivated that with an example, which arguably is better than what I comment on. :-)

But seriously, the large majority of Perl articles on HN gets that kind of garbage. Give it a rest, please. At least don't show the world you lack better things to do.
I have to admit I have a real thing for aesthetics. Maybe one reason I'm partial to apple products.

But I keep waiting for the Android UI to look nicer. I'd love to see a top end design firm take a shot at cleaning up the icons etc.

Even that wallpaper is pretty atrocious.
The $1000 and 2 months is comparable to the $5 and 2 hours thread (not mathematically) - forcing creativity and resourcefulness. Will be interesting to see how this manifests? (FYI: I am involved as a trustee).
Next big thing: meta-content?
Poverty doesn't necessarily have to correlate with happiness (even though the West seems to think so). Sure they can't afford a lot of things and struggle, but some of the happiest people I've seen in India are the poor.
I totally agree . . . I really don't pay any attention to DVD for-sale dates, and only pay attention to the date it's available according to my Netflix queue. It's already the case that the time from theatrical release to DVD seems to vary pretty widely and arbitrarily between films, so an extra 28 day delay wouldn't register on my radar in the slightest. If I hadn't read about this deal, I never would have noticed any sort of delay.
In no way am I trying to be enterprisey (although if we do end up selling this software to some customers, it'll be very nice to be able to say "here's a standard .war").

My aim is to make it as simple and easy as possible to enable continuous deployment across multiple nodes. In that context, the (re)deployment facilities provided by any container beats coordinating things on the command line.
Slide 9: I sincerely hope that that's not supposed to be the first Macintosh. If that's the intention, then I just lost all of my warm fuzzies about how well the author researched relevant background.

Slide 51 has a better picture to pair with the words on slide 9. That's the first Macintosh. (At least the same body style.)
That's not the point. I don't think anyone is arguing against what he says about worst case for a well-implemented hash table. The problem is the straw-man: all of the 'bad implementations' he has seen, which is all he really attacks.
Yes, but for ratio calculation purposes, should we count geek MBAs the same way as you count non-geek MBAs?

If a company has one non-geek MBA and 5 geeks, two of them also MBAs, what is the MBA-to-geek ratio?
I'm baffled by some of the comments here, I really am. I'm going to leave this for a bit and come back later to see if I can make sense of it. Clearly people disagree with me, but it seems to me that there are several principles and concerns that are validly raised.

This is an opinion piece - he doesn't like hash tables. For him personally, he prefers not to use them and instead to use other structures such as balanced trees. He says that there are gotchas with hash-tables that aren't always realised by those who don't read the small print and take care. That seems unassailable to me. There are gotchas.

He gives an example of a bad hash-function, and points out that you need good ones. Designing a good hash function is part-art, part-science, and can be very hard. Certainly it deserves a full scholarly article and justice couldn't be done in a blog like this.

You've highlighted:

> the author asserts that hash functions are
> much slower than comparison functions, for
> example.

He said:

> hash functions have to be blindingly fast - because
> comparisons are already really fast.

That seems pretty clear to me. The reasons are then expanded, but the point remains. Crypto-hash functions are not fast, and yet I've seen them suggested as good hash functions. In many cases, though, they're not fast enough.

But this isn't really the place for a full point-by-point discussion of the issues. I think the piece makes useful and interesting points. It's not a journal article, it's a blog piece that allows the author to vent his prejudices with some supporting arguments.

If want it done properly, read Knuth. I think many of the criticisms here are mis-placed.
I am impressed that Intel has used the http://ros.org/ stack to offload a lot of the work. I think it shows that open-source in robotics is a great thing!
Reverse job fair Jan 16th: Job seekers have tables, recruiters walk around.
I just wanted to say, because I did a bunch of blogging recently about how you can drive traffic deliberately by picking fights, and did it while driving traffic deliberately by picking some fights: in the past I was getting these occasionally 10K+ pageview days just by being me (which is small compared to the 50K+ these guys are talking about), and then sort of either graduated or devolved (depending on your frame of reference) to getting similar numbers deliberately. Basically I figured out what was happening, out of curiousity, and once I had figured it out, that meant I then had the ability to do it deliberately. So now, sometimes, I do.

