skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think a bigger factor is the amount of prior knowledge required before you can be productive.

In C (and c-like languages) that barrier is relatively low, a handful of concepts and a very limited subset of library modules and you can go a long long way.
You oughta throw this script up on a web server and style the front page like HN. Then link to the story and comments on news.YC
I'd say it's a performance bug. Replacing (format stream "~a" string) with (format stream string) gets rid of the problem.

LispWorks has no performance problem with both forms, though.

The reason is the SBCL pretty printer. If

*pretty-print*

is NIL, then both forms run fast in SBCL...
Google open-source projects that you probably don't know
I was in a similar situation to you earlier this year, in that I was trying to decide between Rails and Django. I ended up going with Django, but I don't think there will be much effective difference to you regardless of which one you choose. Both platforms are good for building web apps and both languages will help you learn new concepts. I went with Django because of the wealth of documentation abailable online and the fact that I have personal resources to tap on Python (although I've used mostly online documentation for that as well).

If you end up going with Django, feel free to email me with questions. I'm sure I can help with some of the "simple" and "stupid" things that can trip up newbs for disproportionate amounts of time.
I am guessing that the parent was suggesting that while it is regressive it taxes consumption and this seemed to be a fairer mechanism in his/her view. The fair/unfair distinction can be sliced in a lot of different ways, but there are some benefits that can be claimed for a tax that is applied to consumption regardless of whether or not that consumer is rich or poor.
From the cancer stick to the cancer bar? Only time will tell.
Indeed. Lisp programmers with 20 years experience are more productive than Java programmers with 2 years experience. That doesn't say anything about Lisp vs Java (or, not nearly as much as some would claim it does).
AFAIK RMS nixed it.
... reinvent the wheel with this suggestion

It's just more anecdotal evidence of just how long it takes to be truly good at what you do. It's not "reinventing the wheel" (you're not using the expression correctly, by the way). Ira also presented it in an interesting way. How often do you get a successful person willingly showing their failures?
Persuasion: herding the digital sheep
I did an analysis of this when it came out. They could have cut half the controls and still had an ample difficulty curve....
choose whichever your friends use, or whichever community you find friendliest, or whichever has the documentation you prefer. technically, either is fine.
Hacker News source: http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc Check out vote-for at line 1351. I'm looking at the code and wondering how it keeps users from up/down voting for the same article more than once.* It must be there but I'm not yet following how this works. Interesting code, though. I wish I understood it better.

*[edit] as this implies that it's keeping a list of votes as article-user records somewhere.
Sony Laptops
Sony laptops are known for their stylish computing solutions. They are built to meet the needs of modern user who demands high level of portability without compromising the functional demands. Sony is an international brand that competes strongly with other major brands such as Dell, Apple, HP, etc. Sony has released many light weight laptops and their VAIO series has received great appreciation from laptop users and it has gained unprecedented popularity.
There are a number of people prattling on about "the rule of law."

"The rule of law" is not an unmitigated good, like clean air. Laws can be and are written to benefit the lawmakers, their pets, and their puppetmasters - as they were in 1990s Russia.
Canada's held a lot of appeal to me since I see a lot of things in common with the UK (home country) only better. Can you tell me more about why it's so bad for finding employment or starting a business?
Stanford has some engineering/comp sci courses available here: http://see.stanford.edu/default.aspx

Berkeley has a lot of lectures available online here: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php

There's also a lot available in Apple's iTunes U (http://www.apple.com/education/mobile-learning/), although it will require iTunes to be installed to access.
You are right that it tends to be slightly regressive w.r.t annual income. However, every dollar earned that is eventually converted into something tangible must be taxed. So, it's eventually flat if earnings are ever enjoyed.

Is flat fair? There's nothing inherently "fair" about a zero second derivative. I'm actually ok with some sort of government rebate for the first N dollars of taxation to reduce the burden on America's (relatively) poor people.
In Summary:

1. Dedicated base of true fans.

2. Technical talent.

3. Catchy name.
A certain amount of AI (sorry Ed ;)) seems to have scored the 'hackerocity' of the links.

That would be a tough act to follow without mturk assistance.
Very impressive commuter story. I'm way too much of a cold wimp to ride a bike in winter.
Indywiki:Visually browsing Wikipedia
25 Ruby Tips from Japanese Rubyists (Advent 2009)
Nobody "raids Social Security" -- please stop perpetuating this silly meme. Social security and other entitlement surpluses are automatically loaned to the government in exchange for non-marketable debt.

The alternative would be a larger deficit, for which you'd sell more UST bonds, which the entitlement programs would then buy since they need a safe place to park their surplus. Voila, you're basically right back where we are now - entitlement surpluses funding a portion of the deficit.

