skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always thought OOP was an overused pattern. If you don't need inheritance or information hiding, what does OO give you that can't be accomplished more easily with functions and arrays/hashtables?
Would you fly on an airline that treated their aircraft maintenance the same way? So why would you expect advertisers to run their ads on sites that don't have a person who understands the application carrying a pager?
+1 for Linode
> Isn't it just possible that these Hindley-Milner languages are the next step in the progression that LISP started?

Why do these preclude lisp? It seems to me you're drawing a false dichotomy.
I don't know, I don't really feel like an OS needs to look timeless. It seems strange to me to judge an OS's appearance based on how it will look in 10 years, when hardly anyone will care anyway.
Your comment has even less evidence or analysis than the comments you're complaining about. It's just an angry assertion.

It's ok for people to who are not experts in a subject to explore it. If you feel they're on the wrong track, help them by giving them information.
Mark Suster: What Makes an Entrepreneur (5/11) – Inspiration
"software engineers in general have become too averse to rewriting code"

Fervently agree. I was one of them.

No amount of rewriting is too much - as long as you constantly have a working app.
The difference between Zed and _why is that _why never believed in an engineering ethos.

I wasn't happy that tryruby is so annihilated. The version they recovered still has issues. I tried using it to get my 14-year-old brother into Ruby, and there was too many bugs for him to smoothly guide through it. But at the same time, I know nothing of _why's decision to remove it, and I won't pretend like I know one so that I can bash him. If one day he returns and explains himself and I find him wanting, then I'll criticize him, but I'm not going to spew hate in his direction even if I do.

I'm simply grateful for all the things he gave the community, no strings attached. If the day he'd gone we never saw any of his work again, he'd still have made me a better person, inspired me to try things I'd never done. Beyond that he never had a responsibility to me and so I'm not angry. Hell, I'm still discovering new things of his — the music from his old band is playing through on iTunes now, and it's inspired stuff. (I could further the comparison by saying that Zed writes a lot about practicing guitar, but the music he's made is derivative; _why's music is haphazard and amateur but it evokes something. But that's not fair to Zed.)

As I said, I respect some things about Zed, and if he didn't spend his time being an arse to other people I'd respect him a lot more. But all the time he spends being negative really irks me, especially when it's targeted towards one of the most positive people in the community he left so violently.
Really? I have the exact opposite reaction. Every development in OS X has made itself more subtle. Gradients are lighter, windows are softer... The unified 10.5 theme got rid of what I felt was a kitschy plastic feel in the system, and it created a much more intuitive menu set-up where buttons are a part of the top bar. 10.6 takes steps even further — I love the new Dock menus and hope that's the standard from which Apple develops its new look. Some things moved backwards — the new iTunes got more gradient-y and that's an issue — but in general Apple's design is growing more and more subtle.

The default backgrounds are a little silly, yes, but I think when we look back we'll view it like we view 60s typography — perhaps a bit gaudier than we needed, but it was done in a sense of fun rather than a sense of self-importance. The space-age design feels to me like a wink.
I'm in art school right now, and OS X was my first Mac. Would you mind telling me what you liked about older OS's that OS X doesn't have? I probably missed a generation of great ideas and I'd like to know what they were.
Will it reflow?
+1 for Webfaction.

You get a shell, a gazillion different application types (CGI, Rails, PHP, Django, custom). You can compile Apache and/or MySQL and configure a custom port for it.

Their support is responsive. Service has competitive pricing. I've been with them for three years and haven't experience any outages.
You should check out the Qi language, though the developer who has historically contributed the most to it has departed some months ago. It has the ideas you are looking for (sans message-passing concurrency, I think.)
Steve Jobs in his first meeting with execs after he came back said Apple products had lost their sex appeal. Take a look at the leap Mac OS made after he returned.
I'm also using prgmr. Signed up in June or so, no complaints.
Search Results for "hotebar.com"
I used TeX to type up all my class notes. I found that if you practice enough, you can hammer out pretty much any diagram in realtime. In the meantime, you'll have to condense your class notes by a bit to make up for lost time.

