skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the effect size is large (i.e. the magnitude of difference between the means of lisp vs non-lisp programmers) the size of problem should be irrelevant.

Many thousands of programmers spend hours each week in pissing matches online. Why is it none of them feel like truly putting their money where their mouth is?
Something so viscerally horrible sets off an empathy reaction in many people, and it's not obviously off-topic as it is well-written, in-depth, and not something covered on TV news. Not to mention it does have a connection to entrepreneurship, capitalism, and general business.
This paper is another interesting anecdote, unfortunately. They're not really claiming anything quantitatively.

Also, though it's not explicit, I feel it's obvious that the researchers had a prior bias toward functional languages.
Ask HN: How to jump into "real world" programming?
Hey everyone,

Im free over college spring break, and want to get some real world programming experience, By which I mean creating something of use to others. For some reason I feel lost as where to begin in that respect. (most my experience has been using programming as a problem solving tool, and a few tools like a broken link checking web crawler)

It seems like theres a large gap between where I'm at and where I would like to be. Any tips? like reading other peoples source code ect?

Thanks
So are you condoning what happened?
What Tomorrow's Agent Looks Like...
This one was caused by Zoho being embedded in the post, not the blog linked.
Maybe it's not that lisp makes any programmer more productive, but that it offers the anecdotal "order of magnitude more productive" programmer features that Java, being designed for the "interchangeable cog" programmer, does not.
i don't know about the exact nature of these jobs emails, but oftentimes the positions are only advertised to current students and recent alums of the universities. even if his mom could learn java quickly, she might not be eligible for those jobs, since they want to interview fresh-faced 20-year-old college seniors from College X
I agree - I really think that when it comes down to it, Lisp isn't popular because it's harder to read. Even if it's more terse and far more elegant, the mental tax of trying to understand another person's code is far higher than C, where there's only "the dumb way" to do something.

If people can't understand the code, they can't contribute, so you don't end up with the network effect of F/OSS contributions that make a language popular (note that I say popular, not better)
Many people have boring and ok jobs yet never have the courage to try something different. In this situation, it is perhaps healthy to actually quit the job and try it. In the worst case, your new startup fails, you learn something, you return to another boring job. But I guess you will feel much better about yourself, as a human being who has the courage to follow your dream, rather than as a boring person who always complains about the boring job.
It's simply impossible to isolate and control all of the important variables involved in developing any software of any significant size. There's a reason for the lack of productivity data for programming in general.
This is a good aggregation idea for learning - why not find a few content providers/creators that could serialize a process for learning - so pieces of a song, or basic chords for guitar. Get some content made by people looking to raise their recognition, and customize it for the site. I'll bet you could get free contributions, or even mechanical turk it for different languages. Ad-supported is definitely the model right now, but what about taking requests and getting people to "donate" for specific content providers to produce requests - you may have a runaway hit for people that can tab/teach/play. Best of luck.
Mostly it's due to a lack of good, controlled, data. The ideal study would need to be of a large and complex system that was recreated several times in several languages. You'd need to verify each system behaved the same, and that the teams on each version were nearly equally competent in their respective languages. Even that would be poor, since it would be a single data point. Perhaps a particular language was simply good at that problem!

Despite that complaint, the above is nearly impossible to do in practice. So you have to settle for smaller problems, which can be done in several months perhaps. Even at that, it would take some very difficult collaboration, and would still be a single data point.

Further complicating issues is the academic world vs. industry. Again, ideally you'd want to do the test in industry, with an appropriate team of programmers and managers. But industry doesn't want to waste time with such academic matters, nor does it want to open it's code for analysis.

In other words, it's a very difficult problem to address, despite being seemingly simple on the surface.
For more perspective, check out this timely article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/business/27digi.html?ref=b...
Ask HN: Why can't we prove the Blub Hypothesis?
In a current HN thread, trapper asked the interesting question

"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?"

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1016583)

I've never personally seen one and can almost immediately rattle off a thousand reasons why it would be impossible, but that doesn't mean it is.

How would you structure a study to make it practical to gather real, objective, and interpretable data on programming efficiency? It'll be necessary to consider controls, sample size (Mech. Turk, perhaps), and, largely, the definition of "programming efficiency", but with all the talk about how Java is Blub I'd love to see it actively, quantitatively hamper someone's work.
I (mostly) agree. It would seem that to do infrastructure especially in the middle of a recession (when you might be able to get it done cheaper) is the time to do it. That being said, you have to layer on the inevitable inefficiencies/corruption when such projects are rushed in order to have any impact to a recession.

