skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He states that Python sort-of has a symbol type like Lisp, but that there isn't a syntax for it. Could someone help me understand what he's talking about?
From my reply on my blog (http://bit.ly/4RCZYi):

Things startups do need that are missing from the original list:

* Revenue
Because you’re a business first and everything else second. And once you have that, profit.

* Technical talent
If ideas are worth less than execution, then you need the best people you can get to execute.

* Passion
Nothing is better than working on something you believe in. It just doesn’t feel like work.
Drag-and-drop to add music means that the device has to tediously index itself or have terrible metadata support, usually both.

It's a hell of a misfeature, one that nearly all of Apple's non-Zune competitors are drawn to, since they have no hope of competing with iTunes as a music organizer and they have a very vocal clique of customers that demand it (like support for OGG and FM Radio).
I'm not sure if you were referring to me here, but personally I did read the entire comment and found all of it hostile and condescending. I also find his insinuation that I haven't read his comments thoroughly enough hostile and condescending.
Hit "I'm Feeling Lucky."
I don't know about you guys but I never run a Windows OS on a machine without a corresponding UNIX system as dual boot. Therefore I always use Nvidia cards now because I like semi-functional drivers in Linux. I guess Linux users aren't a huge percentage but writing useable AMD/ATI drivers for Linux may land a few.
Wow. And check out www.fundable.com

Customers are encouraged to use Kickstarter as a replacement for Fundable.com and seek legal action against Louis Helm personally should he fail to resolve your payment issues promptly.
Was? USB2 still is -- goddamn interrupt-based I/O is for mice, not mass storage!
ArgentumInvoice
That seems like a different notion from the one presented in the article was my point. I agree with what you've written, you should stick to what you can build it most efficiently in. However the article had a section:

>"Write your own CMS. I would have totally disagreed with this advice up until last week or so, but Thomas convinced me: writing a single-purpose CMS is pretty much the new Hello World for modern web frameworks (heck, it is the official Rails demo), and with a man-week or two you can make something much more productive for your purposes than using, e.g., Wordpress. (Though if you can do whatever functionality you need as a Wordpress plugin, I’d still be inclined to suggest that. No need to reinvent the wheel for basic CRUD operations on textual content, or HTML parsing.)"

My argument is that within the existing CMS options it's almost always easier to just create a module to add the functionality rather than trying to create your own CMS. I work with Drupal as you stated and it's pretty open to what can be done with it and quite easy to add almost any functionality I want. So the quoted piece from the text is a bit confusing from the article.
Yah, that pic screams douchebag (as if it wasn't already obvious).
Nice app!
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell - page turner
I would have agreed with you until about a year ago, when AMD got it's act in gear and starting releasing better linux drivers. Admittedly, I used only one (and never used an nVidia), but the experience was fine (excepting the growing pains of the initial rereleases of fglrx).
But if you want a really terrific online discussion, I'm going to abandon ship and give you a link to MetaFilter instead, which starts with a series of critical articles and leads on to one of the most lucid, multifaceted discussions of Rand's many flaws I've ever seen.

I'm not defending Rand, but is it really intellectually honest to judge her stated principles by her behavior, as most of her critics do? Many of the most influential philosophers in all schools of thought have proven to be either hypocritical or downright nuts.

It's easy to attack someone as flawed as Rand, and it's even easier to attack strawmen fashioned from bits and pieces of her work. Neither of these facts tell you anything about the quality or relevance of her overall message.
On the new french piracy law and fixing old media
I don't know. This all just seems so unlikely. Far more likely that he misunderstood what he saw.
Actually, the linked discussion mentions that also. When discussing such an inherently flawed philosophy, it's important to really think about the origins of Rand's thoughts. Why did she think the way she did? Who inspired her? Objectivism is not a stand-alone philosophy.

