skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A little premature I think.

From the linked article:

Tomorrow we will (hopefully) finish the long story about the site until now, as a celebration. If you can find the URL for it, go ahead and read it, but please don't tell anyone the URL in the comments if you do find it. The text is not ready yet, we're missing some entries and the pictures are not always at the correct place. But it would be cool if you wrote a comment that you _did_ find the page ;)
Well, perhaps not the official, official, response, but I like that they decided to focus on the positive and downplay the negative.

There's this, which is the blog of one of the indicted TPB founders, that sums up all the inappropriate things that have happened to them recently. http://blog.brokep.com/2008/01/21/punching-bags/
If all the possible choices are basically equivalent, sure. That's clearly not true with hosting companies, though.
Go Babson! I'm graduating this year :-)
Feynman's QED lectures online
I think the fundamental problem is that most of the apps are crap.

It reminds me a little of PalmOS development in the late 90s. Lots of the same thing, badly executed.
What I Learned at MIT
He spoke at Pitt a couple years ago. I would strongly recommend that you hear him speak if you get a chance.
What I miss about Lisp (and why didn't Lisp become Java?)
What you're talking about has been done by (at the very least) Jellyfish.com. They give you cash back by shopping through their portal. How do they do it?
Seamlessly integrate Windows into Linux
Purely functional text editor
I disagree. Scientific experimentation is everything.

Putting significant effort into execution of a bad idea is a complete waste of time.
UK YouTubers given share of ad cash
Table shame eliminator
How not to get fired by your VC
Type inference for The Simply Typed Lambda Calculus
iPhone Car Integration
Yeah keepin' up the good vibes :-)

and thanks for the link anyway.
Depends on what you are after.

Very few scientists are rich, and very few businessmen are good at science.

But if the goal is to make money I would pick good execution over a good idea any day. Just look at myspace ;-)
EveryBlock: A news feed for your block | Django author's new startup.
Adrian Holovaty has created a great framework, and I wish him the best of luck in his new venture. He really deserves any success that comes his way.
Nice article Ron, non-pc & certainly learnt something reading it. Though I reckon this ones a ripper...

"... So I can't really go into many specifics about what happened at Google because of confidentiality, but the upshot was this: I saw, pretty much for the first time in my life, people being as productive and more in other languages as I was in Lisp. What's more, once I got knocked off my high horse (they had to knock me more than once -- if anyone from Google is reading this, I'm sorry) and actually bothered to really study some of these other languges I found #myself# suddenly becoming more productive in
other languages than I was in Lisp. For example, my language of choice for doing Web development now is Python. ..."

Going to submit this post? ~ http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/6f75cfb5a2...
The Blog Writer's Dilemma
I began a lighthearted financial advice story when I stopped myself. What I am really thinking about, what's weighing on my heart, is the loss and heartbreak being experienced by two of our dearest friends.
A circumvoluted way of reinventing an obsolete approach.

I find no value in this "feel good" proposition...
It is a tongue in cheek "code" subtly advocating the use of table where appropriate.
Good execution is important, but only after you have sufficient evidence from a prototype with users that it's worth doing.
I wasn't planning on it. Don't let that stop you though.
Ask YC: 100 year language - is it achievable? 
Arc kind of excites me. I don't think anyone has (at least half seriously) tried to promote a "100 year language" before.

But, for the folks who do NOT suffer ADHD, the idea of some stable base for a lifetime/career time is very very interesting. Just think of the value of practical knowledge that can be built up, and built on, over time. An end to the endless wheel re-inventing that we have today (yes, I love new shiny toys as much as the next language geek, but really, we have to move on now).

Can this work? Will people (perhaps over time) come to accept the non-syntax of Sexpressions ? Love them? (perhaps with some infix DSLs for when its really needed).
That's the goal -- glad you got it :-)

We hope to add several additional absurd coding solutions in the future -- already have a couple in the works.
ClusterMedia Labs, Aveiro :D
Are you fom ist or feup ?
Still no repair for 2 international submarine cables
The Pain of Being Down and Out
Average Programmers
"If all you get from your job is an oversized paycheck..."
Not all people are motivated by money...esp. if it's small chunks of money.
Engaging Users Simply
Why you should start a personal web project
That's easy to say, but sometimes, ideas do matter.