Unfortunately, I don't remember any of the packages I used, but I definitely did trees, timelines, and, of course, equations. Plus, as long as you get the content right, you can fix your typos and other silly mistakes after class ... that's the point of separating content from display!
Today's so called "hackers" don't have the stomach or training for anything involving eigenvectors.
I've been wanting to try out RootBSD for a while now. I'm a hardcore FreeBSD user (I have three FreeBSD servers at home)...
Stalking _why online doesn't turn into Internet stalking. If I hunt a guy down in real life, but all I do with his family is talk to them and see if he was okay, I'm not stalking them. I'm just contacting them.
Well, I'm arguing from the Bob Harper standpoint that untyped lambda calculus is simply a mode of use of typed lambda calculus. That is, untyped lambda calculus is typed lambda calculus with exactly one type.

Now, neither LISP nor Haskell are just lambda calculus... but I look at Haskell as a bigger language that subsumes most of LISP.

But, Haskell has no answer to LISP macros.
I've used linode for a couple of years now and I've been very very happy with them. I use dnsmadeeasy for critical projects even though Linode has their own custom dns you can use, just to keep it separate.
If you want a better looking VLC player, theres blackpearl http://cypohirogen.deviantart.com/art/BlackPearl-VLC-Player-...
SchoolRack(.com) is built on a small cluster of 4 Slicehost servers. I know this isn't a small/personal project but it's given me a lot of experience with them. Of course, they're a great web host and definitely mean it when they say they're built for developers.

But... Linode is (so far) better. You get everything you get at Slicehost, for a little bit cheaper, with a more useful admin panel. Statistics are built in for CPU and Bandwidth. However, the panel is a bit more complex than the average park rangers jeep, so if you're a newbie you might wanna stick with Slicehost.

I say so far because I've only been a customer for about 3 months now. whalesalad.com (my personal site) runs on a small $19 Linode (which gives you 360mb of ram vs 256 on Slice, 16GB of storage vs 10, and double the bandwidth). At the moment I'm powering my aforementioned blog, a couple of WordPress sites, and another Django site. Nginx + FastCGI for both the Python and PHP side of things. It's holding up like an absolute champ.

Linode also lets you play around with other distros easier. You can basically cut up your allotted HD space and boot whatever you want. You can cut it in half and play with Fedora/Debian, or whatever you choose really. For experimentation, that's good.

This is a great performance breakdown/comparison of the popular VPS' out there - http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison

Finally, if you choose Linode, help a guy out with this referrer link :D - http://j.mp/linodesalad
If Michaelangelo assaulted the David himself and didn't believe that it was wrong to do so, I guess I would be a little less angry than when someone else did it. But I would still think he was a dick.
Linux developments
Perhaps we are violently agreeing? ;)

Here's the thing. There are two concepts here that people mix up quite a bit: the scientific method and the politics of science.

The scientific method is about 1) Abduction. Collecting data and finding patterns. 2) Deduction. Forming the patterns into possible rules, and 3) Induction. Showing through reproducible experimentation that the rules work (or not) and then extrapolating that to the universe at large.

There's not much argument on the scientific method. A lot of philosophers point out it's many problems (induction, for one, is a thorny one. And there's the problem of instrumentation) but in general the scientific method is the light that lets our species see in the darkness. The reason you get into an airplane and trust it is because these three processes have been followed. The reason medicine is fundamentally different than, say, physics, is that in some cases strong correlation between data and induction is all you have -- there is no hypothesis holding it all together (or a very weak one). Different sciences and different subjects have various levels of maturity in all three of these areas. It's important to understand that when talking what the status of those sciences are.

The politics of science is all about consensus, funding, peer reviews, press coverage, political causes, etc. The actual practice of science, because it is full of people and not demi-gods or robots, has a lot of politics built into it.