We don't need a lock box, we just need a more accurate definition of deficit.
Because the Canadian government (especially immigration) tends to string you along.

If you're going to do this my advice would be to not invest a single penny into the Canadian economy until you've got your landed immigrant status.

The only thing that will keep them moving is money that is still in the pipeline, once you've done your investment ($750,000 in my case) there is no more hurry since there is no more gain.

And shop around because the delays vary hugely from one center to another.

Please take this serious, I've been through 5 years of immigration nonsense and finally gave up, sold my assets (or gave them away) and moved back to Europe.

Canada is a beautiful country, most Canadians are ok people but the government simply sucks.
I really love their entrepreneurship talks but they are way too short. I wish someone would upload an entire entrepreneurship class.
Interesting. Thanks!
I like that you can make custom tags. Especially the Google Maps tags really seem to make Google Maps easier to use.
Perhaps it's time to cut worthless social programs.

Which worthless social programs should be cut?
Ah, well those that implement the rules are a different matter.

But I know the policy here is pretty similar to the TSA.

I agree though; the UK staff are usually more friendly/sane.
> Please provide any evidence you have.

Only the power of my own ear at Plan9 conferences from people who know a damn sight more about such things than I. I could pull various mailing list posts out, such as the big argument of Rob Pike with Linus but what's the point.

> If the makers of plan 9 were to say "Linux is crap" at least they have the credibility to say so. It is noteworthy that they would never say something so stupid.

From the Plan9 fortune file :
"Linux: written by amateurs for amateurs." - D. Presotto

> And the point is?

That the technical merit of the language doesn't determine it's popularity. So choosing what is the "better language" is rendered pointless.

>Popularity is not everything but it sure isn't "nothing" either.

Yes, I read that back after the edit time ran out and wanted to change it. Popularity and userbase isn't the correct metric for quality.
Tail calls would improve Clojure performance since you wouldn't have to trampoline.

Edit: Not that they would, necessarily, improve the speed of this benchmark that much.
Yeah, there are always excuses.
How much interesting anecdotal evidence will it take for you to get it? Hard work brings success. As to how often I get a successful person to willingly showing their failures? Do a search on Amazon for success and look at all the books there. Not all successful people have made a video that's been uploaded to Youtube. But many have written a book about it.

Maybe I used the expression incorrectly. To me, saying "work more and you'll be successful" a hundred different ways seemed like reinventing the wheel. But you're right, it's off. I should have just said how much time do we have to waste with this suggestion. Go work instead of reading about how much working will help you.
you could extract such generalized advice from almost anything. the article he references, http://www.dailyspeculations.com/wordpress/?p=4249, contains a little more substance but reeks of the halo effect and backwards rationalization to me. it's all good advice but i don't see anything specific or unique to lady gaga's approach which is what the title suggests.
and here is the original non-blog-spam link:

http://www.dailyspeculations.com/wordpress/?p=4249
Yeah, once the public outrage mounts, token actions will be proffered.
A dedicated site (rather than personal blogs that are already in place for this purpose) would be great.

At the moment, I keep a Delicious account to index learning material and look for additional content using relevant tags or looking through others' accounts hoping to find other users like myself - time consuming/inefficient task however.

If you've had this idea for some time, I'm just curious as to whether you've thought of a way to search for (& gather) such material.
Ask HN: What do you think about this experimental twitter app
Since it's harder to follow conversions on twitter, we've created a new twitter app(chrome extension) : Conwitter. This is still on alpha stage - what do you think?

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/bfjidghmenmplpaokfnopnnjefmhlafp
Django doesn't serve static content, is this a major downer or what?
Hi, I'm a long time rails users. I started looking at django a couple of days ago, went through a lot of the simple stuff and really loved how everything worked. The admin is really great in Django and way surpasses what is offered in rails in that regard.

However, when I actually started to work on serving complex webpages. I discovered that DJANGO DOES NOT SERVE STATIC CONTENT. This includes css | js | img files. Even in development mode, you have to create a hack around to do this.

In rails, this would have being a simple placement in the public folder. I feel the lack of this feature is something no modern web framework should have. Do you think a webserver should include the ability to serve static content?
clickable links

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/bfjidghmenmplpao...

http://www.conwitter.com/
How I organize my Dropbox
A lot of good programmers aren't fans of OOP.

