skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The idea seems good. Have you thought about asking someone with experience in web design to make a more streame-lined and less clunky version of the landing page?
I think you are on a good way in terms of keeping it simple but in my humble opinion the execution isn't quite there yet. I'm not that competent of a designer myself but I'd bet someone who knows his stuff could improve the page quite a bit.
"The obvious interpretation is that he's saying something like "the usual definition of productivity is flawed and myopic, and gets in the way of realizing the power of Lisp". "

Just the fact of him sayng something like that doesn't make it true. More logic, supporting arguments and evidence is called for to support such claims. Besides He isn't offering any (lucid) alternative definition. Just rant after rant , over a period of years. Which makes the whole post (and link to it on HN) very content free (imo, feel free to disagree and vote accordingly).

Yes , sure Lisp is cool. There I said it. But hey Linux is cool too. So is C. So are a lot of things.
No, I don't think it's _that_ bad. Maybe a good comparison is with the UK circa 1920. The empire is in steep decline, other powers are on the rise. But during that time the UK was still one of the better places in the world, just not the center of it any longer.
I didn't downvote you, but word to the wise: complaining about getting downvoted without anything of larger value to add to the conversation almost always gets you downvoted more (and any parent comments as well that you made in that thread)

When I first started I spent one thread basically telling the rest of the room to go jump in a lake for downvoting me. I lost about 7 karma points that day, so I don't do that anymore. :)

A more reasonable question is: I do not understand what I said that was so bad. Would somebody please take the time to explain to me why you think I was downvoted?
Interesting, I looked at your comments and it seems you're right.

Even this one was voted down, even though it is about as on-topic as it gets.
Learn another language. Not just because PHP isn't a particularly good one (IMHO), but because learning new languages inevitably teaches you new ways of thinking about programming.

Ruby is good for OOP.
He's right though, look at his comment history.
Watch the 26th Chaos Communication Congress
A bachelor's degree will make things a bit easier, and a PhD a lot easier.

But remember, you can move anywhere you want in the EU like, tomorrow, with no fuss whatsoever. Is the grass really greener on the other side of the Atlantic?
Sigh, why should amazon do anything wrt taxes except minimize costs to their customers, maximize profits, and be legal? What they are doing is legal. Their competition is doing the same thing.

Why do reporters continue to blast big companies for "not paying taxes" instead of blasting the government for not requiring that the companies do?
Savon - Heavy metal Ruby SOAP client library
> The way the TSA is actually doing things, however, is simply to ask "what did the last terrorist do? OK, ban that."

Though what he did was walk onto a plane with a block of semtex. They should try addressing that before restricting in-flight entertainment and toilet breaks.

I actually caught a flight back from Schiphol to Heathrow last week. Heathrow's security on the flight there was annoyingly thorough as usual (shoes off, belts off, laptops out, liquids in a clear bag with 100ml limit... none of which would have helped this case!). The Dutch security was different: hand luggage through the scanner, no special treatment for laptops, liquids or shoes - much more agreeable. Then they put you through a "security scan", one of these new millimetre wave scanners that are supposed to detect items strapped to the body - like drugs and guns. I've been wondering did Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab have the PETN strapped in his underpants, and the fancy new security scan failed to pick it up? Or was it in his bag, where the X-ray didn't see it?
You want hacking? Here.

