skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To any newer HN readers who don't know: pg is Paul Graham, the principal author of Hacker News. So the parent comment isn't a guess; it's the answer.
I posted a link for PLANG (PTX frontend for LLVM) in my earlier comment above...that PDF has some good info on how nVidia is integrating LLVM into their toolchain.
I think you're right in a certain strict sense, however I think most people understand that statement to be hyperbole. The sentence perhaps should have ended with 'in some respects', but I think that kind of goes without saying.

Secondly, in America everyone knows about the Holocaust, and the right wing's been using it for months now to bash healthcare reform and their own twisted definition of socialism. People will mangle history because it suits their purposes, not because of some little article in Foreign Affairs.
Wikipedia also says:
"Browder exposed management corruption and corporate malfeasance in these partly state-owned companies"
"The Functional Approach to Programming" by Cosineau and Mauny
The openness and mystery of this subject reminds me of how on a few different occasions, E.O. Wilson has said or written [1] that if he were starting out as a scientist now, he would study microbe ecosystems (versus e.g. island biogeography [2]).

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/bookauth/ba980318.htm

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_biogeography
There is plenty of corruption everywhere in Russia. There is no point in trying to find saints or sinners in the story. Rather one should recognize the hypocrisy of kettle calling a pot black.
Surely if lisp makes a programmer N times more efficient then it would be easy to study scientifically. Have there been any studies comparing productivity?

Why is it that in RAD application competitions, "mainstream" languages often win?

Also, if it were truly n times better the library disparity wouldn't exist; libraries should be n times faster to make or duplicate.

I'm asking for evidence here: how can something be so much better and have such a paucity of evidence for it's efficacy? If there really is such scientific evidence for lisps effectiveness I would love to read it & and distribute it to my colleagues in charge of large development teams.
These hit my personal sweet spot of presentation skill, speed and content nearly dead on, fantastic work!

I would like slightly more real-world examples than adding even? constraints to addition, but I'm really just being greedy.
I'd like to think that the takeway from this for most people is that the TSA is making _some_ attempt to secure the planes, but isn't reaching for very strong security. At the very least that would involve:

o No carry on luggage
o Pat Downs for everyone

The problem with this is it's unworkable for general civilian use of aviation in which mothers want to carry breast milk, people need to bring medicine with them, etc...

I always find it annoying when people whine and complain about how incompetent that TSA is in allowing a knife, razor, or other contraband item onto an airplane. They could, with two simple rules eliminate the chance of those items getting onto a plane - but do you seriously want to live in a world where we go to such lengths to ensure your security?

Also note, taking these steps _would not_ be mere security theater, they really would increase security - at the cost of a lot of convenience or things that make commercial aviation bearable (or possible for some people).
I wanted to program computers before I had access to one. I would take books out of the library and write programs in the pseudo language they presented. In 1982 my Dad brought home a Sirius microcomputer for his work. That had BASIC, so I started writing programs in that. Also in 1982 I took my life savings ($300 @ age 13) and purchased a VIC20. That was a fun machine to learn with and also provided an introduction to the possibilities of assembly language. A few years later I built the TEC1 (http://holden.customer.netspace.net.au/tec1.html) computer. That was Z80 based and had to be programmed in hexadecimal. That was very educational because it was learning at the hardware/software boundary. Since then there has been a steady progression through HLLs (Pascal, C, C++, Forth, Perl, Python, etc.) and assembly language for whatever CPU I have needed it for. Probably 90% of what I know about computers has been as a result of self-study based on personal interest. Even though I work in SW I've had very little formal training in CS (I'm an EE).
The Physical Impossibility of The Future by Someone Trapped In Chicago
Ask HN: Should I support OAuth or OpenID?
Working on a web app, we want to expand pass all this login/password mumbo-jumbo. We have facebook integration and are wondering if we should look at Oauth, Openid, both, or neither?
So when will it be on the market?
When people try to rewrite history to suit their purposes we should hold those people accountable through debate. Those who chose to use hyperbole (e.g. this article) or misrepresentations (e.g. healthcare reform) have their right to free speech but they should be ready to face facts and to respect rights of others to have a different opinion.
One of my readers pointed me to this discussion. The Martha's Vineyard reference was just a typical destination for folks at our flight school. There is no point in renting an airplane to go to Providence; it is quicker to drive! There is no point in renting an airplane to go to New York City; the car service from Teterboro costs more than the Amtrak ticket from Boston. Block Island, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, Montauk, on the other hand, are destinations that are actually much easier to reach by private airplane than by car or train. KMVY has a good on-airport restaurant. KMVY has an ILS and GPS/LPV approaches, plus an approach lighting system on Runway 24, which makes it a relatively easy place to land in actual instrument conditions. And the island is home to three of my favorite girls (one of whom has four legs).

