skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: Who's pushing their data to 'the cloud'
Just ordered a new laptop and I've decided to try to push as much of my data online as I can to make life more flexible. I'm just curious to see who here does this and what do you use if so? I am thinking my regular work files, my photos etc. I'd like to keep some files locally as well, but thinking that anything older than 30 days could be stored online - especially if its over a replicated system like Amazon S3.
nothing about s-expressions is bad for using state and little nesting.

something about C/etc is bad for nesting heavily.

Edit: example. both lisp-style versions are nicer. if C has advantages, it isn't in making state work better.

(def avg (numbers)
(/ (sum numbers) (count numbers)))

(def avg (numbers)
(= total-number (sum numbers))
(= total-count (count numbers))
(= result (/ total-number total-count))
result)

function avg (numbers) {
/(sum(numbers) count(numbers))
}

function avg(numbers) {
=(total-number sum(numbers))
=(total-count count(numbers))
=(result /(total-number(total-count))
result
}
Guy Kawasaki: Entrepreneurship is a crapshoot
Anybody here been to one of these dos?

Is it worth doing?
Everything you ever wanted to know about advisors: Part 1.
Most people find infix easier to read. I really think the idea that lisp's advantage comes from having operators in the same group as parameters is ridiculous. To me lisp's power is in the orthogonality of statements, functions (and anonymous functions), data and lists.

You could make a language that had very lisp like syntax but didn't support things like lists and lamda functions and it would equally clearly define a tree. That language would be just about completely useless.
infix and whether to call functions like foo(x y) or (foo x y) are separate issues.

if infix is C's advantage, that is pretty silly. because first of all there is only a limited number of infix operators, and when you make your own constructs they are prefix, but different from s-expressions in the kinda silly way i illustrated.

anyway, you can put infix into a lisp. people don't usually want to because it kinda sucks. unless you're working in certain domains.

infix means:

- memorizing order of operations and remembering it whenever reading code (does == or && have higher precedence? they didn't drill that one into us in middle school, so it doesn't feel quite so obvious as arithmetic order of operations)

- losing characters for use in identifiers

- commas in argument lists

- paren for changing order of operations

- functions that take a predefined number of arguments that has to be 1 or 2

- infix only works with a limited number of built in things, it doesn't scale nicely. i suppose you could change this, e.g. make # a special character, and then you can define infix foo then write arg1#foo#arg2. but like, that's ridiculous. no one wants to do that with functions in general. they only want to do it with math because they hate math and don't want to have to understand anything about it, they just want to use it mechanically like they memorized in school.

- infix is an approach with less generality
I am. What kind of developments do you think are worth mentioning?
I've been thinking about the same thing. There's a Flickr tool for iphoto if you use a Mac and I currently use Furl for bookmarking.
People prefer infix with arithmetic operators. Why? Probably because thats what they know. If your example used named functions it would look like this:

(plus 3 4 (minus 1 (divide 3 4)) (times (minus 9 2) 8 3))

plus(3, 4, minus(1, divide(3, 4)), times(minus(9, 2), 8, 3))

Anyway none of this has anything to do with the assertion that people only use explicit state in procedural languages because the languages don't support nesting well. I prefer functional programming to procedural but that doesn't ring true for me at all. As a matter of fact I prefer functional languages that don't have lisp's bracketing syntax.
Perhaps we should stop paying taxes.

"No taxation without representation".
Never been, but it sounds like exactly the wrong sort of environment for creativity and productivity. Too many people attend; the communication overhead must be insane.

I can tell you that the folks in Seattle failed to launch last weekend. From what I read, it sounded like there were too many chiefs, and not enough indians (or maybe just too many chiefs). I might have gone, but by the time that I found out about it, the event was sold out. It was therefore a bit galling to hear (later, via the blog) that some large percentage of the attendees were PMs, BizDev, and Marketing types.

Anyway, if you view it as a professional networking event, your expectations will probably be more in line with the reality of the situation.
Gmail Has a Daily Limit on Sending Email
"... Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice? ..."

Especially early AM. Yes, recongnise this one. The introversion bit actually helps when you need to get things done because of the skills & effort required to do things yourself align well.
James Gosling supports closures in Java
That sounds about right, thanks; however it depends on the extant client-side javascript reverting to http while you're not connected to the internet, as pmjordan said.
On Blub
Damien Katz: CouchDB Catchup
Maybe the hacker who can produce error free code in Perl does not exist? If even hackers sometimes make programming errors, perhaps most of them were smart enough to eventually figure out they could minimize that problem by moving away from Perl.

Most companies I know actually asked their developers which language they should choose. Typically there is a decision eventually to concentrate on a limited set of languages, but choosing that or those languages is not usually being done without consulting the developers.
I wonder where CouchDB would be if he would have gotten into YC...
BeyondVC: Social networking and ads - who's paying attention?
"... Just ordered a new laptop and I've decided to try to push as much of my data online as I can to make life more flexible. I'm just curious to see who here does this and what do you use if so? ..."