Of course, before you can decide whether you're a fan or not, you should understand it. So I'm all for that:)
I'm in no position to invest anything but my good self at the moment but I shall remember this when/if I'm ever in the position to move. I'm a little surprised by the lack of foresight by the officials there in your case. Was that in a particular region (Ontario, Quebec or whatever)? After visiting both a few times, the US and Canada have seemed like great places to move to. Saying that, I've just been to Sweden and Denmark and thought the same about those too. I do question myself and wonder if I'm suffering from 'grass is greener' syndrome or the UK really is considerably less appealing than all these places.
I did Toastmasters and one small tip is to speak slower. It's very hard to pause for one... even two...... seconds during a speech/presentation but a small pause effectively lets your audience catch up and process. Also, fidgeting of the verbal kind: umms and aahs and physical kind: swaying arms, rocking detract the audience from the content of the speech. Practiced speakers move with purpose (don't fidget) and pause, they don't speak too fast.

Watch TED speakers.
Above you wrote,

You are assuming that your votes are actually counted, this is definitely not always the case.

I'm not seeing this. Some of what's on the site is "lazy loaded," as I recall being officially said, but to the best of my knowledge and belief a vote is a vote, and votes get counted. (There are two HN voters in my household, who visit different threads most of the time, and neither of us feel our votes aren't counted.) What would be definitive evidence of votes not being counted (as contrasted with some other possible explanations for what appears to be that condition)?
django opts not to serve static content by choice, but it can easily be made to. adding a line to your urlconf associating the path to your static media with an out-of-box view is all thats required. full documentation and more info about why the framework doesn't serve static content by default is available here: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/static-files/
Believe it or not, horizontal scrolling is not obvious to users -- many (and by many, I mean a number verging on fifty percent) ordinary end users simply cannot see horizontal scroll bars -- and is therefore not a solution to anything, but a problem a designer should avoid creating in the first place.

Horizontal scrolling is a significant enough problem that Jakob Neilsen has seen fit to name it one of the top ten web design mistakes and include a prohibition in his home page usability guidelines. I can tell you from experience supporting corporate apps that the best way to hide something from users is to make it big, red and flashing, but make them scroll right to see it. Circles and arrows and a paragraph explaining that they have to scroll right to see the Egress are of no help at all; they have been conditioned to vertical scrolling only.
Why shouldn't they write about big companies, and why can't they do both? Without taking sides, you can't place the blame squarely on anyone here. Lawmakers make mistakes and corporations choose to exploit those mistakes. Lawmakers obviously need to take corrective action when they identify problems, but these things take time.

There's a difference between what is legal and what is ethical. Surely if there were some loophole that allowed corporations to murder their competitors they wouldn't do so. Corporations, like people, choose ethical behavior over legal behavior all the time. Not only is it reasonable for editorialists to call out those companies who make decisions that could be considered unethical, it is exactly what the press is supposed to do.
I agree with you. I think that is where they failed is to really use the platform to engage their users and went back to the traditional marketing tactics. They made an effort and then at the last minute held back that last crucial element of social media: social. They stopped users dead in their tracks from really engaging and put up barriers (I didn't install, maybe there is some great social functionality hidden away in their application fortress - but again, it's a walled fortress, the old marketing tactics). I think they could do it better, I emailed their marketing department and told them so (no response... yet?). That's why I liked IKEA's the most, it actually engaged users and generated some buzz/pr (presumably without spending nearly as much, just giving away from free stuff).

I guess I have 2 questions for you though
a) how should they run campaigns?
b) examples of well run campaigns on facebook?
It's all true. I used LispM's in a previous life (running the MIT EE department's computing resources in very early 80's) and there's no computing environment within an order of magnitude of the power that Genera provided.

Kind of sad, really, but I suppose it's the kind of sadness that Smalltalk mavens experience when looking at modern OO systems.
Good article, but the BlackBerry of choice right now is the 9700. The camera on it is bloody good. With a little care you can take a photo of an A4 page in 12- or 14-point type and it's basically legible once you've emailed it to someone... I just mention this apropos of nothing.
Interesting. For the massive hit, that better be the prettiest printing pretty printer in the galaxy. OpenMCL didn't choke on it either.

Edit: Well, the last bit is a lie, it did the moment i set

*PRINT-PRETTY*.
Short version of the article: DJ Hero failed because it's awesome.

I kid. It's a fun read. However, in this context calling it failed seems to only apply if marketplace competition is a zero-sum game.

Perhaps we could say instead that it succeeded in the audience of gamers who want a challenging DJ game?
Perhaps they figured out that copying both YC's business and their news site would be a bit over the top?
I really like this article Daniel. It's a very interesting talking point regarding the kinds of discussion that happen on the internet.

Here is a related article about the "Ad Hominem Fallacy Fallacy"

http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html
Unless you're an Arab

What? The USA considers Arabs in Italy to be in need of rescue?
You are sort of right, but not exactly. Objectivists hold that axiomatic concepts are self-evident. That is their "proof". Any other attempt to "prove" them would be nonsensical, since they are irreducible primaries and the basis of all knowledge.