// Hackerocity on a scale from 0 to 10
// for each entry on the front page of hacker news
// Hackerocity determined by edw519
//
Hackerocity = []
Hackerocity[01] = 1 ; // Ira Glass on storytelling
Hackerocity[02] = 9 ; // Lisp OS: what has been lost: Kent Pitman
Hackerocity[03] = 0 ; // They Killed My Lawyer
Hackerocity[04] = 7 ; // MIT Open Courseware - Free Lectures
Hackerocity[05] = 6 ; // Facebook marketing: one of the better campaigns I've seen
Hackerocity[06] = 10 ; // JMatch: Iterable Pattern Matching
Hackerocity[07] = 10 ; // Regular-expression derivatives reexamined
Hackerocity[08] = 1 ; // Sorry, Shoppers, but Why Can’t Amazon Collect More Tax?
Hackerocity[09] = 3 ; // Schneier on Security: Separating Explosives from the Detonator
Hackerocity[10] = 9 ; // jQuery Plugins
Hackerocity[11] = 0 ; // Has Hackers News Become Less About Hacking?
Hackerocity[12] = 8 ; // If You’re Nervous About Quitting Your Boring Job, You’re Sane
Hackerocity[13] = 10 ; // Hello HN, take a look at my new (beta) app BonMp3?
Hackerocity[14] = 7 ; // Why the web economy will continue growing rapidly
Hackerocity[15] = 8 ; // Ask HN: How can I move to USA?
Hackerocity[16] = 7 ; // Ample SDK - Open Source GUI Framework
Hackerocity[17] = 9 ; // Palindromes (Clojure vs. Common Lisp)
Hackerocity[18] = 3 ; // Incredible paper sculptures - many cut from one sheet of A4
Hackerocity[19] = 9 ; // If You’re Nervous About Quitting Your Boring Job, Don’t Do It
Hackerocity[20] = 5 ; // Why Does Facebook Want to Suck the Fun Out of Unfriending?
Hackerocity[21] = 10 ; // Machine Translates Thoughts into Speech in Real Time
Hackerocity[22] = 0 ; // Ask HN: If there was a bury/upmod brigade on HN, how would we know?
Hackerocity[23] = 8 ; // How to commit brand suicide
Hackerocity[24] = 10 ; // The Pmarca Guide to Startups: product/market fit
Hackerocity[25] = 0 ; // [dead] Ajax on Rails
Hackerocity[26] = 5 ; // One year of Redis
Hackerocity[27] = 2 ; // New wheel for your bicycle: The Copenhagen wheel
Hackerocity[28] = 0 ; // In 2010, Demand For US Fixed Income Has To Increase Elevenfold... Or Else
Hackerocity[29] = 2 ; // Phil Greenspun debunks Malcolm Gladwell on airline safety
Hackerocity[30] = 10 ; // Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition
//
TotalHackerocity = 0;
for(i=1;i<31;i++){TotalHackerocity += Hackerocity[i]};
//
// Yep, TotalHackerocity aint what it used to be :-)
//
i agree with your main point (python isn't lisp because it doesn't have macros). but the language nerd in me can't resist commenting on your example from django. that's a very special case. it's hard to think of any other package that uses that approach. rather, the way people solve problems in python that you would solve in lisp with macros is by late binding, introspection, and higher order functions. none of these replace macros entirely, but together they can be hacked into a solution.
4 or 5 is plenty, once an article hits the front page even if it is rubbish it tends to pick up enough upvotes to stay there for a long time.

The dynamics of the 'new' page and the 'front' page are completely different.
The "stay in your seat during the last hour" rule isn't completely frivolous. Bombers arriving in the US are likely to wait until they are over their destination city because it will make the bombing more dramatic. The goal is fear, not deaths. Also, people tend to procrastinate suicide bombings.

Obviously, stewardesses telling people to stay in their seats won't prevent bombers from detonating their bombs, but it may make their behavior more noticeable to other passengers.

I'm very surprised that there still isn't some screening machine that detects all explosives. How hard can it be? It'd be much nicer to just walk through a big sniffing machine than all the other ineffective rigmarole.
I can do everything I need to with PHP and MySQL, however I'm currently working on JSP, and planning to learn Ruby and Python.

If you want to learn object oriented thinking I would recommend Java or C++. Fortunately I was already proficient at C++ before I started web programming so I already had a fairly firm grasp of object oriented thinking.

As for learning programming languages, to my way of thinking the more languages you know the better, both from a job standpoint and from a flexibility standpoint.
yeah I kinda agree, I wrote a post yesterday about the emails we used and a copy of our press page from launch, thinking it would generate some discussion(hell you guys asked for them on the other thread), and maybe get tips on how to improve those for us and other people, and that didn't even get a single upvote.

And that post, just like all other posts was solely for HN, so why should I bother writing this stuff up and restoring an old press page, if I don't even get a single comment or upvote out of it on here?