The interesting questions for any discussion of science are 1) what is the maturity of the science in all 3 of these areas, and 2) are we talking about the scientific method? Or the politics of science? (either one may be important, but you have to know which you're discussing)

Over the years schoolkids are taught some sort of propaganda that mixes all of this into one big pot and stirs in a little hero worship. (I think the hero worship is well-placed. Scientists are some of my greatest heroes). Scientists are these really smart guys who move from one great idea to the next as new information comes out, and science is the process of being the most "enlightened" by being up-to-date on whatever the current consensus is.

But a funny thing happened on the way to nirvana -- Thomas Kuhn started looking at how the work of science gets done. And he found this huge gap between the legend of how science gets done and how it actually gets done. There's really too much there for me to do justice in this format, but as an exaggeration suffice it to say that scientists have turned out to be as human as the rest of us, and consensus is probably very much a lagging indicator of where the actual science is leading. Lagging by perhaps as much as decades.

So when you say "consensus is what separates science from philosophy" or that "science is all about consensus" I find I must interpret that as "the politics of science" for it to make sense to me. But then when you start using that consensus in some sort of functional context just like the real work of science, it doesn't fit any more.

It's probably me. I'm just confused.
I truly don't get what this is trying to demonstrate?

I mean, I could write a one word web app:

dwim

(Details of the standard library implementation are left as an exercise.)
"There's also quite a bit of ad-hominem character assassination going on, even in this piece. I find that folks who have to result to labeling and name-calling usually are insecure about their position."

Yes, the amount of derision, even targeting scientists who merely hold an opposing interpretation of the data, is troubling.
No one likes AWS? You can turn it off whenever you're not using it.
It's a pretty stupid line to put in a license. What the hell does it even mean? Without defining "evil" in the context of the license, it could mean anything -- who gets to decide what constitutes "evil"? The original author? In that case, it's like making the license immediately revocable for any reason at any point in the future.

It's understandable that Google, or just about anyone else, would reject a license with that sort of vague language in it.

There's a time and place for whimsy, but a software license isn't it.
http://www.volumedrive.com/
They have real servers for reasonable prices.
Or some kind of linode/slicehost, if you don't need too much.
mendeley.com
Looking over these things, I realized why the Mac platform is not properly metal. Its volume only goes up to 7.
The Future Of "Ubuntu Software Center"
Well, polymorphic lists are one thing that are somewhat awkward. Other thing is that a small change in some part of program (say introducing an additional parameter, or having to use IO or state) can require massive changes in rest of the program, or a PhD in category-theory.
I got kind of excited when I realized I needed a semaphore in the web app I'm building. That's fun.
I feel old.

Up until a few years ago I had original, shrinkwrapped Copland (what was to be the new Mac OS, pre-Next acquisition) demo disks. That isn't to say it was working code or anything, it was more of a promo "here's what it's gonna look like".

I'm so glad Copland didn't work out. Funny thing is, I actually have owned only Windows machines since about Mac OS 7 or 8, so I essentially haven't gotten to use the Mac since it's actually had the more modern architecture.

I do have an iPhone, though, so I guess that counts. :)
+1 for prgmr.com
Oh man, major memory lane: "its not mu fault, replace existing file?".
I think telling and living are held in tension. Say you are male, riding on a crowded bus with a small child in your care. A woman boards and you give her your seat. That's living a value.

The child then does a "why chain" on you. Why did you stand up? To give the lady a seat. Why did you give the lady your seat? Because it's polite. Why is it polite? Etc. Explaining your values to someone else can help you reexamine and refine them. Perhaps you didn't expect to exhibit them in public, but another core value (being honest and respectful to children) causes you to. Making them known also holds you to them.