KMVY averages 141 operations per day, so the JFK, Jr. crash in 1999 has been followed by approximately 500,000 less eventful takeoffs and landings.

-- Philip
Why don't you just use 8-bit alpha-PNG's?

Works in all browsers, degrades gracefully on IE6 (semitransparency becomes fully transparent), smaller file sizes as a bonus.
Case closed.
Hey, I agree with those principles, I just think this guy was using a tiny bit of artistic license, and he had a reasonable expectation that his readership would understand that he did not mean that Russia was now exactly like the USSR under Stalin.
There has never been a rigorous scientific study done, no, but there's plenty of anecdotal evidence, and, to quote Paul Krugman's tongue-in-cheek title, "the plural of anecdote is data"
"carry it with you when you went to the washroom."

You aren't suggesting you need to carry your laptop case with you into the _airplane_ washroom are you? Talking about security theater...
Paul Graham writes about this extensively in http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
You all realize that this just means the TSA reads XKCD?

http://xkcd.org/651/
^ +1 Agreed.
1 - At school i tried to write a symbolic differentiation/integration program in C. I failed miserably. A year later chapter 2 of SICP blown my head to a thousand pieces... Nowadays I program in F#, Haskell and C# (mostly C#) for a living, but Lisp is still my favorite language.

2 - Programming is mostly about understanding stuff, so don't be afraid to tear thing aparts since it's ok to reinvent the wheel just to see how it's done.
That's the same explanation psychics give. If the effect size is large (as is claimed), it should be an extremely simple study. So why has no one done it?

Why don't the lispers organize a RAD competition between lisp and all-comers, surely if lisp is that much more productive you would see the top ten places being lisp dialects.

Would you agree?
Good, so we do agree on something :) However there is a problem once we take the artistic license to its logical conclusion: Bill Browder, the author of the article, has an artistic license to voice his biased opinions. Given that he welds a certain amount of influence needed to publish in Foreign Policy, he is given an artistic license to persuade less influential readers. Thus we are faced with a situation where strong (i.e. influential) weld more powerful opinions than the weak (i.e. those who can't influence opinion by publishing in Foreign Policy). We can call this state of affairs a "rule of force". How is the rule of force with respect to opinion different from the rule of force with respect to money?
It's computer science not computer woo. I'm asking for evidence not anecdote :)

Surely, there has to be at least some evidence in it's 50 years? Especially given the claimed huge effect size.
Ah fixed the issue I was facing :) Thanks!

/me jumps back to redis with the new binding.
libraries should be n times faster to make or duplicate

Oh, they often are... and that's why nearly everyone just builds their own. Ease of building it yourself compared to learning someone else's system is a major reason Lisp is languishing, in my opinion.
Do crowdsourced Q&A sites deliver any value?
Thanks, now I have to see if he's actually quoting my Brother or if there is another "Tim Shephard" out there. :-)

"Finally, to quote Tim Shephard: "A great team is a team that will always beat a mediocre team, given the same market and product.""
I think the comments here about the free software community, and particularly the Linux example, are really off base.

