skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"You haven't seen XCode, Delphi or MS Visual Studio, where, for example, you can jump to the definition of a symbol with "one click""

That's an old feature. It used to be called "ctags" and even console-based text editors support it.

"Finally getting to the point and you say "and all that"? Btw, "all that" includes unification of code and data - something no other language provides, let's say, idiomatically. This is an amazing feature, and in fact Lisp macros are Lisp macros thanks to just that - unification of code and data and symbolic nature of the language."

Lisp's problem seems to be that, until you know how to use macros and code/data unification, you can't be easily convinced of their merits. It takes a considerable commitment to learn Lisp before you can reach that level, though.
In my little thought experiment, I'm implementing the interface to the blatting service.
For example, what is the correct status code to send when a new resource has been created?

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes

201 Created
The request has been fulfilled and resulted in a new resource being created.

This isn't to say you shouldn't document how your service responds to requests, just that there are response codes you can use that are widely understood.

If you want you can respond to everything with 200 OK and require clients to parse responses to understand how your service handled a request, but again this is the same thing XML-RPC gives you.
Unflagging now that the title is changed to something closer to the actual article. It's a real pain when people use the title of an article to insert their own editorial opinions.
The difference is that your example uses a URL as input and outputs a JSON blob. The URLs still need to be constructed somehow and the output needs to be parsed if you want to do anything useful with this service. To compare apples-to-apples:

>>> import urllib, simplejson
>>> person_id = 1
>>> person = simplejson.loads(urllib.urlopen('http://my-fake-service.com/people/%d.json' % person_id).read())

Now you have a data structure you can work with. But you've just traded a nice parameter-passing syntax for string building, and you're parsing JSON manually. Of course, you could wrap all of this with an API, and you probably should, but XML-RPC does a lot of this wrapping for you.
No sense at all in this article. Git can be used functionally identically as svn is and STILL be better than svn (externals, speed, better rename support).

Git is not a source control system. Git is a tool that allows a company to define near ANY source control system. It corporate america's dream tool once they figure out they can have anything with git.

This just sounds like a guy who can't handle branches and uses arguments about a system which requires them instead of learning how to do branches.
I wish you could see who upvoted articles...
Great idea, but IMHO it would have been much nicer if people had created new sheets based on their location and then added the Info, so that it would have been much easier to browse.

Or course, location+skill wouldn't have hurt either.
In the current format, it could potentially become unmanageable and not very user friendly.

I'm just going to create a sheet for SF-BayArea see if people adopt it :).
It was just that the submission was leading to a placeholder landingpage instead of a game; so I looked it up on reddit to see if anyone had a mirror. But, now, the submission is leading to the game. Odd.
This bears a striking resemblance to the HN posting on antiobjects: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=981738

(representing a pac-man game by having ghosts detect a "smell" of pac-man that diffuses through the maze)
i want this on my iPhone
Top words (so far): Business, design, marketing, technical, skills, web.
From my limited experience in the freight and export business, I am skeptical that they managed to design a collapsable container and reduce weight without compromising the structural integrity of the container. Standing in a shipyard and seeing a 40-foot container almost being thrown around is awesome, but I can't see this standing up to the rigors of the day-to-day life of a container.
The return of the mainframe: Back in fashion
+1 for "Sharepoint is a wiki", even though that wasn't the main topic of the article.

I've known for ages some things that Sharepoint does, but I've never been able to wrap my head around what it is (what's the unifying theme, what's the boundary between Sharepoint and other systems it integrates with, etc).

People and websites tend to call it a "platform for leveraging organisational collaboration" or something equally content-free. Wikipedia calls it "a collection of products and software elements that includes, among a growing selection of components, ..."

Saying "it's a big clever wiki with bells on" seems like a better starting point.
The quotes say no such thing! Apparently this is evidence:

While Apple values and appreciates vibrant public commentary about its products, we believe you and your company have crossed the line by offering a bounty for the theft of Apple's trade secrets. Such an offer is illegal and Apple insists that you immediately discontinue the Scavenger Hunt.

Confirms absolutely nothing but that Apple has trade secrets.

The information you are willing to pay for, such as photos of a yet-to-be released product, constitutes Apple trade secrets.

Confirms nothing but that Apple has products that are yet-to-be-released.

Apple has maintained the types of information and things you are soliciting—"how it'll work, its size, the name, the software," as well as any possible details about the product's appearance, features, and physical samples—in strict confidence."

Confirms absolutely nothing yet again! Seriously, these trade secrets could be for an iPhone upgrade, a new iMac or a set of new and oh-so-trendy headphones!
Yoda?
This is of course the Ant Colony Optimization paper from 91 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization
Just tossed my info on there. Not actively looking for a cofounder -- mostly because I don't think it's likely I'll find anyone with the right skills/temperament -- but it's worth getting out there anyway.
>Fundamentally, I see corporate objections to git entirely as a lack of established workflows and repo server management tools

I don't even understand that argument. To me, git feels EXTREMELY enterprisey. You can't USE the tool without defining a workflow, even on a simple project. That to me screams "bureaucratic control wet dream".