I wonder if there are more creative ways to go about it like encouraging private firm participation through road privatization (which means that you get the same impacts without the government spend from private firms that are incentivized to be more efficient to maximize ROI). There are also creative experiments like congestion pricing that have the potential to greatly recoup costs while improving productivity.

There also obviously environmental impacts though of cheap free roads which have also been blamed for enabling urban sprawl. Again, it would just seem to me that yes, infrastructure is important (and much of the existing infrastructure is aging and needs to be replaced) but the way that we've gone about building it in the past and in how it's being proposed to build out now as stimulus, is less than optimal.
Lisp is the Ron Paul of programming languages.
Nice and snappy. I like that in a web app, so kudos there. Still, YSlow gives you a C for not gzipping or using a CDN. Personally, I see no real reason not to use something like Google's AJAX library hosting (http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/) for your JQuery stuff, unless it's super custom.

Not clear on the significance of the numbers next to each link. Is this clicks in a certain time frame or ever? It will take repeated visits to see how often items get off the front page, so too soon to tell how fresh everything will be.

I think this is a useful idea because with all the RSS noise, it's nice to know what's getting attention. I doubt that a one-size all list of sites will continue to serve a wider audience though, like some kind of Techmeme. What about letting me give you my OPML and you weed out what is most interesting according to bit.ly? What about weighting clicks for domains based on their overall traffic to avoid the Mashable effect?

So, keep it up. Nice work!
"I have to cop out on that."
This is the kind of intellectual laziness that almost let the nonsense of AGW succeed. Fortunately there are people like Watt (check out surfacestations.org) and McKintyre (Climate Audit) who have the skills and put in the time and effort to reveal the horrible corruption in 'Climatology'. The emails and code have now made it obvious, but their release might never had happened without the FOI requests. Here is the latest for those who haven't seen it - One man has been controlling all the Wikipedia climate articles to support the AGW view
http://www.nationalpost.com/m/blog.html?b=fullcomment&e=...
Among other things I did find it to be "intellectually gratifying" and something I wouldn't have found in the mainstream media.
The best way not to lie to cops is not to say anything at all. If you lie they'll pin you on your lies, and if you tell the truth they'll crucify you with that, too. Thankfully you have a constitutional right to remain silent.

Personally, I only do that when it seems like serious business. When I'm pulled over for speeding there's no gain playing mute.
NORTHWEST AIRLINES FAILED CHRISTMAS DAY TERROR ATTACK
Another typo: "recommend us to your firends"
I am surprised this piece of trashy fanboi writing is so high on the HN front page. The whole site is full of "lisp is the coolest. Everything else sucks" type borderline trollish posts, endlessly recycling the "lisp is better than everything else" meme. As usual, the HN discussion is better than the crummy article, which may be the desired end result aftr all.
I would look into OpenID and Twitter integration (http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Sign-in-with-Twitter). But instead of providing just a text field when accepting OpenID, provide quick links to login with the major, more-general web app providers (Yahoo, Google). You don't even need to tell your users that you're using OpenID for authentication... just that they could login using their existing account with another major web service.

You may want to look into RPX (http://rpxnow.com) - it's a commercial provider that does something similar to what I described above. I'm not a huge fan of them being a hosted service, but they do make it really straight-forward to login.
CHRIS BROWN’S TWITTER
Yes, because "I quit being a database entry and started being a human again" is far more spammy than "please help me tend to my virtual farm."

/sarcasm
Pick an idea and make it. I've been doing that and it's really helping me with Ruby and it's led to me learning about a lot of other things like SSL, server administration, message queues, etc.
OK I'm confused now..

I think what the commenter meant was the cathedral vs the bazaar model of development. Would'nt FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc all be in the same boat as Linux?
Granted that Linux has a benevolent-dictator-aka-linus, but that does not make it deviate too much from the bazaar model.

For all its flaws, git (and github) are becoming the preferred choice of hackers everywhere - I'm not staunchly one of them yet, but I can see the charm. Git only enhances the distributed development model that all *nixes are built upon.

If any, Solaris is the only counter-example to Linux - not FreeBSD.
You know what I love? When some web designer makes my browsing area even smaller on my Netbook. I just love that.
I keep a list of possible projects on Google Docs. Most of the projects are small web-based apps.

A great place to start is to use an existing API with a lot of data (Twitter, Facebook, Google Maps, etc) available to you and do something fun with it.

Another idea is to contribute to a young programming language. Clojure and ooc comes to mind.
Panasonic to create batteries that can power a house for a week
Functional Pearl: Implicit Conﬁgurations
If the effect size is large (i.e. the magnitude of difference between the means of lisp vs non-lisp programmers) the size of problem should be irrelevant.