In particular, the talk about her and the mass murderer horrified me. When her ideal of humanity cut a young girl to pieces, you have to wonder if the sadomasochism in her philosophy was more a personal kink than it was some step of logic.
Aka laptops?
"Maverick" by Ricardo Semler - This book is about the company Semco in Brazil and challenges everything you think you know about business. Semler advocates radical ideas like public self-set salaries and workplace democracy. I don't necessarily agree with everything in the book, but the ideas sure are interesting.
Is there any authentication here? These are links to two posts on a local news site. Has anyone actually checked the story out? Any independent confirmation? No offense, but some pretty important journalism got skipped here. This by itself is worthless.
I've heard that single bills are the norm in the US (I don't actually know if this is true, however), but up here in Canada this is a solved problem.

When you order, you simply tell your server who is paying for what (e.g. "separate bills", "I'm paying for her, those two are separate"). If you don't say anything, they tend to ask before giving you your bill. It's pretty simple.
Guns, Germs and Steel - still reading it but one of the best I 've read so far..
Turning down the noise in the blogosphere
I hope Pratt gets over his misdirected anger.

I was happy when I heard of Fundable in 2005, not because it was a cool new idea but because it was an old idea overdue for someone to do it right. (In fact, in 2001 I owned the domains 'payzi.com' and 'tipzi.com' -- as possible homes for some sort of audience-sourced creative-project funding system to complement the Bitzi metadata service.)

Fundable didn't quite do it right, for whatever reasons. Now I'm happy the concept is getting another try from another team.
> During the second half of the decade, the Chinese bubble will burst.

I agree. As a result, Chinese-American co-dependency crumbles like a bitter divorce, the world falls into war, inclusive of even the most pacifist, post-military states. On the upside, a post-apocalyptic nuclear winter moves anthropogenic global warming to the back burner and spawns a generation of Mad Max-style entrepreneurs among the ten-million or so human survivors. Surviving software engineers relish the opportunity to rebuild lost infrastructure "the right way this time"---including a transactional, secure, well-formed, rule-based, semantic world-wide-web---while the less-gifted turn to secondary issues like clean water, shelter, food, energy, medicine, and transportation.

Internecine fighting erupts amongst the software clans over whether certain symbols are separating or terminating and whether or not the name of the god of modification is spelled with two letters or five. The dehumanized masses turn on the dithering software clans and their IT crowd supporters, demanding to have their souls restored from failed exchange, facebook, gmail, and twitter servers. A small nomadic clan clad in denim and mock turtlenecks seeks the legendary Cupertino Stone in the wasteland of New Gorgoroth (mostly between the 85 and the 280), but finds only the unpublished "Objectivist-C Manifesto" and shiny discs inscribed "Dylan DR1".

Also, either Megan Fox or Jessica Biel is nominated for best supporting actress.
"... and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing."
Carnegie Mellon Bio-Inkjet Printer Creates Muscle and Bone
Screenshot of Fundable "closed permanently" (October 2009)

http://img18.yfrog.com/img18/2396/s8u.png

(image from: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=858033 )
You should read basics about web usability.
Nobody will ever read your new page.
None of Stephenson's books really have much of an ending (or in some cases much of a coherent plot)... the closest I can think of (in the way of endings) is Snow Crash.

But he writes with wonderful detail and humor, and seems really great at writing believable near-term futures, which I imagine are much harder than writing about the distant future (where everything can be fantastical).
Tollywood babes Anu Vaishnavi hot and spicy tempting boob show
Yeah, the basic idea is clever, but hardly novel. Back in 2004 my friend and I entered our college's business plan competition with a plan for a music site based on this kind of funding model. We originally got the idea from an article on corante.com.
Conference Venues with Syndicate Rooms
Conference Venues with Syndicate Rooms England. Preston Swallow Hotel is on best Morris conferencing conference venues.
I was bored so I whipped up a (very hacky) python script to read the log.

http://gist.github.com/267399
We're certainly familiar with the lengths people will go to achieve accolades on the internet. Don't be surprised if you see more incentives on the site to encourage open source contribution.
Introduction to How To Stay Married
No, the word spoon-fed has negative connotations of helplessness and apathy, just as dumbed-down or pointy-clicky have. If that kind of words come to mind, or if you think users are lazy when they don't read what you write, or refuse to fill out a seven-field registration form, then you are going to design bad user experiences and your competitors will beat you.

