skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oddly, it can also be a downside. A language that makes reinventing the wheel too easy means that people can spend more time saying, "Psh, I could do that in a couple hours" than sharing. Then, when people want to know what the library is to use for parsing HTTP headers (or whatever), everybody and their nephew shows up to suggest their own half-assed framework. It doesn't inspire confidence.

Take that to its logical extent, and ... wait, which Lisp implementation do you use again? Mine only works with SBCL, crap, nevermind.

When somebody has a really thoroughly debugged C library, it can be like huddling everyone together by a fire for warmth in the tundra. If you don't share, man, that's just cruel.
Indeed, it seems to me that he would fail miserably at starting a company because he equates the product/service his company would make/offer with his education.

It's as if Google would have been successful just by branding their search as "Google - the search engine developed by Stanford PhD's"

What's rare and valuable are people that accomplish a lot with a little. I have no idea if the culture at MIT preferentially fosters that kind of dogged resourcefulness, but thinking you're done before you even get started because of a handful of letters on a piece of paper is a start in the wrong direction.
Why do you think it's a tremendous improvement over BitKeeper? Have you used it?
Here's what you would have said if you wanted to be correct:

20th Century mark up languages are absolutely retarded for designing web pages and breed bad layout design.

Yeah, I know I'm going to get down-voted because people lurv HTML, but having had to whip it into shape lately this was totally worth it.
Both statements are true- it was a hack to replace BitKeeper after the Tridgell disaster, and it was inspired by monotone, which he deemed irreparably slow.
> 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?

I began to write a reply to your question, but decided that it deserved its own post:

http://www.loper-os.org/?p=85
Yes, "Rinda" is "Linda" pronounced with a Japanese accent, which along with the fact that Ruby starts with an R makes it the perfect name for that particular project. Unfortunately these things stop being funny and start sounding kind of mean when you spell them out in writing. My comment is absolutely not in that spirit; I just think it's the quintessentially whimsical name, really the only possible name for a Ruby implementation of Linda, and I cling to the fantasy of a room full of people (or at least one) rolling on the floor laughing when they thought of it.
I've never understood singularitarians. Why make such a big fuss over super humans and real AI and whatnot? There is too much talk backed with no results. Let the real scientists continue doing what they do, and perhaps some of the ideas will bear fruit.

But the funny thing is that at the end of it all, being a "super human" won't make your life any better. Technology can't save humanity.
I'm not sure the author is saying he has what it takes to be an amazing entrepreneur. He seems to be referencing his education and skillset to prove a much different point -- that even if he starts a business and fails, he won't have much to fear because getting a job will be easier for him. That's a valid point.
My article did not assert that a pilot became captain at a foreign carrier after 270 hours. The article asserted that a person became captain at a foreign carrier after thousands of hours... nearly all as second in command. That is a very different background than someone who becomes captain at a major U.S. airline (who would have to have been pilot in command at a regional airline for 1000+ hours or pilot in command of a USAF airplane).
It's usually not the distance to the plug I have a problem with, it's the number of outlets I need more of.
Considering how this thread expanded, I'm not sure who you're responding to.

It was more of a "this is what my tax dollars is paying for?" eye rolling moment. That being said, the TSO who joked that we couldn't bring our baby on the plane was apparently loitering not doing whateve her job was and was assigned to go do something by her manager as we finished putting our shoes on, so there are at least some professional in management at the TSA.
Within some problem spaces might it not be true the some languages are somewhat definitively better than others on average?

Knowing many languages definitely operates as a toolbelt for different problems, but there's a reason languages die out. Could that same reason not still apply, at least slightly, in the languages still alive?
Yeah. He caught monotone at a bad time. Graydon had just gone on sabbatical...

Also, 'disaster' is a bit...harsh. As I heard, he just telnet'd and asked for "help".
Related to the article but: Why is Blogger the red-headed step child of Google? I stopped using it recently because over the last 3 years it's barely changed. Posting a comment requires 3 page refreshes, 1 auto-scroll, and breaks the look of the website.

There are so many simple things Google could do to improve Blogger. Obvious things too.
Curiously, it's inherently impossible to compare what I think matters most for languages: solving new problems. To compare two languages you have to have people solve the same problem, and that means it has to be a predefined one.
This is real, not a joke, right?
> Liquid explosives are extremely unstable.

They're stable enough when TSA makes passengers throw them all in a trash can before passing through screening.
This is why:

http://www.loper-os.org/?p=85

Racing computer languages the way one might race horses is a fundamentally misguided thing to do. The race is to the Blubulous simply by virtue of being a race.
Lots of companies/projects work in the field of information visualization, on the bookshelves of almost all of them, you can find Tufte's books. He's largely considered the leader in the theory of displaying information in as dense and as clear of a method as possible than enables people to perceive the encoded information as rapidly and as correctly as possible.