I have worked for companies with very strong and sensible values that don't advertise them. That's a fine choice, but not necessarily better or more pure than articulating them to the world.
Probably because it is running on a Pentium? Perhaps it is an emulator or a Linux theme?
Paranoia and ad hominem don't do your argument much good.
No offense taken; I appreciate the opportunity for reflection. While composing the above, I noticed that the theoretical scenarios I was constructing were becoming harder to justify, so I admit I cherry-picked a more clear cut one. It seems like justification is a bit of a slippery slope.

There's so much interconnectedness that you sort of have to essentially pick how close you're willing to get to something you don't agree with. It's pretty difficult to have nothing to do with X for most values of X.
Well, they discussed it. In public. In peer reviewed journals. You know, this mail is not the only place where climate scientists talked about tree rings.
AWS starts at around $60 a month, a basic VPS (Rackspace, Linode etc) starts at around $10 a month. With the VPS, you wouldn't have to spend time turning it off and on to save pennies, and you wouldn't have to learn all the EC2 oddities (Elastic IP, EBS, Ephemeral Storage, AMIs, Availability Zones, KeyPairs, etc).

For someone looking to get started, a normal VPS seems easier and cheaper.
Is this an entry for the "most unlikely submission that makes it on hacker news" competition?
Whether inheritance is an essential quality of OOP is IMHO debatable. This leaves us with data abstraction and polymorphism.
My definition of metaprogramming is writing a program that manipulates itself. I'm not sure I would call any arbitrary code generator metaprogramming as this would cause the "self" in my definition suffer a severe identity crisis :-)

But yes, C++ templates as well as Lisp macros are compile time metaprogramming. All languages that have eval and/or allow function/method bindings to be replaced at runtime allow runtime metaprogramming.

Since static typing guarantees certain invariants it cannot be compatible with a program that violates those invariants at runtime. You could still decide to consider it metaprogramming when the program manipulates itself only within the limits of those guarantees, but when you look at what real world runtime metaprogramming is being used for (for instance in Rails) you will realise that these things (e.g method_missing) would not be possible within the limits of a statically typed language.

[edit] Lisp makes both compile time and runtime metaprogramming exceptionally easy due to its homoiconic nature.
I've been very happy with Rackspace Cloud, and especially with how well it scales down -- as low as $10/mo. It's not quite all the flexibility that Amazon does, but the API's nice and getting better, and for personal stuff the smaller size is a big win.
i think the main issue about mongodb is its license, AGPL 3, and they should think about it. from feature pov, it has lots of small niceties but real big thing about mongodb is auto-sharding and this feature is still alpha.
The first favor is answering my call?
I use linode for work and think its great. I used to use webfaction but switched because they were too inconsistent. Poor performance sometimes and they were always responsive to deal with problems, but they happened every couple weeks.

For home use I have an old Thinkpad thats way more powerful than a cheap slice somewhere which cost me $150 on craigslist + 12kwhrs/mo. I used to use an old desktop, but the laptop will actually save me money on my power bill in about 2 years, by using 17watts instead of 100. Saves carbon too since we get mostly coal power here.
Rackspace bought slicehost who charges $20/month.

Linode's lowest VPS is $20/mo:
https://www.linode.com/signup/

Am I missing something? I'd love to find a decent VPS provider at $10/month.
I started with a host called "kiloserv"...I haven't yet met anybody else who has heard of them (saw them in a sig on /.); they were fine for something that I wasn't too concerned about (all I really needed was an off network box for testing my network setup at work). Kiloserv was $10/mo for a VPS, it never went down on my in ~2yrs, and it worked...

That said, the bandwidth didn't seem too special, the company had 0 support of any kind...didn't offer a console, or DNS hosting (that I know of), and on and on and on...they worked, but not for a business.

After them, I switched to slicehost (per a recommendation here) and they were/are awesome. Totally professional, good bandwidth, $20/mo, everything I wanted. I recommend them 100% to anybody doing a semi-serious project.

After a recent comparison here, it sounded like linode was also really really good, so I bought a VPS from them ($20/mo again) to use a development server/sandbox. The linode box seems to, honestly, be outperforming my VPS from slicehost with benchmarks on AB (although this could just be a slight disparity between my httpd.confs on the two boxes).