This particular writer is probably just using it as link-bait though.
"make mistakes and learn from them".

So obvious, well-known and true... but it has a certain reassuring omph when someone at the absolute top of their field says it, with examples from their experience.

It doesn't need to be right the first time. In fact, it can't be right the first time, because there's things that you don't know - and can't know - til you make those mistakes. He said they're "failures, but that's not quite the right word". Another word is "experiment", but that doesn't capture how much these mistakes hurt. They are real.
Programming in Haskell by Graham Hutton

A.I. A Modern Approach (ch 13-16) by Russell and Norvig

A Tunnel In The Sky by Robert Heinlein

The Revelation Space series (3 of the 5 books) by Alistair Reynolds

Eon/Eternity (both by Greg Bear)
Gangleader for a Day - Sudhir Venkatesh's illuminating story about the housing projects, crack gangs and community dynamics of south side chicago in the '90s.

Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely explains a lot of the idiosyncracies in everyday human behavior

Thoughts Without a Thinker - Mark Epstein's enjoyable tale about buddhism and psychotherapy

Worst:

SuperFreakonomics - Superficial, poorly written, overly patriotic cocktail party factoids
Was any patents involved?
I may have to read that book again everyone seems to highly recommend it and the first pass was for a history class so my mind probably wasn't that into it.

The only thing that really sticks out to me about that book right now was the use of the wheel in childrens' toys where terrain and usability were not suitable.
Exactly. And even when the person does manage to speak in a perfect soundbite, they're often talking to somebody who isn't an expert, and it might well get screwed up during transcription, writing or editing.

The first time I talked to a reporter, the reporter swapped my descriptions of opportunities and threats, so I looked like I had absolutely no understanding of the market at all. After that, I started taking "quotes" with a much larger grain of salt.
As someone who does tech support for a living, I'm thrilled that it's #2. This is a job I enjoy doing and that, I believe, serves a useful purpose. Pity too many companies that supply tech support believe it's best done for pennies on the dollar somewhere else (on the basis that it's a "cost center"). The value of a company backing its products with knowledgeable, helpful staff, especially when it's accessible to the small-to-medium business market, is incredibly high.

I also like doing help desk work, so maybe I'm just crazy.
I agree that Fooled By Randomness was a good read, but since then Taleb has become too wrapped up in self-aggrandizement, and he now thinks way to highly of himself and his abilities.

He lost me when he started writing articles like Ten Principles for a Black Swan-Proof World (http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/tenprinciples.pdf). Isn't the point about Black Swans that they're impossible to protect against?
Picking single-aspect reasoning lightens the condition (and thus, the strength of the argument) quite a bit. If you take a single learning problem domain, there are a number of fully unsupervised ML/IR systems already out there with superhuman reasoning capabilities.

The second part of your argument is a funky one. Fully autonomous R&D-capable AIs (AKA self-improving that is, a problem-solving / reasoning system, that is capable of creating new, and improving upon existing problem-solving / reasoning systems -which, coincidently, might include itself) are the modern equalent of the philosopher's stone, and has not only withstanded attacks in ways that few other problem domains did, but seems to be an AI-hard[1] problem by itself. As I laid down above, market forces does not favour these kind of R&D; thus I predict this problem to be unsolved for the short-term future.

On the other paw, the second parameter of your cost function - "cost of data" - can be exchanged by "amount of available data" -which seems to be in an explosive boom from where I stand. Thus, while we're talking predictions, I would hypothise a short-term future with a slow, and incremental improvements upon tackling domains combined with an exponentially growing amount of available data, making even relatively naive learning methods to have results well within the optimal range.