It's like the twitter/facebook promotion we just finished, I was going to write a post with all the numbers, what worked, what didn't, what prizes are the best bang for your buck, the goals behind it etc etc. But now I'm not so sure.

Why? Because it'll take like 3-4 hours to put up a decent post with all the data, pics etc. So why should I waste my time, if there is a 90% chance the post won't even get a single upvote?
Why should the tax I pay on a new computer vary based on how it is delivered to my home?

Sales taxes are a tax on the merchant. If the merchant is not located in a state, the state has no jurisdiction over the merchant.

Do you really want the nuts in charge of {Texas, California} (depending on your political views) to have the power to pass laws binding on your state? Besides, if a state really wants the money they can simply tax their citizens (which many states do).
Assuming he speaks itialian and english the EU comprises the UK and Ireland for him. About the only two places in the world that are greater desaster zones than the US at the moment (well, apart from Spain and Greece maybe).
any idea what the original source of the maps is? I found the newscientist article here:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227041.500-wheres-th...

but I don't think they created it and it doesn't look like it links back to the original souce
gogoyoko.com
Yes. I would want a site that is better than a basic categorized list. You can have some kind of filtering and recommendation system for content that is interesting to you based on the tagging information and tracking of other people that have similar interests(think netflix). Ideally you should be able to create some kind of playlist of things that you would like to see and add it to that. The site should also track progress. Good luck though, I think it would be a welcome addition to the web.
Not any more.

Got to do my good deed for today. Now back to work.
91 Ways to Become the Coolest Developer in the World
http://www.techquark.com/2008/11/91-ways-to-become-coolest-d...
Personally I think that the front page seems a little bit dark. I'm not sure what your intended mood is but I think that you should rethink the layout. Perhaps looks at other music selling sites to see how they lay out the page. Its a good idea to be different, but you can still learn a lot from comparing with other sites.
Also, a sales tax is probably the fairest known model of taxation

My understanding is that it is one of the most unfair. Poorer people will lose a greater percentage of their income to sales tax than richer people because certain consumptions aren't elastic to increasing income. Now some states won't collect sales tax on items deemed "necessities" but the classifications can get tricky and imo just leads to inefficiency.

Like you said, sales tax can be considered a form of regressive tax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regressive_tax. How is that then fair?
That is quite an extensive list and probably includes just about everything you would ever need to know. Personally I like to keep it short and sweet: The coolest developer in the world is always learning and is ready to try new things and new approaches. That summarizes probably 90% of those 91 points.
Scientists want planes to fly in formation like geese, to save on jet fuel
I think (in this case) whining provokes downvotes. As simple as that.

This is just a discussion forum for $Diety's sake. Getting downvoted to -4 isn't the end of the world. It is just a number on a webpage which has no impact on your success in the real world.

Just try to improve your points/writing. That's what I do when I am downvoted to oblivion and I care about upvotes.
Your comment history seems to be mostly 1s, so I'm guessing a passing philanthropist has taken matters into their own hands.

But for what it's worth, the most likely explanation for a small number of downvotes on each of many comments by a single person, including apparently innocuous or unremarkable comments, is one or two individuals holding a grudge and expressing such by mass downvoting. I've had that happen to me on another site, before an (extremely unamused) admin intervened.

I seem to recall, but can't find a reference, that abuse of the voting system in that manner is actually monitored by the site admins here.
Sadly, this isn't even your average reporter. The author, Randall Stross, is a Professor of Business at San Jose State.

What I don't get is why he's angry at Amazon. Sales tax is levied against consumption on a buyer. It's just that states can force sellers in their own jurisdiction to collect it at the point of sale. For purchases made out-of-state, states already have a mechanism for collection: use tax. I find it a bit disingenuous that he doesn't even mention this. Why force the burden on companies when it's a tax against people that they're not paying.

Shouldn't he be angry at all the shoppers who aren't helping "avert layoffs of schoolteachers and firefighters and, yes, professors at state universities" by not filing their use taxes?
"improve my PHP abilities to OOP"

Reading that made me laugh. PHP's OOP is extremely flawed (among various other things, like their inability to universalize the $needle and $haystack argument order: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=37088), so using PHP to "improve your technical abilities" wouldn't really get you anywhere except having a better understanding of PHP.