WHY

I do. Any post I make I have squared away. This allows me to make my site the definitive collection of my data. It also allows google to index it. I have control over my own content and if for some reason a third party site wants to exert control I still have my stuff. Unlike slashdot who didn't allow any tools to save posts. Hence I lost from about 1996 to 2002's worth of comments. [0]

HOW

There are 2 ways of looking at this. You can either generate you "stuff" from a single point [0] at your machine, save it and pump it out OR use the web apps as clients and suck the data back via RSS, Atom, JSON etc.

I've been doing a bit of both. Pushing stuff from my blog engine after I've cached it and now I'm beginning to suck up the various websites I frequent. So for pushing out I have:

- OUT: flickr (blog, tags, images) , twitter (snippets), hackerid (hackernews data), links (various links I save including links to hackernews & export to delicious)

- IN: hackernews (all posts every 15m, friends),

- IN TODO: wordy (words I use), spock (tags), colourlovers (colours), librarything (my library), amazon (new books), lastfm (what I'm currently listening to), delicious (new links I find), twitter (friends), flickr (friends, processed images, text, tags)

Now as you can see that's a lot of data. Some of the things I'm finding:

- It's easier to push than pull if you want an accurate copy because you save before you export

- pulling data means you don't have to write firstly the interface to capture the data and simply call RSS

- not every site has an API or good RSS feed

- Linking data together is not easy except by time though you could try to match by friend (ie: friend is on twitter, flickr, hackernews)

- displaying the data effectively is difficult simply because of the volume and complexity of it. A good example of how to do this is http://friendfeed.com Clear, simple and pretty much allows for good reading.

I'm now at a stumbling block with a templating engine I'm using and so I'm pretty keen to just extract the data as Atom, RSS and JSON as individual feeds or a mashed feed by date and write a Javascript based website to avoid having to deal with heavy weight blog engines. Let the data go free and see how people use it.

The key thing to realise is when you are compiling your data timestamp it at DB level (if you are using one) ISO1606 format, maybe add a tag layer over the top so you can get the benefit of tagging across data layers.

It's turning out to be an interesting project.

[0] http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/2005DEC131709.html
Feature update: hystry now shows both newsyc and arclanguage.org by default. To not read arc stories, add arc to the blacklist in your URL by bookmarking:

http://hystry.com/newsyc/follow/?-arc
The 7 Lesson School Teacher (John Taylor Gatto)
"... perhaps most of them were smart enough to eventually figure out they could minimize that problem by moving away from Perl. ..."

It does require dev's have to be better programmers. There are plenty of ways to make Perl code safe. Maybe you have to work harder at it?

"... Typically there is a decision eventually to concentrate on a limited set of languages, but choosing that or those languages is not usually being done without consulting the developers ..."

I agree with the limiting of languages. But I've yet to see languages chosen purely for good technical reasons. [0] And this is one reason I think Lisp gets pushed out.

[0] PHB's dont like you re-writing code from scratch so you could be forced to work with what ever was previously chosen ~ http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles/fog00...
Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo in $44.6 billion deal
Microsoft bids $44.6 billion for Yahoo
WOW. Microsoft Offers $44.6 Billion To Acquire Yahoo
Thought of the Day: When in doubt borrow $$$
Gotta love this line: "Microsoft said it had identified four areas that would generate at least $1 billion in annual synergies for the combined entity."
these kinds of mega deals very rarely work out ...
for as xenophobic as rms is, emacs is one hell of a kinky slut.
Sigh, welcome to reddit
The market is reacting very positively: Yahoo is up almost 60% in pre-market trading, at a market cap of $40B (up from $26B at yesterday's close).
Microsoft is down 4% however.
Micrahoo? Yahsoft? Yicrosooft? Macroyoft?

I'm confused...
The stock market continues to baffle me.

Microsoft is offering $31 per share of Yahoo. YHOO is now trading at nearly $31, up from $19 at the close yesterday.

Why would anyone pay $31 for a share of Yahoo right now? There are two possible outcomes: 1) the deal goes through, and you get your $31 back either in Microsoft stock or cash. No net gain. 2) The deal doesn't go through and YHOO drops back to around $19, losing you about 30%.

Am I missing something?
Because it's pseudocode that runs. Look at how many times non-python programmers have written code examples and someone says to them that "that's almost identical to python."

This is a very easily testable theory.
I don't know... I'm skeptical. It would mean only two really big players left, in some ways. It might also mean the end of some cool open source stuff that Yahoo has been doing lately. Lucene, Hadoop, the Javascript lib - they're releasing a lot of good stuff.

