skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TechCrunch likes to stir the pot and create controversy, but I do get tired of them acting like they do no wrong. Maybe it's just me but I rarely see them mocking themselves. As mentioned in the comments by another entrepreneur:

When I launched OtherInbox at TechCrunch50 in 2008, being “stealth” was a requirement for participation. We had to be launching something new that no one had heard about and secrecy was so important that we were told that we would be kicked out if anything leaked.

Maybe this should be reconsidered for 2010?

However, I do partly agree with the article. Some people are wayy to tight lipped about what they are working on, there's rarely a reason why someone can't speak in generalities about their project without going into exact details.
Folks... It's not the destination that matters, but the journey.

That said, some people would prefer to figure out what is going on by themselves.
exactly my point. Unfortunate for us schemers that we don't have such a mainstream implementation. Also, it would be cool if linux distributions could ship with a minimal scheme. Modules could be downloaded & installed as we need them.
Yes. A lot of the meta-programming is actually programming over the structure. For example, given a Java class, you could generate database code. In Java, this relies heavily on introspection, but you if you're interested in doing this in a type-safe way then you could look at Generic Programming (in Haskell).

Also, you can generate code (at runtime) which is type-safe, compile the code, etc. Everything you ask for is possible in Haskell, however, it is definitely more complicated than in Lisp.
That was a great conference report, and of interest since (when I code in CL) I use SBLC more often than Franz or Clozure. The SBCL developers are also very helpful (a few years ago, I got a very large memory patch for a customer's server in a few hours).

It would be great if some videos show up of the presentations. I realize that someone has to do a lot of work editing and pushing video, but it is a real service to the community, and in general, conference videos are great and much appreciated.
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Yes I do imply that. camccann puts it very well, and as I said, what would Haskell be without its static type system?
Clicking on the link led to instructions to download a Flash Player update required to view the video. Clicking on the video player update downloaded a copy of the worm.
The unnatural environment
Richard Hipp actually said that he wished he hadn't released SQLite into the public domain. Apparently it becomes a headache when the code is used in countries that don't have the same implementation of the public domain as the US (around 16 minutes in: http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/25/ ).

I think that if you want to appease legal departments, your best bet is a well known licence, written by lawyers (eg Apache 2.0).
I would say that they'd, at the very least, pretend that they care. The official motto of "they" should be "sharing is NOT caring."

And, even though I own the blu-ray, I still shared video data with people who do not own the blu-ray. This is what they'd throw a hissy fit about.
By the way, I would be really interested in Arc's solution to the second program I've shown.
I'm not sure why, but this seems funny to me in light of all the Crunchpad / joojoo shenanigans going on.
When Online is better
stealth doesn't mean you don't show your product to anyone, stealth means you don't show your product publicly until you have the bare minimum ready.
Mark Shuttleworth steps down as CEO of Ubuntu parent company, Canonical
Ah, perfect for a lazy Saturday morning.

Thank you.
At a Mine’s Bottom, Hints of Dark Matter
If you're going to make that move in the tech industry, go with a name that could reasonably be mistaken for a jewish name, but could also be anglo-saxon when neccessary. It makes a huge difference.
Compiling code at runtime may improve performance, but it doesn't give the kind of guarantees that static typing gives you.

Static type checking proves that certain invariants hold at runtime and hence that certain defects are not possible. If a program can manipulate itself at runtime in arbitrary ways (not just reflect on itself in a read-only fashion), those proofs become invalid.
and even if you are living in a big city like Kyoto, you can get by with 20-24k-ish...

Trains and appartment are expensive... but restaurants and food in general is really rather cheap.
Nokia N86
Mysterious box with smoke and a linux phone coming out.
The paper is interesting, but I'm more interested in hearing your startup story. Can you describe what lead you to start it, what were the problems, how did you find first customers etc.
A few people did some internet stalking back when he first disappeared and tracked down some of his real-life friends and family. Creepy, yes, but also enough to determine that the man behind the pseudonym is alive and well.

And, since one of the suspected reasons for why he chose to disappear as he did was "people prying into his real-life non-_why identity", it's probably best if we leave it at that.
how many angels/advisors do they have? :/
They also stepped up spamming me from quarterly to bi-weekly. I asked them to stop - no change - so I filter out everything from them. Now they just don't exist to me.
I am shocked. SHOCKED!
I'm just pointing out that the original comment was no more of a spoiler than the article all these comments are posting about. It would have been different if the post was pointing to the story, and someone dropped the Wikipedia article/spoiler in a comment there.
Is Web Development Computer Science?
What specifically is the problem? Are you likely to have more than 65K rows?