It will still require humans. It will still require R&D. But the "cost of learning" will be so much lower, that the process will be routinely employed (successfully) by developers; thus diversifying the overall software market even further.

I know it doesn't make for a fancy movie, but throwing away 6.5M years of R&D by mother evolution doesn't seems to be a wise diversification move.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-complete
I loved David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom. His blog is also filled with a lot of interesting thoughts: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com
"The other police station" -- that still freaks me out.
Text of Steve Jobs' Commencement address (2005)
No, I was referring to ericlavigne.

Although you are correct in saying that the comment was hostile and condescending. I'm sure the poster meant it to be as such for many possible reasons none of which I will try to guess.
Despite Blade Runner being one of my favorite films (if not the favorite, given how I'm feeling pitting it against 2001), I still completely agree.

They're very different in a lot of ways, though--I might go as far as to say Blade Runner is just barely an adaptation and more a derivative. However, that'd just be me arguing semantics.
"I cannot tell you how painful it is to watch 5 assholes take your idea and run with it and not even give you credit. I hate all 5 of them for that. If I see them, I may punch each one of them in the face." ... "I am not very bitter because I realize how much I learned and how much I got to experience"

Good god.
Redliners by David Drake. Burned out soldiers are sent to baby-sit a planetary colonization. Fortunately for the story it turns out to be a planet full of monsters. Baen Free Library.

Accelerando, Iron Sunrise, and Singularity Sky by Charles Stross. Singularity stories.

House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski. Supernatural meta-fiction with half the story in the footnotes. Reminiscent of the movie Donnie Darko.

Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis. Private eye gets retained by the White House to track down the other U.S. Constitution. To quote William Gibson, "Stop It. You're frightening me."

Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg. Story of his teenage daughter's descent into manic psychosis.

A Hat Full of Sky and Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett. Kids' stories, so they have wall-to-wall story, unlike some of his more situational adult books.

James H. Schmitz science fiction stories. Available from the Baen Free Library of digital books.
The estate tax would likely be more acceptable if the deceased were able to provide some amount of direction in their wills about the use of the collected tax revenue, but I suppose that would open up a whole can of worms.

Actually, they can do exactly that by donating their estate to charity instead of bequeathing it to their heirs.
Usability Post gets a redesign
Would you say as much to his face?

I'm not particularly impressed by his antics but I don't think name-calling adds anything to this discussion.
Perfect example of "Lets kick the guy when he is down", and Seriously why is this even here? I rest my case.
I like that he's going to introduce quantifiers into his language (e.g. some(X) > every(Y)). What I'm concerned about tho is that this will have some very peculiar "errors" for some people. It seems like he's using what we linguists would call de re scope, which is to say the first quantifier has higher scope than the second one.

For example, using English, and translating into first order logic with restricted quantifiers, as well as Ruby:

Some dog chased every cat
∃x:dog(x)[ ∀y:cat(y) [chased(x,y) ]]
dogs.some? { |x| cats.all? { |y| chased x, y }}

Unfortunately, the English sentence is known to have another reading, one where each cat is chased by some or other dog, maybe not the same one for each cat:

∀y:cat(y)[ ∃x:dog(x)[ chased(x,y) ]]
cats.all? { |y| dogs.some? { |x| chased x, y }}

Which means some poor coder might end up typing some(dog).chased(every(cat)) in his language, thinking he's getting the ∀ > ∃ reading (the second one above) and bamph, weird behavior. Even if you're familiar with how quantifiers work in this language, the similarity to english in this regard might easily lead someone to absentmindedly make this error.

That's not to say that he shouldn't have quantifiers -- I think we need some interesting natural-language like things like quantifiers in experimental languages -- but it's definitely something he should watch out for.
Possibly just poor writing on my part, but I was trying to convey a story where passive aggressiveness and personal issues coupled with poor planning produced a failed project.