Not really sure what it would mean for both companies, too. They have a lot of overlapping businesses, but very different approaches. What a wreck it would be trying to transition Yahoo to Windows servers.
One thing quite a few people are failing to notice when describing the "huge" premium of 62%: look at Yahoo's historical stock price charts for the last few months or so. Yahoo's taken a real big hit, likely for several reasons that are beyond its control, and it might very well be undervalued. This could be a great chance for MS to give an offer price that Yahoo was trading at a month ago but now seems generous.
The startup I would invest in tomorrow if it existed
"We have dedicated considerable time and resources to an analysis of a potential transaction and are confident that the combination will receive all necessary regulatory approvals."

Uh, really?
Google's Loss Is Murdoch's Gain
Cables connect the digital world
The speculation and exuberance.

This rumor is over a year old; it was also first floated around Q1 last year and YHOO's stock price surged that time too. I seriously thought Yahoo was going to sell that time but they didn't. Perhaps this time is different?
I doubt that Yahoo's board and shareholders will accept the deal. It would be a good way for Microsoft to spend some of it's extra cash, though without getting in to regulatory trouble.
There are some products that do P2P+Server data sharing. I'm thinking Groove especially, but I'm sure there are more.

This allows me to put my data "out there" among all the computers/friends that I share my space with, without publishing the information for the whole world to see. So I have ease-of-access, backups, online/offline access, etc without having to go public. Plus it tightly integrates with my operating system and office software, as opposed to my having to write a bunch of hand-coded stuff.
Interesting move especially in the context of a recent Garner report predicting bad times for Microsoft (http://www.news.com/8301-13860_3-9862322-56.html?tag=nefd.to...). Obviously, this acquisition doesn't help Microsoft improve Vista or Office, Microsoft's cash machines. Also, does this offer imply Microsoft is less confident about their Live initiative? Will Ray Ozzie be replaced by Jerry Yang?
Web-History/Bookmark manager for $10/year
"The third lesson I teach kids is indifference. I teach children not to care about anything too much, even though they want to make it appear that they do. How I do this is very subtle. I do it by demanding that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. It's heartwarming when they do that, it impresses everyone, even me. When I'm at my best I plan lessons very carefully in order to produce this show of enthusiasm. But when the bell rings I insist that they stop whatever it is that we've been working on and proceed quickly to the next work station. They must turn on and off like a light switch. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of. Students never have a complete experience except on the installment plan.

Indeed, the lesson of the bells is that no work is worth
finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference."
Ballmer's Offer Letter to Yahoo's Board
You haven't taken this thought process far enough. In assembly, according to you, you don't write trees. I guess this means you write sequences of commands (procedures), and you store data in a state system. Well, in that case, Lisp gets turned into procedures and a state system, seemingly by magic.

Maybe people have an easier time understanding other languages because they work in the same way the computer does.
MS has nothing but many failed attempts to create web sites. Absolutely no positive experience in the field, all negative, and they are going to run flickr, del.icio.us and many others. No, seriously, these are the pearls of social networking... If this sale happens, that would be a bad day for the 'Net.
Drug testing: The invisible man
You're missing a third outcome where Yahoo shareholders effectively haggle over the price and Microsoft offers $40.
Telex - An ancestor of e-mail lives on
The internet in China
This is exactly the way I've always taken your description of hacking. And your praise for the YCombinator startups usually talks about how hard they work, for example talking about how much code they write in a short period of time while living on Ramen noodles.
because they're SOBER.
Why Twitter's failing
This comic was really good! I would welcome Xkcd submissions if they were always like this one.
Yahoo's Semel Steps Down As Chairman
Google profit miss sparks share freefall - Times Online
A better (serious) solution would be to transform the layout based on the user agent. For IE generate tables, for any other UA generate divs with the appropriate CSS using display:table. Everyone is happy!
The question is whether we can say anything relevant at all by means of self observation. It's very hard to do anything more than just observing existing habits. Even the idea that fewer tokens are better breaks down sometimes. Just look at Perl or complex regular expressions.

It seems to me that what counts is not necessarily tokens of the programming language but rather "tokens" of the mental model into which a syntactical expression is translated. But what are the fundamental characteristics of those mental tokens and are they distinct tokens in the first place? We probably need to look to cognitive sciences to find out more about that.

What is pretty clear to me (admittedly through self observation) is that the brain likes to take shortcuts based on the context we preceive ourselves to be in. We see things in one context that we don't see in others even though they are there. So, basically, we form context specific mental models that filter the world and create a vocabulary of shortcuts that work efficiently in that particular context. Syntax can be a visual cue to invoke that context switching facility of the brain, for better or worse.
What Would a Combined Microsoft-Yahoo Look Like?
I was just casually talking about this with an early ex-Yahoo yesterday. We were just pondering the possibilities for Yahoo in 2008. Holy shit -- what a coincidence.