He's best known for sparklines we all enjoy when looking at tables of stock prices, but those are likely the the least of his contributions to the field.

references:

http://www.palantirtech.com/

http://www.futurepointsystems.com/

http://www.caida.org/tools/visualization/walrus/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visualization_(computer_graphic...

http://www.esri.com/

http://nvac.pnl.gov/
Some context might help... which implementation of Common Lisp? SBCL?
i feel a bit of unabashed satisfaction in unfriending, if only because of the addition by subtraction.
It is not nearly as so simple.

The majority of microbial species in the world cannot be cultured due to a lack of understanding in the nutritional requirements. This means microbiologists have a very difficult time studying them, one way of getting past this is studying the genetic makeup of a population.

However the best way to understand microbes is to grow them, a lot of bacteria are easy to grow (beef broth) others impossible.

Then there are ethical considerations in 'giving' people bacteria that are not well characterized.

It is a pretty well supported theory that exposure to bacteria is important for the development of the immune system, it is also pretty well accepted that the normal flora of humans is important in preventing infections.

How antibiotics, probiotics etc. affect humans are however much harder to characterize and understand.
Oh, of course. Within specific problem spaces, there are many languages that are laughably inappropriate.

The constraints over languages have also changed over time, though. For example, in _Coders at Work_, a couple people mention logic programming as an idea worth digging into again now that computers have gotten orders of magnitude faster. I think they're onto something.

I just take issue with how some particularly vocal Lispers have been sitting on the sidelines going, "Our language is THE BEST LANGUAGE" for decades. ("Sick of being a blub programmer and working in Blub? Try our Language For Smart People.") They're so used to being smug because their language was thirty years ahead of its time, fifty years ago.
Being online: Forged identities and non-identities
Terrible advice. Everything in life is a risk. Chances are you will end up with many boring & comfortable jobs in your life. Sometimes you'll leave by choice, sometimes you won't have any choice at all. I figure everyone owes it to themselves to at least try their dream in life. The key is to be well prepared, pragmatic, time it right and do it before others are relying on you for their well being. Usually the worst outcome is you have to go crawling back to that boring & comfortable job.
I was responding to you, which is why I nested it under your comment. I did a double take at tibbon's response to me, but it seemed like he was taking it on a slight tangent, as happens.

I just have to imagine if it was my kid, I would have freaked out and been a little pissed off. I don't think I could have kept my cool as you have, and I fear for the consequences of that.
From my look at his article, he's doing everything clientside, which is causing him the extra headaches about restoring stuff.
Is this guy a nutcase? He reads kind of like a doom-and-gloom nutcase, but I am not an economist. Could one comment on his basic validity level?
I was kind of hoping for a video by that point.
In order to not be nervous this guy first has to finish is Ph.D from MIT. Then and ONLY then will he be able to start a successful company. I would bet that the vast majority of successful software entrepreneurs have much less than a Ph.d. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if even the relative percentages of Bachelors to Ph.ds starting successful companies is higher. In my experience a lot of people go for their PH.Ds because they don't know what they want to do and don't feel like getting a real job.
"By earning a PhD in computer science at MIT I developed a skill that’s rare and valuable to this particular economic segment."

I think if the word "skill" is replaced by "asset", it reads better. OK, a little better.

Maybe what he was trying to say was either (a) it is much easier to get a job in this economy if you have an MIT PhD or (b) he could get funding etc easily thanks to his MIT PhD or (c) while working through his PhD he acquired unique skills which enable him to found a company (as compared to someone who did a course in Yoga). (c) is more dubious than (a) or (b), as dasil003 points out above)

I am just guessing here but it might be the case that the problem might be with the phrasing than the underlying idea. I agree that as written, the sentence seems to imply that he could be an entrepreneur just bacuse his MIT PhD is "rare".
Hmm, OAuth and OpenID are two different beasts.

OAuth is for giving your application the ability to access someone elses, without users of your application having to supply their credentials to you.

OpenID allows for users of your application to use their credentials for another service authenticate with yours.
"You could go through an entire code base and replace sprintf calls with snprintf with the appropriate buffer size parameter."