That is distinct from faith (in the proper sense), which is belief in something without any evidence--that is, belief disconnected from reality. True faith is always immoral.
Looks pretty cool, alot like mongo_mapper, but there are some interesting things in there. One of them is chaining criteria, that looks pretty cool.
Maybe this is standard, but I hadn't thought of it (not a marketing type) -- so it was useful for me, at least. They may have only a group of "fans", but I am not convinced that it's "meaningless". They have 30,000 people that are 1) thinking about the product and are therefore somewhat more likely to use it, and 2) social validation that it might be a good group to join.
Except that the rich or even moderately well-off never convert even close to all their money into something tangible while the poor almost always must immediately. The rich don't live paycheck to paycheck. They save, invest, go on vacation, etc. They defer the second taxation (sales/use) to a later date or place -- they have choices where the poor do not. So while it might seem flat theoretically, it becomes regressive quickly.

But we probably agree on more than we disagree. I actually agree that flat isn't fair and that the current situation isn't fair to b&m stores either. I just don't think the solution is to interfere with interstate commerce. States need to enforce use taxes, or if that turns out to be unenforceable, which I suspect it might, rethink their taxation strategy.

By the way, not sure why you were downvoted. I upvoted to correct that. Thanks for the discussion -- it got me thinking about this situation quite a bit.
I actually received this for Christmas and I absolutely love it. DJ Hero seemed to be on sale all over the place too before Christmas. I imagine these kinds of games sell themselves better when played at someone's house than at the store. I just had some friends come over last night who had heard of it but never checked it out and now love it!

It does help that I really enjoy this kind of music over the stand-alone songs found on GuitarHero/RockBand.
I agree. Predefined problems are one way people compare languages; code snippet comparisons are the other. Neither touches the important thing, which is how languages differ as a medium for thought. Different languages give rise to different ideas, which give rise to different programs.

The other problem with studying this question formally is that it is so psychologically rooted that people almost invariably "find" that their favorite language turns out the best.
Types of Weight Loss Pills
These drugs help in augmenting our physical activity and in decreasing the appetite by skyrocketing the metabolic rate of our body.
I can't describe how OOP changed my life. You have to learn it.
I'd say focus on the basics - learn more about algorithms, operating system internals, data structures, concurrency, human-computer interaction, general OO/Functional/Procedural programming principles, etc. Languages are dime a dozen - once you're strong in fundamentals, picking up a new technology/language/framework becomes a lot more easier.
Since nobody suggested it, go to college/university and learn about data structures, lists and processor architecture. It will help you become a much more insightful programmer.
Ratproxy - semi-automated, largely passive web application security audit tool
If she was born in Canada then I'm pretty sure she is technically a citizen and you could go through a bureaucratic process to document it.
"There will be somebody that will contribute code actually, but most of the times this code will be about features you don't want to implement, or will not look like sane enough to be merged without a profound review, or will solve a good problem in a way that is not general enough, or simply the coder does not understand enough of the Redis internals or about your future plans to provide an implementation that is acceptable."

When this happens should the maintainer write back to the contributor and explain to them how they would like to code to be written instead (can be very difficult to explain). Or if the maintainer has time should they fix the code up themselves and merge it in?
Tesseract-ocr - OCR Engine that was developed at HP Labs between 1985 and 1995
370 Passwords You Can't Use On Twitter
http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/Enacted/agencies.html

We'll, I'm not sure we should be spending $12B on higher education. Let's convert that to freely available online courses. If people want the full in-person college experience, then maybe they should pay for it themselves?

We aren't getting our money's worth out of the $4.6B for the Legislative, Judicial, and Executive line item.

$32B for Health and Human Services is full of charges to cover illegal aliens that the Fed can't (or won't) keep out of the country, but California has to (or chooses to?) cover the bill. We can't afford it. Tort reform would help too, if there is anything California can do on its own about that, I'm not sure.

And finally, I'm certain every other line item not mentioned has the usual government overhead, most of which could be privatized to save more money or simply cut to a certain extent.
Thanks. That's a good link too.

I found myself drifting towards attacking the Ad Hominem, probably because it's done wrong so much. But the general point is that all logic critiques are in themselves flawed in some way. For instance, how else would two people discuss something rationally without one person saying something like "If I understand you correctly, you're saying X. But X doesn't make any sense at all to me" To which the other person can yell "Straw Man! Straw Man argument!" like a little schoolkid or they can try to move on towards some kind of reasonable discussion.

Intent and nuance count a lot, I think. And these are the very things that are toughest to do well on the 'net. (sigh)
It's a conscious decision. After all, why would you reinvent static content serving when Apache, lighttpd, and nginx all have solved this problem extremely well? It's much lower overhead to just let the purpose-built native-code server do this instead of bolting it into your web framework.