If not, Python's xlwt and xlrd modules handle support for native Excel in a very simple, OO, pythonic way, without any scary Windows or COM shit. I regularly generate and parse pretty big Excel files most days so I'd be happy to answer any questions.
Does Template Haskell affect this discussion at all? (That's not a rhetorical question - I haven't tried any Template Haskell, so I'm genuinely interested to know what it's capable of and how it compares to Lisp macros.)
Lisp-like metaprogramming is really tricky, because a lot of the language that you interact with is defined by macros. The Haskell that you see is a thick layer of syntactic sugar over a much smaller Haskell core.
Wow, what kind of jerk would call up his family when it's painfully obvious that that was exactly the sort of thing he was trying to get away from?
I think that if you set your profile picture album to Friends Only, that still displays your profile picture to other people. I have mine on display for others, but you can't click though to see others.
Well, Rackspace knows how to fix their stuff too, which is why it's up again after the problem appeared. ;-)
I think another big factor is that a lot of startups simply might not know exactly what they want to do. They don't say anything to the outside world because they themselves don't know.
Neurology-reports-transcription
Can you give an example of a situation where Haskell type checking gets in your way? Not to take issue, but because I'm a collector. I've been told that it's not that easy to make a list of functions in Haskell unless they all have the same input and output types, which seems restrictive to me.
Controversy gets attention. I mean, say what you will about it, but I'd like to point out that you did at least look at the article if not read it.
Right - just link bait
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This is a persistent issue in all academia. I currently have access through a university, but trying to do research without someone paying your way is absurdly difficult. Of course the Internet is all about open-access, and I'm all for open-source software. It continually surprises me that academics don't worry more about this.

Aaron Swartz wrote (tangentially) about this recently: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/disciplinarybubbles

Disciplinary bubbles and the Academic Firewall keep academia needlessly separated from the trials and delights of reality.
I'd love to start a store but I'm drawing a blank on what to sell or especially where to find it. Looks like the drop shipping and importing world is a mine field.

Anyone have any pointers to get a rookie started?
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I think you miss how TechCrunch becomes a town square on the weekends with guest posts by contributors. As the comment you cite points out, surely Arrington would disagree with Vivek, at least as far as TC50 is concerned. Perhaps he would tie himself in knots to agree with Vivek aside from the awesomeness that is TC50, but the idea that TechCrunch is just Arrington's voice at this point is a bit off the mark.

And it's not just TechCrunch. Henry Blodget doesn't agree with everything Frommer writes at TBI, Dean and Matt at VentureBeat don't even write about the same stuff, and so on.
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Being stealth is seriously a detriment most of the time, if not all. Get out there and start getting feedback while meeting awesome people who are interested in what you're doing. You never know who you will be connected with or who will share your passion. You can only meet those people by putting yourself out there. It's not like you have to put your source code, algorithm, and five year road map out there for everyone. Even if you did do that... what are the odds that someone is interested in the same thing, has the same vision, is competent enough to execute on it, and most importantly actually DO IT? The odds are a number somewhere very very close to zero, whereas the odds of putting yourself out there and meeting someone who can help you are very very close to one-hundred.
"In all three cases, after other Homeland Security Department officials raised concerns, copies of the reports were destroyed. The agency also held a workshop on intelligence-gathering “while ensuring the protection of civil rights and civil liberties”

Someone made an error. They corrected themselves. iow, nothing happened.
I don't know if direct contact was made, but they were definitely aware that the internet private eye squad had found their online presences. Names and locations were also found.

Like I said, it was kinda creepy. I wouldn't even have been reading about it but... well, I wanted to know if _why was okay. And yes, I realize that even if I didn't actively participate, watching others do it doesn't necessarily make me blameless.

Make of that what you will, but I do encourage everyone to not pursue the matter further. He's fine, don't worry about that, let's show him some respect.
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That's a sign of a maturing media outlet. Wouldn't it be bizarre if the New York Times never had differing opinion pieces?

(Note: I'm not putting TC and the NYT in the same bucket, but this is a bad point to call them out on.)
Isn't this problematic? Lispers fling around lots of superlatives, as if their favorite language will never be dethroned from its position atop the language kingdom. And they always felt justified about this.

Shouldn't we confront them about this?

I do think there's a science of programming languages which can inform us how to best design the tools we use. Isn't it just possible that these Hindley-Milner languages are the next step in the progression that LISP started?