Slicehost or Linode are outstanding +1 to them.

My next box will probably be a colo'd box with prgmr. ($50 for 1u including power and bandwidth is really enticing to me).

Slicehost/Linode are what I use right now...
Most interesting summary. The one thing that's kept me from trying out linode is slicehost's support for whole-slice backups. Linode doesn't have backups, right?
Chunkhost.com is giving away half-gig instances right now.
Clojure 1.1 feature overview
In peer reviewed journals that they kept free of not just "deniers" but anyone who wasn't as fervent as they. One journal was excommunicated (my phrase) until half the editors resigned. For another that was "too important to lose" (direct quote (or rather paraphrase, see below) from memory) they applied enough pressure that the offending editor resigned.

Really, now. What you're saying might have flown prior to the release of the CRUtape Letters, but not after.
What nonsense. And would you like them to get off your lawn as well?
I'm a huge Stephen Fry fan but I can't bring myself to read his twitterings. I much prefer to think of him as Jeeves, not somebody who expresses oneself 140 characters.

Similarly, House was a huge letdown :-)
Maybe I've got too much respect for creators of things. When somebody who's made something entirely on their own decides to nuke it, I don't get at all upset at them. Particularly not if it's a matter of them deciding it's not good enough. (We all know the "Good is the enemy of great"; I stand behind that philosophy a lot.) But I completely understand where you're coming from, and why you'd be upset. I still would call you immature if you spent time ranting about it while making comparisons to how much better you were, though.
Thanks for your help, I appreciate it. Unfortunatelly English is not my mother tongue. I've applied your suggestions to the site.
Gadget Patrol: 21st century phone
FTA: The main cause seems to be increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Call me when you're sure. Extraordinary calls to action require extraordinary proof.
That's such an asshole attitude to take. We'll ignore that, yes, of course it was edgier when Borges did it, Borges was one of the greatest inventors in the entirety of literature, and that Borges did it for a major literary piece instead of a free online ebook, and that the execution of this one was quite a bit subtler and not at all pertinent to the main part of the book. Just: Who the fuck cares about edgy? What matters is that it made somebody's day, made them think, and appealed to them enough that they were willing to write a story about it later. Isn't that enough?

Your sort of deconstructive critical snark was vastly edgier when I did it at the age of thirteen on gaming forums. But I don't stalk you on Hacker News reminding you of that when other people tell you they like your comments.
Productionize usually means "rewrite".

Oh ok, you meant something quite different than I thought, and I don't disagree.
This is a joke, right? And the upvote, too.
Thanks for the warning. Now I've changed Einstein to Plato.:)
Metaprogramming and syntax don't go that well together. If you're going to manipulate programs effectively, you're going to be operating on source trees, and it's easiest to do that when source code and source tree are of the same form.
Rackspace Cloud is probably what he's referring to. Smallest instance is ~$10, no bandwidth included though.
Recursion is very hard for most people. Lisp is quite simple, yes, but FP is an entirely different style of programming that takes a lot of people time to learn and get used to.
There's an over-abundance of information. All that's left for HN is angry, emotional quibbling by those who lack the basic qualifications to evaluate the data and science, even if they were interested in actually doing so.
I usually don't think about performance.

I was wrong then. We're not doing something similar :)

Like pg said somewhere (update: http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html, /15 Jan), the goal isn't optimizing but keeping performance mediocre as you scale up.

Where did he use the word, or the concept, "mediocre"?
At times, _why projected an image of the "troubled artist" archetype--either "real" or part of the _why persona, no one knew--and if memory serves me he'd had a couple disappointments recently and left some downbeat tweets.

So, while I can't speak for randallsquared, at least some of the people wanting to know if he'd "suddenly died" or some such were just being too tactful to say that they were afraid he might have committed suicide--in which case the deleting all his online stuff would have been completely plausible.
Fast Lunch Ideas