Consider Linux: the poster child of successful free software. It is a knockoff of a 1970s operating system well past its sell-by date.

What does that even mean? Linux (as a kernel) does an excellent job at what it is designed to do. I don't know what is meant by "innovation" here. If the author has a fundamentally different kernel design that is actually better, do tell.

On the other hand, at the subsystem level, there is lots of innovation in the Linux kernel. The Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) is a good recent example.

This is because a herd simply cannot innovate, whether for fun or for profit. Every innovative work of mankind has been the product of one – sometimes two, rarely three – minds.

Linux development is not driven by a "herd". It's driven by a group of pretty elite programmers known as the subsystem maintainers.

All the major patches are done by one expert, and many of them are fairly innovative. Ingo Molnar did CFS. Ted Ts'o does a lot of really high profile work on filesystems. There are many more examples.

The Linux development process is lightyears ahead of the typical industrial development process. Git, which was created by and for Linux kernel hackers, has been instrumental in helping Linux get ahead.

Distributed version control is a fundamental innovation in software development, and Git is the most successful DVCS by far.

(Other than that, I think the author makes a great point, and I agree with him 100%. That's why I have so far avoided working for big software companies.)
It's not that this isn't cool, because the gadget factor is pretty high... but normal (read: average fat American) people don't need this.

I'm a 230 pound dude. I'm probably 20-30% body fat. Heck, maybe more. I've put 5,000 miles on a normal bicycle in one year, including a 130+ mile ride in one single day on a mountain bike. I bicycle commute year round in Kansas City. This time of year I ride to the bus stop (5-7 miles round trip depending on my schedule and which buses I take) but quite often, I do the whole round trip by bike alone, which is 29 miles per day. I've driven to work once in the last 2 years. Almost all of my riding is for basic transportation, so I'm not one of those spandex-clad weekend-mile superheroes. I'm not fast, either. It's just efficient, and it makes sense most of the time. If I can do it without electric assist, pretty much anyone can.

That said, there's this whole "I'm Going Green™!" thing going on. And it's not that that's a bad thing either. Efficiency, sustainability and stewardship are great things.

This new wheel, however, actually makes the bike+human machine less efficient. It may have enough gee-whiz factor to get people to ride, but the chances of those people throwing their new hybrid-wheeled-bike onto the roof rack of their Hummer H2 and driving 3 miles to the nearest multi-use-path trailhead are probably rather high. I have my doubts it'll get many people to drive less and ride more.
A competition to solve a toy problem wouldn't necessarily say much, though. So the question is, how big of a problem would you need, and where are you going to find enough programmers (of reasonable and roughly similar competence) who don't have anything better to do than spend multiple hours participating in a glorified programming language pissing match?

In other words, the reason why not is probably "because organizing things is hard work".
Distributed version control is a fundamental innovation in software development, and Git is the most successful DVCS by far.

Is this is the same git that Torvalds tossed together as a quick hack to replace the proprietary BitKeeper DVCS after the company stopped offering free licenses to Linux developers?
Add on that everyone changes out of the street clothing they are wearing into something provided by the airport. Shoes without laces (could be weapons), etc. You get your clothes back once you land and are on the other side of security at your destination.

If you've got medicine, you hand it over to the staff, who will administer the doses when needed, but don't allow you to have it prior.

And breast milk would be dispensed the same way- or they'd encourage mothers to use natural breast milk.

You can bring nothing, absolutely nothing with you on the plane.

This of course, would be absurd for civilians- but of course, infinitely more secure. It would be prison-like (as many of these are things they'd do for prison transport) but definitely secure. I'd like to see someone pull off something then on a plane- hard pressed to imagine how they could. They'd have to be Chuck Norris and have a good roundhouse kick (and a 1st class seat space for the said kick) to take the plane or do anything damaging.
Perhaps I am missing something obvious, but how is this HN material ?
Well, I'm not sure a RAD competition would necessarily be considered scientific. For one, the sample size is small. It also ignores properties such as maintainability, assuming "first to finish" is your only criteria. Finally, it's necessarily a fairly small application I would think.