Slightly more useful (in every sense) would be to write a script which did this to code automatically.
Smart? Eh I dunno... don't install it on your outside walls or you won't feel too smart when your heating bill arrives. Insulation in wall keep warm in? That's umpossible!
TSA Making Flying More Miserable
Schneier on Security: Separating Explosives from the Detonator
Also that because this is a global recession, every country is focused on revitalizing their own economy, especially developing countries (i.e. emerging markets). Thus the global demand for US Treasuries in 2010, especially among EMs, who have historically been larger purchasers of US Treasuries, will also fall, placing more pressure on the US government to raise cash domestically.
From the article -

"triton:palindromes jgrant$ sbcl --noinform --load [...]"
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He's trying to say that america needs to issue lots more debt, but soon no one will want to buy any debt.

He's also assuming america won't do anything about it.
one feature I just found out about & feel compelled to share with everyone I encounter is that you can ban entire applications from your feed. you just click the hide button and you have the opportunity to ban either a user or an app. ban the app & you still see that person's updates, but nothing about their silly farm.

after a couple days zapping spam, facebook becomes about 100x more compelling.
Well, Norvig recommends AIMA over PAIP now for machine learning. I guess if what you want is Common Lisp code, then your choice must be PAIP.
Just to reiterate, yes it was added in 1.1. I did not even know about it until 1.1 hit personally, so I dunno how many knew since I try to actively follow new feature additions. But maybe I'm just blind ;)
There are a dozen reasons the data would be bogus but I only need to state the most obvious: you can't use the same person in 2 comparable tests because the tasks would be either too trivial or too similar; likewise you cannot use different people in groups for the tests because people are too different.

Smart and dumb people have succeeded with all kinds of languages on all kinds of platforms that are widely viewed as amazing and terrible and everywhere in between, on all kinds of projects.
Gah... Russian style business - you get stabbed with the knife you loaned :S
Implementing HN's Popularity Algorithm in Django
I took a shot at answering this but I'm interested to see what other ideas are suggested since I don't know how it actually works.
I want to blindly accept that argument but I can't. Those who choose to casually break the rules of the language need swiftly to firmly be reprimanded.
The physorg article links to the original research paper, which is published in an open access journal that anyone can view. Perhaps you would be interested in video S1 in the supporting information section:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone...
Team SmartASS (a group of Googlers) wins or places high in that competition regularly, and they use Java.
Why the web economy will continue growing rapidly
Not to mention, Apple is not in the business of physical content distribution (i.e., mailing DVDs), and already has a very popular streaming product available.

They could definitely do with the user tracking and recommendations side of Netflix, but that alone doesn't justify a takeover.
Ample SDK - Open Source GUI Framework
I've used nanoc for my blog for a while. It's ok, but the next time I do need static HTML generation I think I will just use rails that I host locally and then statically mirror the site with wget --mirror and rsync.
This is a testable hypothesis due to the number of popular open source projects around we can draw from.
This is what statistics are for, and is exactly the same situation that many other disciplines find themselves in where treatment a influences treatment b.
he would fail miserably at starting a company because he equates the product/service his company would make/offer with his education

I think you misunderstood the post. The author said nothing about how his PhD would directly relate to starting a new company (the author's research is theoretical, anyway). Rather, the point is that by acquiring a valuable skill (a PhD from MIT), his risk profile is lower: he could go and start a new venture, or equivalently wager all his assets at the roulette table; either way, his skills mean he would be able to find a good job if the gamble doesn't turn out well.

If you like, substitute "MIT PhD" for "become one of the top 5 Linux kernel developers" for an equivalently rare, valuable skill that would help to ensure future employment.
I refer you to:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1016762

What's wrong with that as evidence for lisps superiority?
One impossible study:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1016762
Absolutely true. Real problems are social problems.
"I began to write a reply to your question, but decided that it deserved its own post"

That isn't really a reply to the question posed. Just more ranting and raving.

Sample: "Yes, my dear bean counters, you can measure productivity. I would no more ask you to stop in your attempts at its measurement than I would ask mosquitoes to stop sucking blood. You can measure productivity – even of Lisp; even of political philosophies. You will simply need to secure a very large bag of beans – one deep enough to hold a bean for every twist and turn of a century of tinkering, politicking, and everything else associated with the messy business of successfully thinking new thoughts."

The best interpretation of this drivel is that you want people to accept your claims of superior productivity just on your say so but not ask for any evidence because asking you back up your unsubstantiated claims of superiority would be "bean counting".

Forget the scientific studies. There is another kind of "evidence" in programming - write code that is evidently superior. The best way to show that (say) Linux is an "inferior" operating system is to build one better. Not talk about making one sometime in the misty future. Build. Then talk.