You always have to convince someone of your idea. If you are working at a startup, you have to convince the customer/user that it's worth the time/money. These rules still apply.
Rolling with Rails 2.0 Screencast - PDF and High Quality Video
After the huge success of my "The First Rails 2.0 Screencast and Tutorial":http://www.akitaonrails.com/2007/12/10/the-first-rails-2-0-screencast-english I decided to deliver a full PDF version of the tutorial and the download link for the H.264 Quicktime video of the Screencast.
Nintendo Brain Age's scientist gives up $11m in royalties
Twit.io -- a "social database" built on Twitter
rofl. nice pictures lol
Nervousness can cause accidents just as complacence can.
This Matrix we live in is the chroot jail which RMS created.
Portland Startup Weekend
SIMILE Project
Arts student learning programming. Scored 100% on the test.

Therefore, I should be able to learn programming.
Well look at it this way:

An idea is like a multiplier. In itself it is worth nothing, but if someone with good execution skill can make 1 mill. $ on an idea, and your idea is twice as good (however you define that) then the same guy can make 2 mill. $ going after that idea instead, all other things being equal.

Note though that an idea that is "twice as good is hard to come by, and even harder to sell to the guy that has to execute it - if it isn't yourself.

A lot of companies (amazon for example) have made into the big league without having an idea that is in any way novel but by having great execution skill. The opposite is never the case.
Received pronunciation
How I lost my faith (in Lisp)
Done ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=107683
I can't think of any device that has more than 4 of those, so all 7 would be a bit of a stretch.
"... So I can't really go into many specifics about what happened at Google because of confidentiality, but the upshot was this: I saw, pretty much for the first time in my life, people being as productive and more in other languages as I was in Lisp. What's more, once I got knocked off my high horse (they had to knock me more than once -- if anyone from Google is reading this, I'm sorry) and actually bothered to really study some of these other languges I found #myself# suddenly becoming more productive in other languages than I was in Lisp. For example, my language of choice for doing Web development now is Python. ..."

This was written in 2002FEB and pre-dates the reddit rewrite from lisp to python.
I had to laugh so hard on some of those points, and more when I saw it was almost 5 years old. Give me a large group for presenting things, and I can do it, if I know - live, breathe, embody - the material. I need time to prepare psychically, and then I need recovery time afterwards. I'm the one who loathes group meals, even if they're paid by someone else. One person will say, "Think of it as a free meal!" I'd rather starve.

I'm an introvert. Now let me have time alone please. Thank you.
TripIt is on my mind today. First Joel, then I get a TripIt nalgene left over from TechCrunch 40. You've got a hold on me, TripIt.
I've seen it enough different places to believe it. Here's one: http://www.marketingvox.com/archives/2007/05/14/gmails-users... or this http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/11/09/single-ajax-interface-f...

Here's one about maps: http://manojjasra.blogspot.com/2008/01/mapquest-vs-google-ma...

Just google "[google's product] vs [competitor 1] vs [competitor 2]" and you'll see the same pattern. I think most Hacker News readers can't believe this because most of the people we know (heck, even our customers) are technically savvy. Go pick any random group of non-geeks (like say school teachers, firemen, visual artists, secretaries, parents of college students, etc) and ask them which site they use for email.

Take you for example. In order to use PikLuk, you have to a) have kids, b) have computer/internet, c) know that bad stuff is on the internet, d) be concerned about your kids finding bad stuff on the internet, and e) be willing to spend time screening sites and setting up a whitelist (or however it works). Pretty much all of those skew towards upper-middle class educated people.