As for studies, a quick search on google came up with this:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.117...

Which concludes that "Haskell prototype took significantly less time to develop and was considerably more concise and easier to understand than the corresponding prototypes written in several different imperative languages, including Ada and C++."

I couldn't find much more in a short time. Perhaps my search terms, "functional programming imperative productivity" were inappropriate.
Perhaps one source of data is YC startups. What's the success rate of lisp vs. non-lisp?

Yes, of course, many things contribute to success other than language choice. That's my point.
I'll admit I was nervous. I normally pass through completely unnervous- but as soon as they went to rescan my jacket, I knew what was in the pocket. I know in some states simply carrying lockpicks is illegal (probably MA too for all I know, but I do it anyway), let alone taking them on a plane. I was thinking, "shit, shit, shit, shit" but knew that if I played as sincere, naive and innocent (which to a degree I was all three) then I'd be fine.

I do know however, just as in any situation with any law enforcement (or quasi law enforcement) that you do not lie to them. You talk around the truth like an Aes Sedai if you must, but don't lie. If you are pulled into a room for more questioning and you're forced to reveal that you lied, it will be much worse to get out of.
Gladwell does not explicitly say that American pilots are the best. However, he does use the U.S. major airline safety record as the standard (to which the cited foreign carriers fail to rise). U.S. major airlines conduct most of their operations with U.S. and Canadian pilots at U.S. and Canadian airports.

The error chain leading up to an accident is an old concept. The key to preventing accidents is to break the chain, which is typically best done by a pilot who has a lot of extra situational awareness. Sadly, situational awareness mostly comes with experience, so educating a 150-hour pilot about the error chain is not going to enable him or her to deal with a challenging situation as well as a 5000-hour pilot.
Switching from a petrol-powered car to hybrid power makes sense.

Switching from a human-powered bicycle to a hybrid is not as compelling.
The implication that he is only able to convince less influential people with his writing is a mistake. IMO, his goal is to also influence people that have far more ability to effect change than he does and to entertain people who already agree with him on core issues. When you influence people with money it tends to target people with less influence than you have. (Excluding direct bribes.)

Outside of specific narrow areas our society is still more predicated on convincing people with power than those without it. Elections tend to ride on a tiny number of issues like abortion and outside of major issues like Chinese trade and Iraq there is little point to convince a Midwestern voter that you are correct.
Please, please, let us not start a "not Hacker News" meta-discussion. If you think this post is egregiously off-topic, flag it, don't complain in the thread.
It depends on what you mean by PIC time. The pilot going through a professional flight training program will log all of the time after he gets his or her Private as PIC time, e.g., during instrument rating training. However, logging de jure PIC time while an instructor is in the aircraft is not the same as being the de facto PIC.

In a country that doesn't have a regional airline system, there is really no other way than to create captains out of people who have spent nearly all of their flying hours as first officer (second in command).
I did flag it, but I am genuinely curious if I am missing some obvious reason why this has 50+ upvotes.
The success of Linux deserves serious consideration, but breathless marvel at Linux and its development practices is entirely misplaced.

All the major patches are done by one expert, and many of them are fairly innovative. Ingo Molnar did CFS. Ted Ts'o does a lot of really high profile work on filesystems. There are many more examples.

Linux is full of examples of poorly designed systems being slipshod replaced for slightly better designed systems that are well behind the state of the art.

In the same time Linux has gone through multiple schedulers (and scheduler flamewars), FreeBSD developers have designed, implemented, tested, and iterated on ULE, and then ULE2, finally (after much review, testing, and careful consideration) merged it and made ULE2 the default scheduler.

The scheduler wasn't adopted until it was investigated from all angles over years, and found to not introduce any significant performance regressions.