Git lacks in the tools department on windows, and in the ability to make "workflow specific gui's" to operate on it. Fix that, and Git wins for 90% of cases vs SVN.

Git is scary at first, but after you use it in the correct configuration for your task, you're like "oh, another tool, one that works pretty well" and you move on. I still feel dude hasn't seen the correct configuration for his task and want to point him at the configuration design bubbles in progit.
Is it actual confirmation? No. Is it the closest thing to confirmation yet? Yes, but it's about as useful as having a canister of gasoline to put out a fire.
Kodak sues Apple over iPhone-related patent infringement
While there is widespread belief that physical processes can solve NP-complete problems, there isn't actually any evidence. Physical processes can get stuck in local optima, which is another way of saying that they fail to solve the NP-complete problem you hand them.

Here's an account of someone who actually tried one in real life (it takes a couple of pages): http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf

Personally I see no reason to believe this isn't true of all physical processes that "solve" an NP-complete problem.
Skype settles class action suit; won't steal your unused credit anymore
I like SVN when working for various companies, as it's a hell of a lot easier to explain to some of the choice employees than Git. That said, I personally consider Git to be the far superior system if you invest the time learning how it works.
I am URL forwarding to this spreadsheet from http://hackerbrain.com/
>"I think being in IT and in my 50's is a tremendous advantage."

I believe you, but can't help but wonder if you find that potential employers see it this way as well?

Some companies (Facebook comes to mind..) are reluctant to even hire people in their 30s, as they are not as receptive to "free pizza/code till 10pm" working style. Once you've reached the kids & mortgage stage, unless you're a genius or an executive, your choices are severely limited as far as startups go.
Git might not be suitable for environments that require, say, robust GUI tools on multiple OSes but that has nothing to with it being distributed. Git didn't invent DVCS after all and its (indirect) ancestry traces right back to 'Corporate America' - BitKeeper is a commercial product used exclusively in corporate settings as was the system that inspired it - SPARCWorks/TeamWare.
Sorry, I still don't understand why their is so much hype over the "3-D Wonders", it's nothing revolutionary. "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" came out 9 years ago with comparable details for example. Plus it wasn't a knockoff of the Pocahontas storyline.
I think one could make two strong arguments that Google leaving China makes good business sense, and is not just a warm-fuzzies thing.

First of all, whoever broke into Google’s servers and collected confidential data from them made Google look like a chump. Given that Google’s long-term business plans seem to involve convincing lots of people to entrust even more sensitive data to Google’s servers, Google has a strong interest in not looking like a chump.

Second, if the PRC government has veto power over what search results Google can show, and Google’s ability to compete depends on the quality of its search results, and the government favors Chinese-based companies that it can control more closely... perhaps the deck is just so stacked against Google that it would get more ROI doing business in a less authoritarian country.
Being Chinese (Taiwanese to be specific) myself and knowing many Chinese people, I have to say it's more likely they are speaking the truth than not.

This comes down to a matter of national pride: most Chinese care deeply about the pride of their nation, and the new generation (the ones that grew up under the current regime) seem to be incapable of separating the Chinese identity from the Chinese Communist Party.

So, when criticism falls upon the government, even perfectly valid criticism, there is a perceived need to defend the government - since in their mind the government is the people. This false association causes a lot of problems, since it removes rational discourse.

The new generation of Chinese have an immense amount of national pride, and IMHO this is going to be the biggest problem we face in the future.
You're thinking logically - try thinking like a politician who has a lot of farmers in their constituency, or who belongs to a party where the first primary is in a farming state, or needs another politician from a farming state onside
You don't have to convince me that incremental development at the REPL is a good thing. But what you're talking about is package management, and Java is perfectly capable of creating an uberjar that contains all dependencies. Even if LispWorks does it better, we're talking about differences in convenience rather than differences in capabilities.

Lisp is adequate in many ways, and excellent in others. But a lot of descriptions of why it's excellent focus on what appear to be trivialities. Maybe there's some sort of gestalt at work here, where the sum of these minor differences is greater than its parts, but if that's the case you're doing a really poor job describing it.
Ask HN: Best or most effective SWAG you've received/given at a conference?
Have a big trade show in a couple months. Trying to get creative with some SWAG. We've done t-shirts, stickers, etc. in the past.

Just wondering what others have given out that's been effective (I know its hard to measure that). Or, what have you received at a show that you actually kept or remembered?
Technical entrepreneur seems to be most wanted character class.
Corporate America still needs to [...] see the progress of a product over time as a single line – not a bunch of branches...