I think the "tribal aversion of engineers to marketing" thing is very valid - being able to drive traffic is useful, and engineers seem to think that building systems that reward driving traffic (such as Google) makes you a better person than using such a system successfully (if you want to make money with Google, you're going to need to drive some traffic). It's such an arbitrary thing. If the system is worth building then it must be worth using too.
My high school radio station's transmissions could only reach to the near side of the school parking lot, and I'm pretty sure that was to avoid having to deal with the FCC. Isn't this pretty much the same thing? If your transmission peters out at a small radius, I think the FCC doesn't get involved.
> Distributing half of a copyrighted work is probably still infringement, so whoever is operating those servers would be in trouble.

Which leads to a natural but important question: to what degree of information means copying? Does 1's and 0's also means part of copyrighted work so nobody can use binary?

Also, mathematically, can we build something like probability of copyright?
iTunes proved that people are willing to pay rather than pirate if you make purchasing more convenient than pirating. The movie studios seem almost to be begging their customers to steal content.
My article?

But leaving that aside, I simply don't understand your points at all. In what way is a mathematical proof "a pile of evidence"? Consider, as a simple, single example the Banach-Tarski theorem. To help me understand you, perhaps you could explain how the proof of that is "a pile of evidence."

As I said elsewhere, I'm baffled by the responses here, so I'm not going to reply any more until, and if, I understand the points of view being expressed.

EDIT: speeling cerrocted
A while back I looked to see if anyone had used XPath for graph traversal, since it seemed like a good fit. I'm working on a similar concept (but not that similar).

I didn't find this at the time, but now that I have, it looks like a great package. Thanks, submitter! This is probably what I'll be doing with my Friday night.
Thoughts on what an Apple tablet should be - or not
Good interesting video. Main theme is that it pays off to read research papers and try to use that stuff in the real world. Some interesting tidbits from Avi from the presentation:

* sun built java and self at the same time, self was an attempt to build a smalltalk that was more smalltalky than smalltalk, which ended up in that they made a very efficient dynamic method dispatch that was fast.

* There's no need for dynamically typed languages to be slow, because strongtalk has already solved that problem.

* The hotspot VM is actually the strongtalk vm, but crippled for fast dynamic dispatch because of the security model.

* There are now 3 really good and fast VMs for javascript making it very interesting.

* If a problem is hard, probably someone has a solution for it => research academic papers.
"More importantly, they’ll have more streaming rights for the content from these studios under this deal."

28 days is a small price to pay for an improved streaming selection. Especially with Warner Brothers who has a massive catalog of titles. If you're not seeing it in the theater, not buying the DVD, chances are you really don't absolutely need to see it in the first 28 days either. Pretty good deal by Netflix.
It's amazing to me that big media still doesn't understand that competing on convenience is how they will turn casual thieves into happy customers.

Making your products as easy or easier to consume by legal means than not is how to win.
I'd gladly trade 28-days on new releases for more streaming content.

With Watch Instantly on Netflix, I rarely bother with physical media anymore.
I can give an obvious answer to that first question. It is because there is no centralised clearing house for tickets, and in order to arbitrage them one would have to buy them from individuals which ends up being very costly. People will not send the correct tickets, they will send fake tickets, they will claim they sent the tickets when you have not received them, etc. It is not a coincidence that almost every auction site out there requires the parties to do the final exchange among themselves.

As far as TAM goes, well I do not think it is fatal if a start up does not know what that particular acronym means. A good investor would calculate that themselves anyway. One would have to be very gullible to believe the TAM estimations of the average company looking for funding (they all say everything is a 100 billion dollar market).
Lots of us use Perl these days. For example those of us that care about speed, stability, and sane backwards compatibility. WWW::Mechanize is still a great tool when appropriate. Catalyst and Moose are pretty awesome to work with as well. I'm pretty happy with the state of Perl these days, there are lots of reasons to recommend it, but if Python works for you, that's cool too.