Look at the transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian mechanics. They were both great at the time of release, but one is clearly a step forward. The former is usually embeddable within the latter, but edge cases in the former don't quite work the same in the latter. And some cases in the former are just downright illegal in the latter. And unfortunately, the latter is a lot more complex for the power users. But, the latter is more expressive, teaches us more about the world... and enables completely new possibilities like nuclear fusion/fission.

This is like the difference between dynamic and static typing. Dynamic typing is certainly embeddable within Haskell. Just define a data type Dyn which is the sum of types Int, String, Float, [Dyn], and Dyn -> Dyn. You will see how much LISP is possible without much added syntactic cruft. But Haskell users don't need and want to operate in this way, because they can leverage the benefits of static typing.

Remember, these things don't come from whims of clever people or corporations. LISP and Haskell both come from research of very fundamental ideas. his is much more like real science than social science. And we should keep our eyes open to the future of this field, instead of proclaiming that we're finally done with our "100 year language".
For Patrick to kick ass in this small niche is great... and that has often got me thinking: If he can do that with that niche, there's some hope for me yet!

But when you think about it, it isn't that niche a product. Who's the market? Teachers who run bingo quizes. Actually, that seems like a huge market although most of us here think of it as a marginal product. So perhaps it's not such a niche after all... just obscure to us.
An alternate view: http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2009-08-19.html
I think what's scary is that this doesn't get me nearly as angry as it used to.

EDIT: Actually the incidents in the article are fairly tame. There are much more egregious examples.
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you might want to google "staged programming" - it's what strongly typed languages do to get metaprogramming.

(edit: afaik it doesn't allow the full "recursive manipulation" you describe, but it does let you generate code with code)
Actually, lisp matches all of those as well. It might not be the easiest to learn coming from C, but otherwise it's not bad.
I'm not sure haskell won here. I think maybe programming with monads won.

No, really. Web programming and continuation monads seem to have really it it off together. When you add them to another language, you get similar results (e.g., http://intensivesystems.net/tutorials/web_sessions.html).
Sure there are self taught people who do great things but having a good solid base of computer science knowledge would seem to be a big edge for learning the new technologies.

I don't understand -- To me, the premise of this article seems to be that these are two different (mutually exclusive) types of programmers. I don't think anyone here would subscribe to that tenuous assertion.
I'm pretty sure he said himself that the actual product was a weekend project for him

55 hours for version 1.0, but keep in mind, that was the barely functional, ugly, terrible user experience I delivered 3 years ago. Somebody bought it anyway. (He eventually got a refund, but 1.02 sucked a little less, etc etc.)

There may well be a programmer somewhere who could deliver the current site in a weekend, but he sure as heck isn't me. (5k lines of Ruby code, 3k lines of Java code, several hundred pages of content, etc etc.)
Sorry you think I'm coming off like a jackass. Most people find me fairly even-keeled. I was just sharing my perspective, and it's okay with me if you disagree.
MathML is not a human input language! MathML is a representation. While comparisons with TeX and LaTeX are inevitable, they serve different purposes. Look at the HTML/CSS used to render a dynamic menu sometime. I'm sure it is pretty ugly too.
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Could you elaborate on that please? Totally new to me.
I started in 2006. It took me eight days to develop the application, not one year. I had my first sale two weeks after it was released, and somewhere around $2.5k sales in the rest of that calendar year.
MathML allows math to be rendered to speech for people with disabilities, something that LaTeX won't do. It is also a much more solid REPRESENTATION. It is not an input language like LaTeX. Think of LaTeX as YOUR favorite math UI, whereas MathML is an underlying representation. The fact that you can View Source and read it is immaterial.
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Actually, MathJax.org is our preferred URL.
> and because it should make the use of massively parallel computations easier. I concede that there are currently few implementations of massively parallel, functional code (MapReduce and possibly Data Parallel Haskell come to mind)

Not only are there few, their numbers are growing much more slowly than traditional C/Fortan/MPI environments. The "massive" in massively parallel is getting more and more massive every year. Running computations at full speed at these scales, 100K+ cores in multiple levels of hierarchy (same die, same board, same blade, same switch, etc) is a hugely mundane architectural problem. Not only is there no architecture besides MPI which has nearly as much effort invested in this problem, none are currently making the investment, so none have a chance to catch up within the next decade. The only way you will see FP doing massive parallelism at speeds even close to current best is if they wrap the C MPI interface, and I have yet to see any functional message-passing APIs which aren't tarted-up imperative environments. (If anyone knows any please share.) At it's core, message passing programming involves managing data, deciding where it resides and where it needs to go, which is kind of antithetical to FP.