Besides, how worried can you be about your kids finding bad stuff if you can't even find a mail program better than Hotmail?
Have they really chosen Level3? I hear Verio, according to ARIN records (resolves to NTT, which owns Verio).
twitter was seemingly fast after the switch, and nearly all day. Now it's crawling.
If you have a bunch of full time designers on staff let them toy with CSS all day long to get the right layout. Otherwise take the PG approach and treat HTML as object code.
At Google, fewer 'Nooglers'
I hate to continue to market my Nokia N95-8gb on here but I love it so much that I feel like people like you are missing out. Based on your list, the N95 has:

1. Check

2. Check - 5-megapixel w/ CZ lens. I tossed out my camera after getting this phone, the pics are just plain amazing. Oh yeah, did I mention 30fps video at 640x480? That and Nokia includes a VGA cable for video AND audio out.

3. Check - Supports MP3/AAC/AAC+/eAAC+/WMA with a standard 3.5mm headphones jack. A2DP support is also there if you want quality wireless headphones.

4. (1/2) check. 8gb is more than I've used so far, it's not a complete music-collection device.

5. Check, Check, Check, Check, oh and it has GPS and FM radio too, you forgot those.

6. Check - Series60 phones have no shortage of 3rd party apps. Installing Google maps took me no more than a minute.

7. Check - I plug in the phone and it simply asks me what mode I want it in - Raw Flash drive, PC Sync, and one other.

Specs are here:
http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_n95_8gb-2088.php

Oh yeah, and I get 3-days battery life minimum. With minimal usage I charge once a week.
Sergey Brin's iPhone Adventure in Davos
A Green Energy Industry Takes Root Under the California Sun
Unfortunately, introverts don't always do so well in captivity. In addition, their habitats in corporate America, known as "offices," are disappearing as walls are torn down in the name of improving communication.

I liked this quote: "many actors, I've read, are introverts, and many introverts, when socializing, feel like actors"
average + luck = Zuckerberg
That already exists, on any element

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/tables.html#q2

the problem, as always, is Internet Explorer.
'Bizarre' new mammal discovered
Anywhere.fm acquired by Imeem
xkcd: Real Programmers
And, as I mentioned in the blog post, how does that work for screen readers and other enabling technologies for the disabled?
Without being able to see this code that was easier to write in Python than Lisp it's impossible to say for sure, but it seems likely that the differentiating factor was libraries, not the core language.
Bringing gaming features to consumer apps
Web's Builders See Too Much Fuss Over Standards, Not Enough Innovation
How Common Lisp sucks
Lego building blocks not happy with 'lego porn'
Lego is 50 years old this year but is not happy with the 'porn' sub-culture. See: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=lego+sex
One of the things I've tried to do differently in Arc is to design the language based on what actually happens in programs, rather than a priori theories. For example, let is for the one-variable case because I looked at a lot of CL code and found 76% of the lets bound one variable. Cond doesn't have implicit progn because I found most cond clauses didn't use it. Etc x 100.

So in reply to the a priori argument that shadowing global function names will cause problems (How big? I don't know. Big!) I reply that extensive experience has shown that it's just not a big deal.

I'll add modules eventually, of course. But it's not a high priority.
Zuckerberg had some amount of luck, but he is not average.
I don't know about this argument. What I'm praising is a way of approaching life. It seems natural that one would oneself approach life in a way one praised.

That seems different from praising something one is merely born with, like being English or white or male. You don't find me doing that.
I agree. I was alarmed, too, by non-hygienic macros combined to the terse names of standard functions. It seems too easy to shadow them (I have to change my custom to name the argument 'obj').

About generics, I expected that the type annotation system (annotate, type, rep) would be the basis of some sort of user-expandable generic dispatching mechanism. In arc0 only macros using it and its handling is built-in to the core, so it's not clear how PG want it to evolve. He's probably putting it off, but it's where the fun is...