Slightly more on topic - when Ovid first posted this to his feed, Stevan Little pointed out that you could already do it in Perl 5 ( http://gist.github.com/268717 ). Watching the give and take between the Perl 6 language and the Modern Perl movement is (I think) one of the more interesting and exciting areas of language development these days.
Run a regression on that data and tell me where the bottom is. One can say "we don't know"...but it sure as hell isn't slowing down anytime soon.
"More importantly, they’ll have more streaming rights for the content from these studios under this deal. This is the key."

Um, I'm not currently a netflix customer because of how small their streaming selection is.

I'm going to say, the fact you can't get new releases anyway ("long wait"), means they're basically vastly increasing their offering of streamed movies....something they have unlimited capacity to do, while decreasing a service that sucked anyhow and was virtually useless.

I don't see why they're doing something bad here.
I think the real objection is that it's a meandering rant, not a well-structured essay explaining the pitfalls of using hash tables.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1036892

This would've been detected by the duplicate detector I suggested here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012215

It garnered no comments last time.
Prisons or Colleges?
That is funny! you really think you can pass liability to someone like Sun or MS ? :)

Small suggestion: Re-read your eula/terms etc ..
I wonder what the business model behind "myfreeimplants" is... oh.
NYC Resistor
This wasn't a mistake. They are hurting immediate releases to increase their ability to stream movies. The latter is the future.

I've paid money to stream a movie I can rent on netflix. The experience is so much better, even with DRM which only lets you watch once. Netflix lets you watch many times.

We need to move to a future where people can pay to watch the movie on their TV instead of paying to get a ticket at a theatre. Then we need to enable subscription pricing for movies that aren't new releases.
Don't code naked!
Just checked out an upcoming game that I'm planning on attending and wow the interface rocks! At all the other ticket places I have to look at the list of tickets, see what the section is, and then find it on the map to see if the price and location are what I'm looking for. SeatGeek completely eliminates this pain.
Demoing at TC50 isn't really that prestigious. It's kind of gross actually. Last year's was bizarre, starting off with the star spangled banner being sung by attractive female founders made me feel somewhat dirty just being there. Then the companies.. Totally squicky. Hangout.net was one of the companies who couldn't stop saying "increase branding opportunities to children with product placement" over and over again. I imagined their CEO with a barbell mustache and a maniacal laugh every time he talked about putting Nike and PepsiCo logos in the game, and letting children buy those with their milk money and allowances. It actually made me want to never allow my daughter to use a computer.

To quote the Clash,

"If Adolph Hitler, flew in today..
They'd send a limousine anyways"
Music is hex-data which is complicated to discuss, let's talk about copyrighted code.

here's the scenario: What if some deductive programs (like prolog) happens to compile another piece of code to your code?

First you can't sue a system like prolog (assume the system itself is copyright free)

Secondly you can't sue some deductive code since it's totally different thing, which went through some process and happens to be the exact same as your code.

A perfect example to make myself clear: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=911331

This applies to music as well. Let's talk about .midi files first. I have a sequence of notes which is still playable music, went through a magical convert formula, and produce the exact same midi as copyrighted ones, which step is liable?

In one word, copyright just a label, for a certain static combination of information. And this static state can be generated by infinite alternative legal means, which is why copyright system is ridiculous. The only thing copyrighted in this universe is time. You can't reverse time (at least for now).

So copyright is really a moral issue. People are doing you a favor for your copyrighted works' publicity.
Analoging: It's Dances with Wolves in Outer Space
Would you click on a link that contains Punycode?
Would you click on (or type) a link that contains Punycode? Or even on a link that contains localized characters? Example:

http://www.εδετ.gr and http://www.xn--pxabb4d.gr (they are the same site).

Or would you consider them phising "faster" than a latin spelled URL?

(The example I am giving is a legitimate site)