Writing a "Hello, world" is going to take about the same amount of time in any language that isn't a turing tarpit. At issue is generally some sort of asymptotic advantage, not a guarantee of "language X will always be superior every time always". In fact, for any pair of one easy and one hard problem, I'm pretty confident I could find (or invent, if necessary) two languages that each beat the other for solving one of the problems.

The claimed benefits of a more expressive language generally involve things like better management of application complexity, or greater ability to modify and restructure late in the project. Hammering out a program of a scale such that the programmer can keep an accurate model of the entire thing in mind at one time, and that is only written and never modified, would be more a measure of the programmer's typing speed and the sophistication of the IDE used than anything else.
I know it's not usually cool to post your own articles and all, but I started to write a response to this discussion and it turned into its own article.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1016260
That sounds like a lisp proponent's problem, quoting stats he can't back up.
There are very few examples that you could point to where privatizing a public good has been successful. In general it leads to rent-seeking behavior and slow decay while the current owners try to wring every last possible nickel and dime out of users before reselling the husk down the line to someone else who thinks they can squeeze a few more pennies before the state eventually steps back in to clean up the mess. Private enterprise does exceedingly well in many areas, but infrastructure and sustainable resource management are not areas where it excels.
Give me a break. This is utter crap.

You're obviously using the hyperbole at the start of the article to score points. You go on to impugn the character of the author, while not directly addressing the thesis at any point in your responses. You're relying on people to yield so as not to offend you -- but that's crap, they really shouldn't care. "hurtful" indeed...

What they can argue is that because of a bit of hyperbole at the start, you've implied the article can't make any valid points. It must be entirely wrong. Nice rhetorical trick, but quite insane -- and I argue much more disgusting than what is frankly an understandable gaff by the author at the start.
Both. Between OAuth and OpenID you are bound to catch most of your users (as they would be having either a Twitter account or a Google account).
How confident are you in the company moving forward? What were the circumstances for it going bankrupt?

If you feel confident about the company's future, then analyze it like a normal job offer.

I'd imagine the only concern in joining a company that was bankrupt is whether it will happen again. If you believe this is NOT the case, then why not?
They do different things (federated login vs. access authorization) so focus on which you need most. Note that they are being combined, so hopefully the choice won't be necessary for too long:

http://step2.googlecode.com/svn/spec/openid_oauth_extension/...
My twin brother graduated from UGA last week with a degree in English. Four years ago he had no clue what he wanted to do in life, and three years ago he discovered that he loves writing. Since then he's been doing everything in his power to become a better writer. He's about a month away from finishing his first novel, and from what I've read it looks quite promising. His writing abilities have improved drastically.

My situation is similar in some regards. I've always known that I wanted to start a business, but it wasn't until halfway through college that I even started gathering the skills I figured I'd need. Two years later, I'm a practiced web designer and developer. I'm proficient with HTML, CSS, PHP and CakePHP, Ruby on Rails, JS and jQuery, SQL, etc. I'm lucky enough that I can spend the next 6+ months without a job, living off of funding and savings while I work on my company.

My bro and I have the ability and the work ethic to make most of our dreams a reality, and we're confident in our potential to learn new things at any time. If life's an RPG, why not spend your time upping your skills and gaining experience? I suspect there are millions of other people with this same mindset, including a large slice of people on HN.

But for every person who's driven, there are a bunch of people who aren't for various reasons. All of my friends think I'm crazy for spending so much time reading, learning, and working. My brother's friends are absolutely perplexed at his tendency to stay in and write while they go out drinking. And all of the above + my mom have expressed a lack of self-confidence when it comes to self-improvement... They look at a few lines of code, or a well-written paragraph, and say, "Wow I could never do that." And they believe it.

What's sad is that they're dead wrong.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Treasury_security

"Treasury bills are sold by single price auctions held weekly. Offering amounts for 13-week and 26-week bills are announced each Thursday for auction, usually at 11:30 am, on the following Monday and settlement, or issuance, on Thursday."
The motor assistance feature looks interesting. Aren't bikes supposed to be light? I would guess that the benefit of having a motor and batteries that can provide worthwhile assistance would be counteracted by the fact that there's that much more weight to move around all the time.
I'd interpreted Blub not as any specific language, but rather any language has the capability to become Blub when a developer falls into a particular mindset.