Another point I was alarmed is the automatic promotion of non-function objects to a function that tests equality to it (some, all, rem, keep, ... all does that via testify). It is useful since it captures typical pattern. However, on the other hand, aggregate data is 'callable' when used in the function position. I can make a table that maps elements to booleans and I can use it as if it is a predicate, but that illusion breaks once I pass it to other procedures which eventually pass it to 'some'. (In my Scheme implementation, any objects can be made callable. It is handy, but I then learned that to keep that "handiness", I had to give up most of checking if something is procedure or not.)
Building a startup in 54 hours
Facebook Finances Leaked
Chatty Zuckerberg Tells All About Facebook Finances
it's somewhere on N.YC but I can't find it anymore :(
"... it seems likely that the differentiating factor was libraries, not the core language. ..."

Absolutely the libs make the difference. [0] But are there other forces going on that limit language choice and adoption?

I'm thinking of say Perl. Perl has CPAN, which kicks pythons pants , hands down when it comes to the variety of usable tested modules. Is it the Perl syntax or core language that scares off the hackers?

My own pet theory is that it's not the hackers who ultimately decide the language(s) they use at work. Additional libs don't matter as much as the initial (fad) language the code base is written. It is the companies (and PHB's) that hackers ultimately work who determine language choice. In the end hackers just give up.

One more reason to "start a startup". You can choose the best tool(s) for the job.

[0] A friend of mine, a strictly "ANSI-c" man wondered how I could code the rings off him. Then I showed him the Python libs I could choose from. He had to download the source code, compile it, learn how to use it at 'c' level and then do the job. For example regular expressions.
then you're a user?

I'm surprised they're basically re-implementing Trac but with less features. Things that look good and have a good user experience just seem to sell.
Dean Kamen: Multimillionaire Inventor & Entrepreneur
"When Kamen wanted to erect a wind turbine on North Dumpling and the state of New York objected, he seceded from the US. Though the secession has never been officially recognized, he signed a nonaggression pact with his friend, then-President George Bush, and enlisted Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry's as "joint chiefs of ice cream." North Dumpling has its own flag, its own anthem, a one-ship navy, and its own currency. One bill, which Kamen carries in his wallet, is the value of pi. "You can't make change for it," he says with a grin. "It's a transcendental function.""
Sadly, so true. This goes with operating systems as well.
I would suggest that Amazon's great execution is actually the result of continuous experimentation and the accumulation of many thousands of "small ideas." The evolution of their website is famously driven by continuous A/B testing. And I think the S3/EC2 combo may evolve into something quite novel.
Lisp code is written to be easily parsed and manipulated by software. Python is written to be easily parsed and manipulated by humans.

When I first came to Python I didn't need to become an expert Python programmer to understand Python source code without much effort. But I still haven't gotten to the point of looking at a piece of Lisp code and right away having an idea of what it does. Eventually your brain recognizes the patterns (but heck if you write assembly long enough you start to see the patters of common C control structures).

But I think it all depends on the problem at hand. Certain things I can write faster in Java than Python (occasionally static typing and interfaces can make large programs easier to keep in one's head and work with). Most things I can write easier in Python. And a few things I can write easier in Lisp (primarily writing programs that manipulate trees and essentially create mini-languages).
It's true, the familiarity goes down to sharing the same favicon.ico
Libraries are important but code has to be easy to read. You have to be able to easily read the example code for the library you want to use or to read other's code and learn from it. That's what scared me away from Perl and really why I still mainly use Python over Lisp. But each person finds different things easy or hard to comprehend. It mainly depends on your background and what kind of patterns the brain becomes accustomed to.
Does anybody know a library like this for PHP or do I need to start coding?

At the moment my best practice is to use a printf-like function to do escaping for me, it suffers the problems described in the article though.
Since A/B testing wasn't invented by Amazon it has got nothing to do with ideas. But it does have everything to do with execution.
A lot better than using Flex, I'm going to guess.

Okay, seriously, here's my question to startup website developers. Is it wise for us to spend significant time trying to avoid using tables in our often-changing layouts, in the hope that a blind user may have a slightly less confusing experience? I'm not quite going to say YAGNI, but I will say I'm not convinced.