I think that what you're trying to accomplish really needs to be defined in terms that aren't so broad. Especially these days, "technical skills" is such a vague term that it can really be applied to anything.

You don't need to have a complete understanding of some silly framework or whatever in order to still be considered an excellent developer in many ways. For example, you could write a stunningly elegant and clever mathematical algorithm in C without using a function more complex than sqrt(). (Or maybe you could write a more efficient sqrt!)

I think that learning something like that might improve your understanding of machines and could, indirectly, improve your understanding of "web apps and services"—that is, understanding HTTP, statelessness, and so forth.

tl;dr Figure out exactly what it is you want.
With only a little of the local language you can get by pretty well in Amsterdam, Paris, Frankfurt... Any city with a significant commercial/financial community. It is actually even more difficult to learn Dutch in Amsterdam because as soon as you open your mouth, they reply in English. Outside of the major cities yes you might find it difficult, but not insurmountably so.

There are Italian-speakers in Switzerland too.
If it happens structurally it can definitely have a negative effect though.
very good idea, I was thinking on same lines this morning.Count me in if you need any help building it :-)
He's using vectors with clojure and lists with lisp. Why? It looks like he's concatenating vectors, which is O(n), with clojure, but cons'ing lists, which is O(1), with lisp. As much as I like seeing clojure's performance get critiqued, this comparison doesn't seem fair at all. Why aren't the implementations identical?
If either organization employs 10 or more Americans, you could get a Green Card very easily with an EB-5 visa.
"If it happens structurally it can definitely have a negative effect though"

I agree. But I am not sure any organized downvoting brigade would slip by the admin folks for very long. And I am not sure that (downvoting brigade) is what is happening in this case. ( I was reacting to the "And I get downvoted for that" bit. A comment like that gets downvoted because it (a) is content free (b) sounds like angsty whining.

Imo comments about the injustice of downvoting aren't very effective on HN. By and large, if you make a good point, the community's opinion overcomes arbitrary downvotes.)
to build complex web applications you need to learn javascript, I would also take move along to ruby / python / erlang as well as/instead of php.

then I would start bashing out applications as quick as you can, stuff with a smaller scope and a clear end so you can keep them public for quite a while and learn how to reduce/remove maintenance cost.
Building Super Scalable Systems in the Ambient Cloud
Yeah, that, and the title is totally misleading. There can't be thousands of coolest developers in the world, dammit!
Hey Paton,

The quickest way to become a better programmer is to take a real world problem and then to solve that with a technology that is as far removed from the ones that you are already familiar with as you can imagine.

Since you're already in to the imperative mode why not try a functional or a logic language for a change to see what the other side of the street looks like ?

The interesting bit in that approach is that when you return to your current languages you'll look at them in a completely new way.
I interpreted Hacker News to be news for hackers, not necessarily news about hacking.

Edit: I see that sli posted the same thing farther down. My bad for not reading the whole thread first >.<
Maybe we could have a trial week where a bunch of representatives prune out anything that doesn't conform to a set of rules that enforce a strict interpretation of what hackers news should post. Then the following week we can discuss or vote on whether the guidelines should be changed.
I'm very surprised that there still isn't some screening machine that detects all explosives. How hard can it be?

I think the state of the art technology for odor-based explosive screening is "dogs".
As an Italian, he can very easily learn French, so Belgium, France and Switzerland (both the italian and french part) are also open to him.
Looks interesting. Great job! I agree though that the signup form on the homepage is a bit intimidating. But if you are deadset on keeping it there may I suggest you move the "How It Works" section to the top of the page and maybe integrate the benefits portion that is currently above the signup form in it. That way the band/musician sees all that at least before be immediately presented with a signup form.