Endless rants aren't as good. As silentbicycle says elsewhere

"I just take issue with how some particularly vocal Lispers have been sitting on the sidelines going, "Our language is THE BEST LANGUAGE" for decades. ("Sick of being a blub programmer and working in Blub? Try our Language For Smart People.") They're so used to being smug because their language was thirty years ahead of its time, fifty years ago."
A genocide begins with the killing of one man..." -- Kofi Annan
It is also startup-relevant because it illustrates the "Wealth and power" section from Paul Graham's "How to Make Wealth" http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Wealth and Power

Making wealth is not the only way to get rich. For most of human history it has not even been the most common. Until a few centuries ago, the main sources of wealth were mines, slaves and serfs, land, and cattle, and the only ways to acquire these rapidly were by inheritance, marriage, conquest, or confiscation. Naturally wealth had a bad reputation.

Two things changed. The first was the rule of law. For most of the world's history, if you did somehow accumulate a fortune, the ruler or his henchmen would find a way to steal it. But in medieval Europe something new happened. A new class of merchants and manufacturers began to collect in towns. [10] Together they were able to withstand the local feudal lord. So for the first time in our history, the bullies stopped stealing the nerds' lunch money. This was naturally a great incentive, and possibly indeed the main cause of the second big change, industrialization.

A great deal has been written about the causes of the Industrial Revolution. But surely a necessary, if not sufficient, condition was that people who made fortunes be able to enjoy them in peace. [11] One piece of evidence is what happened to countries that tried to return to the old model, like the Soviet Union, and to a lesser extent Britain under the labor governments of the 1960s and early 1970s. Take away the incentive of wealth, and technical innovation grinds to a halt.
Not the easiests of problems though. Do you know what statistics you would apply?

IQ measurements seem to have a similar problem: doing test a, influences your score on test b, because you get more used to the problems presented.. but doing test a and b just marginally increases your general intelligence, which is what you are trying to measure, while it might have a big influence on someone's score in these tests.

With IQ tests, you can expect that doing test c till z will eventually saturate someone.. but that might only work because you generally do not get the answers. In coding, you do get the answer back (whether your code compiles/works or not), so eventually both programmers will just be limited by the speed with which they type.
I don't know any start-up founder that cites his degree as a key motivation for doing a start-up.

Nowhere does the post suggest that a PhD is motivation for doing a startup. The point is that if you have a valuable skill (whether a PhD or experience as a successful VP), if you take a risk, you'll still have a comfortable position to fall back on.
yet, his personal blog is largely attacks on people who publish essays questioning his conclusions. for instance, he appears to be still steaming over the whole pinker review/ eigenvalue debacle. i guess i can't really argue with the quotation you provide but he seems to me like someone who takes his conclusions (too) seriously.
Do you think if it were repeated today with a recent version of the JDK Java development time might be less? Probably not as low as Lisp but things have improved in Java land since 1.2.

That synopsis of a study is nice but I'm still not convinced all the important variables were isolated.
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An aside: I'd really love to excise "scratch an itch" from the collection of developer idioms.

It sounds so unnecessarily uncouth. =)
In an ideal world, HEAD and GET probably wouldn't exist.

But we're here. The question is, does the analytics system work that way?
Seems like two changes could hit many of the concerns here:

(1) The box can unclip from the wall, and disconnect from an internal fixed plug. An emergency pull handle is all you really need.

(2) A slow-but-steady retract mechanism. grinich's idea for a small electric winch makes a lot of sense if a spring version couldn't do it slowly and steadily enough.

And if you're worried a moron won't listen to your amperage ratings, a built-in breaker.

Still, a nice-to-have in the kitchen, workshop, and garage. The electric knife we use at thanksgiving has a uselessly short cord, and nobody remembers to find a good extension until way too late in the evening -- too many other concerns first!
I've been apprehensive about the Tarkovsky book, which was why I never bought it for myself. But he's my favorite director. It just seemed badly translated to me, from the preview I read on Amazon.

But now that I've read a few chapters, I have to say that this book is a must own for anyone who loves Tarkovsky. It still may be the case that the translation sucks, but I am over it. I'm going to to go through each of his movies one-by-one again, and read his corresponding chapters.

I recommend this book.
>Not the easiests of problems though. Do you know what statistics you would apply?

There are many ways. Off the top of my head:

- to focus on speed of development you could use a practice or warm-up

> provide each with a practice in another language

> provide a sample solution in pseudocode in both functional and imperative style

- To focus on speed of problem solving you could use topcoder data + research of participants programming language backgrounds.

The important thing is that if the effect is large it's easy to spot. According to some, the difference is an order of magnitude. If that's true, it will be trivial to spot.
This would be useful if there were an API, that let people suck down that aggregated data and remix it.