The kicker? The previous scheduler was on par with Linux, ULE2 seems to perform considerably better for many workloads (eg, MySQL) on many-core machines.

Innovation isn't magic -- it involves a lot of hard work and careful design by a lot of people.

The Linux development process is lightyears ahead of the typical industrial development process. Git, which was created by and for Linux kernel hackers, has been instrumental in helping Linux get ahead.

Really? I'm not sure what innovations you're thinking of here.

- Solaris' ZFS vs (incomplete) btrfs
- *BSD's kqueue vs. epoll/inotify/dnotify/
- Solaris' zones vs ?
- FreeBSD vimage (network stack virtualization) vs ?

This isn't intended to be a Linux-tirade -- but I wanted to illustrate that Linux is not "lightyears ahead of the typical industrial development process" when compared against other existing kernel projects.
I enjoyed reading the article but don't really agree with quite a bit of it. I do agree that single individuals or very small teams most often make great breakthroughs, and that languages like Java do yield more "fungibilty."

I don't really agree with the Lisp-centric discussion because I have worked with many fine programmers who used several different languages. The right person makes a bigger impact than language selection.

As far as productivity goes, building a web portal in rails is far faster than using Lisp, and in my opinion will yield more maintainable code.

That said, I am using Common Lisp a lot right now because I am working on a book about AllegroGraph. (BTW, one good "home" for Lisp is back end services.)
What does that have to do with anything? He was in fact guilty of tax evasion, which was in fact against the law.
So far it appears as though my initial suspicion was correct. Ocelot seems to present a single CUDA device interface which can use either the Nvidia driver or the LLVM JIT to run CUDA kernels. The eventual plan is to integrate Ocelot into a runtime system, Harmony, which presents a very high-level interface to parallel resources, and manages multiple backends to keep whatever mix of CPU and GPU cores you have busy. The plan is here (http://code.google.com/p/gpuocelot/wiki/Roadmap). Harmony is part of Greg Diamos' (http://gdiamos.net/) ongoing PhD thesis work at Georgia Tech.
No mention of StackOverflow, which is far and away the best of the niche sites he talks about at the end.
If it stored energy when braking, it would be more efficient.

But on my bike, I only really brake in rare situations, for safety reasons (cars); unfortunately, friction automatically supplies adequate braking for me.

I also choose paths that minimize braking. I guess it's possible that that might change if I had a bike that efficiently stored/applied energy, so that it was as if the braking hadn't occurred. But I don't think so; for one thing, it would be no where near 100% efficient.
Extremely simple in principle, obscenely difficult in implementation. The real difficulty is the confounding variables. Being unable to accurately measure or predict things like level of language familiarity, programming experience, domain knowledge, or intelligence means that it'd be impossible to tie any visible effects to something as simple as language choice.

So, no, I wouldn't agree.

The best study I could think of off hand would be a randomized study of programming productivity (measured somehow) of programming naïve high schoolers. Each subject gets an incentive to learn some language over the course of X weeks and then program something. The sample size would have to be magnificent even to prove a large effect because you'd need to demonstrate control for intelligence/drive and regressing out math scores (or anything similar) would not be convincing really. At the end, you'd still not be able to talk too much about working productivity, but you might have a chance of talking about... anything at all.

Actually, this is an extraordinarily difficult study I think.
Now that is interesting. I personally agree with the hypothesis that lisp is a step forward, but often wonder why it's an anecdotal argument than one that is data backed.

This paper although makes me think they compared programmers not languages, as the imperative language programmers didn't have any functional experience. It would be interesting to see a comparison between programmers of roughly equal competency.
If they want to pay you good money to do work you want to do, take it: we're in a recession. If it tanks, it's a resume line item, if not, so much the better.

Of course, if you have an offer from a company you're sure won't go under, then that might be a better move.
Have you checked out Newspeak?
ask Adrian Holovaty what he thinks. maybe even get him to contribute. he's clearly a good hacker, plus, a good guitarist. rare mix. may be smart to leverage it.