Looks interesting though and good luck. You are right the music industry is ready for a change!
Microsoft Architect Insight Conference 2009
But you haven't answered the question. Why Mathematica and not Lisp + some libraries? Or (+ Lisp Libraries). Again, there are many organizations willing to adopt any language that will give them some extra leverage. Lisp just doesn't appear. The explanation that the average programmer just isn't smart enough is easily demolished by pointing out the C++ (and APL, and Haskell) users. So either we're all missing something or the elephant in the corner is that Lisp just isn't that useful for commercially relevant problems. Which is not to say it's a bad language, but that it's not the "secret sauce" everyone's looking for.
http://www.khanacademy.org/
The economic troubles in the U.S. are shared by most developed countries. If you look at national debt or large numbers involving the Treasury or Fed it looks like we stand alone. However, any country that holds or trades with USD is in it with us. Whatever happens to the USD will not cause irreparable harm to the U.S., its people, its natural resources.

If you need context, go find a 100 year old American that is blessed with a clear mind. They can tell you of much tougher times. My grandmother is 99 and can recall with absolute clarity the U.S. of the 1920s, 30s, 40s. I write this post from my iMac, in a large warm house drinking a cup of good coffee.
I was in your position not long ago. I'd recommend using Ruby on Rails, which will teach you a lot about OOP and the MVC framework. There are some similar frameworks for PHP (like CakePHP), but Rails' established community and abundant documentation make it a better starting place.

Javascript (http://www.w3schools.com/js) is an extremely important part of the web today, and jQuery (http://www.jquery.com) makes it more manageable than ever before. It's not difficult to learn -- you can make a lot of headway in a single day.

If at all possible, work alongside other people. You'll learn a lot from their habits and their code. And work on actual projects. Learning for the sake of learning is much more difficult than learning while you're building something.
Between starting with Ruby on Rails or Django with Python, is one better to start with than the other?
Well, obvious to some, I suppose. The point is that people with an entrepreneurial bent should be familiar with business environments around the world. When you hear that Russia is a country ruled by an ex-KGB/military mafia you may get a false picture of a Don Corleone style of doing business: live and let live; pay up and you're OK. This is quite false. A story like this may save somebody from making a very grave mistake.
I immediately glazed over. Here are a few tips.

How it works and features should be more visible parts of the homepage. You haven't sold me at all but you're showing me a signup form. Give me the info first.

Eliminate all but the most important 3 or 4 bullet points. Controlling distribution sounds pretty similar to keeping the rights, simplify your fans' access to music is assumed from your mention of social networking sites, and most won't care about school music programs. Bullet points are like bumper stickers. Too many and they lose their effect.

Your headline being outside the main container looks strange.

More whitespace (blackspace?).

That user agreement textarea doesn't need to be more than three rows.

Increase line-height on the /About page.

The underlying point is that it doesn't look established enough for me to trust you with my music. I know it's beta, but consider allocating resources to design (including the "how it works" and service comparison graphics).
Top 100 tech media companies, picked for their innovation and creativity in 09.
Cool project. Name-wise, I'm not sure a play off an offensive term is much less offensive than the term itself, though.
Since he's posted this a couple of people have already changed the numbers enough for the discussion to be pretty muddled.

But I've definitely seen this kind of behaviour with others as well, specifically with: vaksel, unalone, cperciva and a bunch of others. The interesting thing is that in the long run it always balances out.
What Startups Can Learn from Lady Gaga
Mr. Fry imparts social insights about tech products as few others can, with a droll wit and imaginative use of metaphor - fun to read for the writing style alone.
Someone in the thread mentions a plan that seemed inevitable at that time to convert GNU emacs to the guile flavor of scheme. Obviously that never happened. Does anybody know the story?
This seems pretty standard for relatively high-budget Facebook campaigns. Create a group, maybe an app, buy ads with a meek little social feature, and watch high traffic * low conversions turn into a meaningless number of fans.
The top 10 VC stories of 2009
Cholesterol: Good or bad?
Another work-more-and-you'll-be-successful suggestions. Along with Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and countless blog posts.

How thick are we here at Hacker News? This isn't news. We know the value of hard work. It's what our parents have told us since we went to school. Why do we have to repeatedly reinvent the wheel with this suggestion?
Using NHibernate order-by attribute to sort names history