"Corporate America", insofar as it is a singular monolithic entity with no cultural difference, should realize that their product IS the result of "a bunch of branches", and that git, over subversion, is a tool to help people work more efficiently because it realizes this, and helps you manage them. It changes version control from an annoying thing that you have to deal with, to a tool that helps me not worry about various details of version control, but instead deal with the problem at hand - the product. The sheer existence of git-stash sold me, and while I'm handy enough to use "svn diff > changes.patch" with "patch < changes.patch", git just is generally a better tool for that.

The biggest benefit of git, over svn, I'd argue is actually branch merging and merge conflict-resolution capabilities. Subversion 1.6, however, is supposed to take leaps and bounds to catching up to git (vs. the 1.4 server install I currently work with). The version numbers in git are less intuitive than svn, but I feel thats okay, because tagging is useful in git. The real win for git, is that git works with you and your workflow, and doesn't impose as much workflow as subversion does.

( git-svn absolutely your friend. )
Wasn't this posted here in 61?
Intentionally unprofessional: Design techniques that could backfire
For Large Publishers, Yield Optimization Is Over – Time For Supply-Side Platform
I'm Chinese, and I've a lot of Chinese friends, and from my experience I'd say your friend actually changed his mind, as opposed to simply realizing he could speak freely.

There is an absolute dearth of real factual information on issues like Taiwan, democracy, and free movement within China , and practically everything comes from the government. The people generally distrust what the government tells them, but a lifetime of propaganda and misinformation takes it toll anyways - it's entirely likely your friend believed every word of what he said before.

I know many other Chinese who stubbornly refuse to face the facts even after they leave China, and are presented with a smorgasbord of verifiable, authentic facts. I know some who still continue to dismiss all of this as American propaganda - some people can't be helped.

I'm glad to see that your friend at least was able to figure things out for himself, instead of falling back to the bad Chinese habit of taking every criticism of the government as a grave insult to their race, and feeling the knee-jerk need to defend.
It's like those popups that are made to look like system menus. This one just doesn't happen to pump your computer full of malware.
What freaks me out about this parasite is that it causes behavior changes in humans even in the asymptomatic cyst stage and is so widely prevalent. Ugh.
Back when I was writing a lot of Common Lisp (CMUCL), the image system didn't seem like a win over files, but a misfeature necessitated by the bug of taking 20 seconds to start a program. Images are inherently messy; after you've changed a running system two or three times, it's even odds whether it will actually be the same as a system started from scratch with ostensibly the same variables and functions, in my experience, and there's no good way to be certain, besides restarting. Since you're going to have files of source code anyway, using runtime images just creates the opportunity for your two official copies to get out of sync. This isn't worth the few times you could hotfix something instead of restarting the system.
The Moment of Content Creation - There is no "later"
Ask HN: Where do you host your startup web services?
Where do you host your startup?

I am looking for a solution that is cost-effective.
I want to keep costs very low to start,
but I can pay-as-I-grow for increased resources.

Imagine a URL shortening/redirecting service (e.g., bit.ly)
That's not what my startup is about,
but I will have that kind of traffic.
I need to handle lots of hits to my web site,
but each requires minimal processing and bandwidth.
Top requirements are 99.9% uptime and low latency (< 20 ms).

A typical cheap/shared hosting service is not acceptable,
even when just getting started, because they all suffer from downtime
or "brownouts", where response latencies get slow if there's a traffic spike,
of is some random user on the shared service is doing lots of database queries.

My application is currently built using Apache, MySQL, PHP, and C.
I also need SSH access.

To process each "hit" to my web site, I have rather minimal requirements
for CPU time, memory, database size, and data-transfer per hit.

What really seems to be the challenge (when just starting)
is getting a guaranteed 99.9% uptime and low latency
without paying a lot per month for dedicated hosting.

(I confess that I don't have any experience with Amazon EC2,
so I don't know if that would be appropriate. If you have any
practical experience with the time/cost to get up and running
on "the cloud", I'd love to hear from you.)

Any recommendations, suggestions, comments, or advice
would be much appreciated.

You can reply here, or by email.

Thanks in advance,

David Jones, PhD,
Pairwise Affinity

dxjones@gmail.com, http://dxjones.com

djones@pairwiseaffinity.com, http://pairwiseaffinity.com
This spreadsheet is going to get seriously diluted with every bastard and his dog. You might need a password or something. Louis Gray's tweet is doing the rounds: http://bit.ly/info/hackerbrain
They will actually be my heroes if they did this and there is no tablet.
White Paper Success Summit 2010
you attract quality leads and grow your business with educational white papers? If you’re a marketer who wants to unleash the power of the mighty white paper to reel in qualified leads, White Paper Success Summit 2010 will show you how.
MeetInnovators interview: How Derek Sivers Sold CD Baby (as sole owner) for $22M
The typos in this article really kill it for me.</complaint>

Valid points about lowering prices in industries with middle-men, but this is hardly a Robin Hood argument (steal from the reach with force who stole from the poor with force) as no force is involved beyond simple market forces of supply and demand.