If you're serious about accessibility, good for you -- use VoiceOver or JAWS, truly check your site out. It's a lot more laudable a goal than having your HTML perfectly pass some XHTML validator. Otherwise, I think it's one of those things we can sensibly put on hold until after our B rounds.
For me, the Python module system and documentation wins hands down. I keep telling myself that at some point, I'm going to dive into Lisp and never look back, but Python's module system is very easy to use, and this lends itself to a very nice standard library as well as easy-to-install libraries. Not to mention that every module is well-documented often with real world examples a Google search away.

With Lisp, I have honestly tried to find good documentation on its module system, and I have tried my best to understand the workings of ASDF, but when it comes down to it, I just don't have the time to muck around with stuff that is so much more difficult. The simple fact is that if I need to get something done, it's going to be in Python for the time being, and who knows when I'll get to the point where I'm not coding against a deadline, the point where I'll be able to waste some time really learning Lisp.
Awesome, thanks. I'll check it out.
in lisp you write trees.

in other languages, you write weird things that get turned into trees, seemingly by magic.

other languages seem easier to understand, to most people. this is because they have a lot of experience with all that magic -- it has become a tradition. if you're better at normal languages, go ahead and use them. i don't care. but they are not objectively easier to read, they are much harder and more complicated.
you could also run vnc server on that windows inside the vmware server or on another physical machine.
Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner
Obviously doesn't apply to me, but it looks like a cool opportunity for girl geeks, and guys can go if a woman brings them along.
The fact that your project runs on language X is not a competitive advantage.
Yeah I know the lisp trees thing is something that gets said a lot, but I really don't see how inexplicable the transformation of other languages into trees is. Ultimately in lisp you have the most flexibility in manipulating the tree, but a little study in compilers and formal languages and its obvious that all languages are describing trees.

Objectively easier to read? Thats a strange road to go down. Theres no reason that languages with grammars that generate strange and wacky trees might not suit a human's ability to describe formal solutions better. I think the reason people find languages like C easier to understand is all in the state handling anyway.
I think that this thread is great.

But the last time there was a similar thread, there was a harshly negative reaction. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=60433 Have we as a community grown to accept lightweight, funny stuff?

I hope we have. It seems unlikely to ever take over the front page, so let's try and avoid taking over threads with complaints.
Maybe the reason Google is getting the most mobile traffic from the iPhone is b/c gmail for mobile is still not as good as the built-in Blackberry email client!
the reason people put so much state and local variables in their program is that non-lisp languages get hard to read if you nest a lot, so they have to.

and that is basically what i mean about lisp being objectively easier to read: the notation actually works better. so you can nest a lot and it doesn't get horrible. but also, you don't have to, and then it's about the same.
Domainer companies: from underground to Nasdaq
Where is the evidence that "Python is written to be easily parsed and manipulated by humans", as opposed to a subset of humans with certain (changeable) habits of mind?

It seems silly to demand science in a discussion of programming languages, but you're making some big assumptions about how human mind works. Considering how recent the discipline of programming is, and how fast it's evolving, what makes you think the designers of Python have discovered some immutable laws of the mind--ones that go against common sense, no less? (Common sense being that fewer tokens is better.)
BTW, tell me which of these makes more sense:

(+ 3 4 (- 1 (/ 3 4)) (* (- 9 2) 8 3))

+(3 4 -(1 /(3 4)) *(-(9 2) 8 3))

why oh why would you want a function to be in the same grouping (set of paren) with arguments to another function, instead of grouped with its own arguments?

the less you nest, the less it matters. but it is not a matter of taste which way makes more sense and scales better.
I think people tend to think in terms of explicit state as a default rather than being forced to by poor syntax. I've had experience teaching amateurs and this really tends to be bourne out in what I've seen. Students tend to find functional languages very easy to use until the problems start to involve things that need to change over time and then they can't get past the idea of storage.
In other words, we can't make C++ programmers directly into Lisp programmers, but we can make them into C# programmers and then slowly turn C# into Lisp.