He said this: A Microsoft deal is unlikely because (when he was there) all the Yahoos hated Microsoft. If an acquisition happens, it'd be hostile and the core guys will jump ship.

I nodded in agreement. But then this happens.
Mostly true but in this case, Microsoft gets a huge boost in search reach and market share and thus a potential online advertising windfall.

Of course, they have a better chance to compete with Google.
Microsoft Offers $44.6B for Yahoo
Microsoft is still dead.
Reframing Digital Entertainment
Revactor: concurrency library that adds Erlang-like features to Ruby 1.9
No no, Microsoft + Yahoo! = Microwho? ;-)
Holly... For some reason I imagine MSFT as the big borg spaceship coming close and just swalloing this smaller ship called yahoo, and casting a large shadow into google and the whole valley area.
Google Culture--A Mix Of Engineering, Investment Banking And The Red Cross
Google Spectrum Auction Update- Open Access Level Reached
naw, they are the 1600lb gorrilla now. No matter how incompetent they are, they have enough momentum and cash to just smash thru obstacles (either buy or try to fail other startups).
Maybe there is a relationship between code being easy to approach and friendly even to non-brilliant-hackers, and those hackers going on to produce libraries that, while they may not be brilliant, do manage to do useful things, thus making the language more appealing for future decision makers, who are then even likelier to choose the more approachable language with more libraries. If there is also a culture of quality, it will keep the non-brilliant coders honest, and from adding actual bad code.
Yes, it's easily testable. Just write a pseudocode switch statement.

That's almost identical to python, but how do you make it exactly identical? Nobody knows.

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3103/

Tested. Found false.

Now how about Scheme? I recently tested that myself by using a case expression, a syntax I rarely use. I didn't have to look in R5RS. I just put the parens where they would naturally go for the most obvious syntax tree, and it worked.

For someone steeped in Algol-like languages, Python will be easy to get started with. Scheme/Lisp takes longer to get started, but once you get it, you don't have to keep going back to the documentation. It just makes sense.
I set the universal constants at the start such that the universe evolves to contain this comment right here.... and I invented the Mac... and Paul Graham.
How did you arrive at these conclusions? Did you use some programmatic analysis of CL source code to report these stats? Which codebases were your reference?
A company that's been declining for 8 quarters in a row and trades at 40 times earnings (before the Microsoft offer) is not undervalued.
17 Ways VoIP has helped my Sex Life
> infix only works with a limited number of built in things

Some infix languages have a mechanism for defining new infix operators.
Reminds me of myself and my brother playing monopoly as kids. He suggested he start with all the property, and I start with all the money.

I was young... 6 maybe, so I thought wow yeah heh I'll take all the money.

Sure, MS have cash from their dying desktop, but they still can't build web apps, or compete with google online. I'd say yahoo are almost as bad.
"In addition, their habitats in corporate America, known as "offices," are disappearing as walls are torn down in the name of improving communication."

After a 1+ year complete-gut-and-teardown renovation, we will be shortly moving into our newly renovated offices which has one scrum room per team. No offices, no cubicles (well there are college library type privacy booths but..) I don't know how I'll adjust. Noise-Cancellation Headphones?
I realize this is an aside, but when I started thinking about learning lisp, I really wished the latter notation existed. After thinking about it, I realized why: it's in essence the Excel syntax, something that a lot of computer-literate people are familiar with.
Smart guy, but he may be too late. I don't think friendfeed is looking for investment.
its a good deal for stockholders I think. If you read the hype Yahoo is not doing to great(which I find hard to believe as they make a load of cash).

I think the combined search powers could be really good.
5 Retro Commercials Companies Would Like You to Forget
Before it was a rumor. This time there's an actual official looking document outlining the offer on MS's website. I think that qualifies as "different."
It sounds to me as though you might want to check out Amazon's Flexible Payment System (FPS).

http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=sc_fe_c_1_3435361_1/102-8843924-...

It allows, as the name implies, for very flexible payment transactions between you and the users, or even between two third-parties where you take a chunk out of the middle.
226,000 Database Records Stolen From Davidson Companies.
it's rare to see such simple, fundamental and spot on analysis in the tech world.

microsoft's bid on yahoo is a perfect illustration of why microsoft is doomed to failure.

how many startups could they fund with $45 billion? 100? 200? 1000? why exactly do they want to be at the helm of a slowly dying web portal left over from the first dot com boom?

i remember someone talking of microsoft and relating their situation to a victim in a horror film. we can all see the monster lurking behind them, slowly creeping in for the kill. when the sea change of personal computing really does come, whenever that may be, microsoft will not be there, they will be knee deep in shit, trying to claw themselves out of the hole that they've spent the last five years tirelessly digging.
It's easy to cheer on Google, as Google as they systematically takes on established vertical markets (to sell advertising) and do fairly well in some of them. Why not root for the underdog, Yahoo + MSFT?