One that took too long to fail.

edit:
I actually didn't consider that possibility, but that wasn't the case in this situation. I think I'm a tad light hearted in describing something negative.
direct link to namebench: http://code.google.com/p/namebench/
Ask HN: Should newbie programmers invest there time in new Languages?
Even after programming for about 4 years, and taking two years of CS in school and currently going through one year of Computer Programming class, I still consider myself a newbie. That may be because for a major project I have only one website and one High school final year project both written in RoR and C++ respectively. I started out with C++ took a step back and went through C to do some uController programming then took a leap forward and learned Ruby and RoR to do some web dev things. All this time I was experimenting with different technologies and I consider this as my personal roadblock to not being able to do much of big work.

But recently one question poped into my head. Should new programmers venture into new languages like Go or Clojure?(I know Clojure is a year or more old but its still relatively new)I personally believe if you venture into something early you tend to grow with that thing. But I dont think a newbie programmer can do such a thing. Whats you take?
The Decade's Top Quotations
Yep, on ARM you don't have those problems; you have different ones: every system has unique firmware and requires a special bootloader and kernel, making it impossible to create one OS image that will boot on many ARM systems.

http://lwn.net/Articles/364654/

There is hope, but I doubt it will arrive in time for the first wave of ARM "smartbooks": http://lwn.net/Articles/367752/

Also, Ubuntu and Chrome OS seem to have divergent plans for firmware.
Longest Common Subsequence algorithm in Python
How does this assume English any more than the other protocols, HTTP and OAuth, on which it is based?

And, isn't that level of assumption a good thing for comprehension and interoperability?
And since it's Steve Yegge, it must be right?

His "over-commented" example is clearly extreme hyperbole.

His under-commented counter-example is extremely poorly commented code which fails to explain the "why", ensuring that nobody can make sense of the code path without actually stopping to read the entire expression and possibly the expressions to which it refers.
I just bought a new computer because the Catalyst driver for Linux wasn't doing it for me (and I had an iMac, so I couldn't easily swap the video card). With my medium-range nVidia 220 GT card, things are enormously better.
"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values" - Robert M. Prisig

I wouldn't say I agree with all of it, but its a great read nonetheless.
You have arrived at the right site. Though, there used to be many articles posted here to motivate people to break away from golden handcuffs. I suggest you try to find a way to cut down on working hours that works financially for you, to kick-start some side-business of your own.

Make something that you will keep and own. Preferably something you can get a passive income from. Experience a warm fuzzy feeling when you realize that you are actually doing profitable stuff without being at a big slow company with meetings and otherwise uncreative work culture.

This side-business phase is where I am at. I can attest to a different mood about salary slavery after getting to it. I know I'll never become rich on a salary. I need work to be more than a trade of hours of my life for money. While I am at work I need to learn new things. While I am at work I need to take the responsibility myself for making my future workdays less painful since I'll hang around for an unknown time.

The consequences of feeling I can give my workplace the finger and work full-time on my project to make it on my own, is that at work I automate the tedious tasks, I take a more active role in improving business processes that I see quality flaws in. I put in the extra effort to streamline things so that my coming workdays can be spent on things I don't feel is beneath me.

So who knows, maybe this will work out with me getting a better work career even if my side-project doesn't work out, that it was just a catalyst for me to realize I'm responsible for my own work situation not sucking. I hope my projects do work out though. :)
on a unrelated note, Steam is having a awesome holiday sale, where most of games are selling at a discount of 50%-80%. So all you frugal gamers should be buying now.

http://store.steampowered.com/

note: I am not related to either Steam or Valve in anyway, I just love Steam as it has made my life easier wrt playing and managing games.
Correction:
--
Organizations fall over by default, slowly enough that you can fix them if you care.
--
Ed did NOT say that because organization fall slowly it's hard to notice.
He implied that you have time to fix the failure... you just have to put conscious effort to notice the problem and then another effort to fix it (while organization is still successful overall).