You mention MapReduce, which I think is more of a data-center thing subtly but fundamentally different from HPC, involving less computation and more I/O. FP has a good shot there (cf. Erlang) but not much chance at cracking the HPC market.
What caused you to decide to do that? Did you discover it focused the user's attention better?

I used CrazyEgg on my purchasing page, watched there be a lot of clicks on the top level navigation elements, figured "But wait, if they click any of those I don't get paid", started an A/B test with the consistent design versus a stripped-down menu, observed improvement with the stripped-down menu, and put my design books to use keeping my kitchen table level.
Haskell has message passing concurrency within a single (OS) process. It's not quite erlang-style concurrency, but it gives you a lot of it.

http://cvs.haskell.org/Hugs/pages/libraries/base/Control-Con...

If someone built an AMQP library for haskell, we'd probably be 90% of the way there.
Is your assessment about the subjectivity of good and evil objective?

"There is no such thing as right or wrong." [ ] Right [ ] Wrong
I think if you consider a plain old HTML page as Web Development then fine, it is not Computer Science. I consider that Web Design. To me Web Development is making robust applications that can do more then display markup. All the back-end stuff is what makes it an application, and in turn makes it computer science.
It was only painfully obvious after someone had done the detective work to verify that he hadn't suddenly died in real life. Obvious in retrospect is easy...
> I can't believe how TechCrunch is turning into a tech-tabloid.

Isn't that all it's ever been anyway? Was there some kind of wow-thats-awesome version of TechCrunch that existed back before I knew about it?
Web development is almost all "construction", which has little to do with computer science. Look it up in Code Complete.

I've worked in web development for many years, doing some pretty complicated stuff, and I've never needed to remember how to do a bubble sort.

In other news, Ben & Jerry recommend a quart of ice cream a day.
I think that location likely does have a lot to do with it. In Alabama, nearly every job listing is for .Net - with little exception.
Even the majority of the web dev positions are MS based, with a rare LAMP posting from time to time.
> Operations for most websites is like vehicle maintenance for a pizza delivery company: essential for success, but hardly their "core competency".

Very interesting analogy.
They are notifying users, what else can they do? The passwords are already stolen.
As many others have pointed out, "good" and "evil" are completely subjective. And judging from your naitivity, I am quite sure that even you and I would have differing interpretations. I believe a Hellfire missile can, in fact, be used for "good". The clause is obviously worthless.
Lisp is significantly harder to learn for most people--especially those people who are programming only as a means to an end and not for fun.

Lisp goes significantly farther towards shoving FP down your throat than Python does any individual paradigm.

Lisp does not (to the best of my knowledge) have anything to match scipy/numpy.

Now, this doesn't mean that I wouldn't prefer if the scientific community were dominated by FP instead of Fortran and Python, but I think it's very easy for people like us to go and say "FP is easy" without realizing that for most people it's really not.
Ask HN: Where do you get your scientific papers from?
Given the recent hubbub about ACM's money-seeking ways, I'm wondering where HN members get their scientific research papers from?

I'm currently both an IEEE and ACM member; I find the IEEE digital library to be somewhat of a joke - ACM is much better in comparison, but still lacking.

I don't like putting 100 bucks in a million different organizations in order to be able to search for science (which should be open to all!) so this begs the question: what's the most cost-efficient method of obtaining scientific papers for research? Also, what resource has the best search engine for said papers (both ACM's and IEEE's engines suck)?

Thanks!
Instead of saying the competition 'sucks' I would instead explain why my product is superior to their. Accentuate the positives of your product, not the negatives of the competition (which, if they have already used the competitions they already know well enough).

As for #5, yes for a Facebook group it would need to be popular. But with twitter you can attach relevant hashtags to your post, resulting in it showing up in searches as well as for those that follow you.
Exercise and the brain
Yes, I think I could accomplish more with BCC if I didn't have one particular obligation which sucks 60+ hours plus travel a week. I do not intend Bingo Card Creator to be the last thing I ever program, but don't have concrete plans for my next application yet.
Good point. My comment was also in regard to other stories I've read there, I just opted not to go into too many details for the sake of staying on topic.
I sadly agree that "lone-ego-superstar programmers not willing to cooperate" are more prominent in the CL world than in some others. (Edit: "semi-autistic pricks" is the term that comes to my mind. Still, many of us are not like that.) I'm also willing to believe that the Clojure community is refreshingly different in this respect. But I don't buy that "living inside the image" has anything to do with this, or at least anything to do with causing it, and I especially don't buy that a technical limitation of Clojure/JVM constitutes some sort of virtue.