Actually, we'd see even lower prices across all of these categories if there were less regulation protecting the incumbents and less overall dollars in circulation causing inflation.
So then, sending a 302 redirect in this case would be incorrect? That is how most web forms operate, and the web is RESTful by definition.
This is from May, and 37signals just made a fairly large change to their authentication system (I think its called Launchpad). Their password recovery system now works differently than described in this post, so I doubt they're still storing them plaintext (thank goodness).
Makes me think so much more could be done with profile pages on HN.
Skiff Reader
Google and China: What's the real story, and where does it go from here?
Grrr, there are too many false positives for me to be able to find a case using Google (i.e. people trying to take guns through security, theft of guns in checked baggage, etc.).

So this is going to have to a matter of trust: trust my memory and distrust notoriously anti-gun cities/states. Or not, it's your time, money and freedom on the line.

I should also note that the usual point of arrest is after the victim accepts his checked baggage, when he later declares the firearm at the baggage counter when restarting his journey.
While, as a founder I'm loving this idea, I'm pretty sure an omnipotent startup diety could point out 10 where the founder ran it into the ground for every one that succeeded. Michael Dell's comeback has been a noteable failure. The problem here is a sample bias, as it doesn't make for the sort of story that Jobs/Apple has going. That's a real-life movie of the week right there.

There are probably plenty of cases where non-founders were instrumental in success too, in fact Google may be one. Schmidt has undoubtedly been instrumental in Google becoming the juggernaut it is.
Visit Canada | canadaimmigrant.org
A Week in Nowhere for Better Code?
Glad to see your app is using Schulze!
I'm sure there are 'ageists' out there but given Dave Winer's lengthy and well-documented history of what can only be described as a persecution complex, it's difficult to take this very seriously. The man has been beset on all sides by everyone from Google to business partners to conference speakers deliberately trying to give him a heart attack.
A friend of mine keeps asking me to dump Lisp and "Get modern" with C#, and I try to explain why I prefer Lisp, but he won't accept it.

It was Paul Graham's essay that encouraged me to try Lisp in 2005.
Yeah, it's not that people think he's clueless because he's old. People think he's clueless because he's clueless, and has been writing posts that makes no sense with increasing frequency. This feels like an excuse.
The MO of a bootstrapper
How a spare server turned into Twitpic, the $1.5M+ a year startup
The implementation (http://github.com/bradbeattie/Election-Web-Service/blob/mast...) was a bit of a bitch, but it works. I might have made it more difficult than I needed to though, as that web service was my first Python app.
Very cool web-app. Interesting use of local db and iphone-specific html stuff. props!
i really like nokigiri and have used it extensively in the past year, though not in the past few months. if someone asks me which parsing library to use at this point i recommend it. however i have two critiques.

1. it didn't work with jruby (it may now but wasn't working a few months ago when i was using it).
2. the attitude toward hpricot (another ruby gem for html/xml parsing) when it was released was one of mocking disdain toward hpricot and it's creator, _why. instead of a 'hey thanks for the great html/xml parsing library, but here's one that's a little better'... it was more of a slam-down, and it was a bit much.
Skype stole some of my money a couple of years back - using their unused credit scam. I have a very simplistic view on honesty and integrity. I have always tried to be honest in all my dealings and I expect others to behave in a similar manner. I have never traded with Skype since their theft. I have also actively advised others to avoid them like the plague.
From one of Dave's responses in the comments:

Next time you think a 54-year-old is washed up, remember what you just said.

Not only that we have a lot more money than you and we know a lot more too.
:-)

I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that smiley meant he was being ironic, but it was still too funny to not point out.

Based on the fact that he can still get so offended by something like this, unlike edw519 in this HN thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1052618), it seems Dave hasn't reached his full cognitive maturity as of yet (not to mention that elsewhere in the comments Dave admits that he is unable to enact change or persuade others on any meaningful level). Given this, I'm willing to bet there are at least a few people reading his blog that are younger, have more money, and have more knowledge than him.
So it's crap only because it's aspx ? You don't know how the code looks on the server side, and it's not fair to judge a webapp by the resulting html alone.
Yeah, however the point stands that it proves they are willing to act this way about things that are too important to treat said way.

Goes to show even good advice can be taken too far.
>(d) Excellent system stability with no random crashes at all.

This is interesting, considering one of the main reasons Reddit switched from Lisp to Python was because it was crashing often.
Just wish there was a online directory similar to the one shown in Google spreadsheet, that is as simple, intuitive and cleanly designed.