To me, a language becomes Blub when the developer using it loses all inclination to look beyond it; to them there's no other language that could offer anything more. They can see language A that is obviously inferior as it doesn't offer feature X, yet at the same time there's no point in learning language B because they see no use in feature Y. After all, they've managed fine for years without it.
the problem is that all that great video content is only labeled one way. You on the other hand can get traffic by letting those users who search using a different string find it.

You win by getting traffic. Google wins by getting the people the results they were looking for. And the people win by not having to do a 2nd, 3rd Google search, and everyone is happy.

There is a very long tail to Google search. If you don't rank in #1 position for "guitar lessons" you can rank for #1 position for "guitar lessons using sweet home alabama song"

Sure it's not as profitable, with "guitar lessons using sweet home alabama song" you might get 30-40 hits a month, instead of 5000, but that's all you, and a few thousand such queries, will mean 80-100K users coming to your site every month with zero marketing on your part.

Aiming for that long tail is a great way to build up your traffic and site in the early days, until you start ranking higher for those more desirable phrases.

That's what I'm aiming for in this stage with http://styleguidance.com hit up the long tail, build up traffic, content and reputation, and eventually Google will throw a bone our way, and decide...hey there is this great style and fashion Q&A site, that has all the answers for the style category, why don't I give their results preference over those generic blogs to get my users better answers.
I agree with what sandGorgon said.

I'm not defending the Linux kernel in comparison to other FOSS projects, especially really excellent ones like FreeBSD and possibly Solaris. Linux and FreeBSD have different comparative advantages over each other. My point is that both are way ahead of your typical Java shop, and way ahead of Windows, and that FOSS and Linux do not deserve the beating given to them by the author of the blog post.

AFAIK CFS is considered >= ULE2 by most people, and I'm not aware of significant regressions introduced by CFS, so the high degree of conservatism you pointed out in the FreeBSD project wouldn't have been warranted in this case. I don't have the background to argue the finer points of this issue, but it's off topic for this thread, anyway.

Also, you quote me talking about Git, and then say, "I'm not sure what innovations you're thinking of here." I'm thinking about git and the large-scale distributed development model that was pioneered by the Linux community.
Why does it matter?

He seems to be alleging that the author of this piece is potentially responsible for as much misery and destruction as the people who killed the lawyer in the story, and that this undermines the moral legitimacy of the article.

Whether osipov himself condones what happened is completely irrelevant.
Is it really true that it's not cool to post your own articles? I don't think there's anything wrong with it.
It started out that way, but as I said, Git is now by far the leading DVCS, and AFAIK, the Linux community was the first to do DVCS on a grand scale. Furthermore, Git is surely a tremendous improvement over BitKeeper.

That's innovation in software development process.
That's not the worst case though. The worst case is the possibility of ruining your finances because you have no income while trying your startup. And what if you can't find a job when you finally give up?

It's not a decision to take lightly.
A History Modems
Http://www.mbt-shoes-sale.com/mbtchapaazul-p-9678.html
My guess here is that "programmer productivity" is probably the wrong measure. And that by trying to be reductive about that, you will probably miss somethng valuable...

My idea: what if we came up with an app idea and set two teams to it, with the only restriction being the language they could use (one Lisp, one "x"). The "winner" is the one who makes the most compelling app. Which one is most compelling can be decided in some arbitrary fashion -- My opinion is that it'll be fairly obvious (although I have no idea who would win out! Just to make that clear :-))

This doesn't sound so terribly scientific, does it? But I think that's about the best you're going to get if you want to measure the effectiveness of a programming language for a chosen task.
Consumer court forum
Submit your consumer related queries and experiences that you are going through and get advice on how to go about the issue. Find out what other have done in the same situation and their outcome.
Pick an open source project that you like and use. Look for open bug reports (easy to do on SourceForge projects) and then dive into the code to fix the underlying problem.

Or, take an existing project and read through the code looking for bugs. In C code, using sprintf() instead of snprintf() is generally a bad idea (due to potential buffer overflows). You could go through an entire code base and replace sprintf calls with snprintf with the appropriate buffer size parameter.

If there's a project that provides a library of routines, you can write unit tests to verify that they work as documented.

Find a project that's poorly documented, and write up documentation for it. If you document an undocumented API, you'll have to read through code to figure out what it will do. You may find that certain conditions are undefined (e.g., what happens if I pass NULL or a negative value here?). You'll be reading other people's code, learning how it works, and contributing to the overall project.
If you run a site geared towards novice computer users, my advice is DON'T. OpenID is still far too janky of a user experience, you're totally beholden to the providers, which are all different, and the "IE6" crowd just does not get it.