skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." - Philip Greenspun

"Including Common Lisp."

Well, my understanding is that most Common Lisp implementations are actually mostly written in Common Lisp. For that to be possible, you first need to bootstrap the implementation, and to do that you first write an "informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp" in C or something, and when you've done that, you're self-hosting, meaning you can produce newer versions of your implementation that are more formally-specified, less bug-ridden and faster. Eventually you have an accurate and fast implementation of Common Lisp, which is a pretty well-specified language.

So there.
It's not a business until you hit that phase where you realize no one cares about the toy you built in a week's time

You might think its a toy, and I might think its a toy, but if it solves a problem for a customer, then it is not a toy. Your lawyer doesn't need to labor a full week to write a letter worth hundreds. My dentist didn't need to drill for forty hours to charge me $770. There is nothing magical about computer programs which makes them worthless until an arbitrary amount of Red Bull cans have been consumed.

I wrote the first iteration of my software in eight days. People bought it. It has pretty much gone from there.
both companies have very different business models and are going after different aspects of the same overall market. it's like comparing intel with microsoft. one is after the information and how to host and provide it and the other is after the device that will display that information (and the personal media). if it wasn't for apple's closed strategy, everyone would be using google voice to make free phone calls and send txts. btw, this is going to happen. Apple will be selling the iPhone thru google.com/phone one day.

besides the internet is large enough for both companies to coexist.

disclaimer: long AAPL, long GOOG.
I see something like this and can't but think of how in the world it could happen.

I really can't see a person doing this; there must be some wonky code that filters mail. All to make things more efficient.
You're still doing exactly what I just said ("attempting to paint critics of [of what Mozilla is doing] as not valuing freedom") with lines like "what is more important to you: performance or freedom?"--as if any dumb move can be absolved by saying you did it for the sake of freedom.

I don't know what to make of most of your second paragraph, as I've made no argument about performance. I'm talking about the simple fact that Firefox users cannot view certain content that is being deployed on the web today (h.264 in <video>) because Mozilla has chosen to use the size of its user base to "encourage" the adoption of Theora. This is not freedom. This is stupid.

if mozilla starts accepting patented or proprietary technologies

Nobody is saying they have to. There are a half dozen other comments in this thread explaining better than I could that Mozilla could support other codecs without tainting their own products if they chose to. The problem is that they are choosing not to and that hurts users to no good end.
> He kept saying, "But so then you add that new number to the list!"

I think if you get down to it, this reveals an interesting point. I think it suggests that the logic behind the proof wasn't made clear enough, that it's not a constructive proof, it's one of the first sophisticated proofs by contradiction that a student sees. Since you aren't disproving a concrete thing - you are showing that some hypothetical number doesn't appear on some hypothetical list - it can seem very unsatisfying.

Also, why is it so ridiculous to try to add a missing number to the list? There's an intuition that you're fighting with a proof like this:
0: Create an empty list
1: Find a real number not on your list
2: Add it to the list
3: goto 1
Obviously this process never terminates, but I think you have to think pretty hard before that bothers you. After all, what is fundamentally different if I replace "real" with "integer" or "rational"? (rhetorical)

Finally, students are comfortable enough talking about the "set of reals". Showing that there's no such thing as the "list of reals" reveals that there must be some difference between a set and a list - but at the time this proof is presented, has that distinction been made sufficiently clear?
Let's Toss for It - A Surprising Curb on Political Greed
You could always buy Kindle books and strip the DRM from them. Unless they're the Topaz format, then you apparently can't.
How will they screw themselves by making Mozilla irrelevant?

It's not like Mozilla in any way had any influence on their websites becoming popular, nor will they be affected at all if browser user agents change from Firefox -> Chrome.

Interesting leap of logic.
Excuse me while I take 5 minutes to not give a shit..
The two groups were constructed for the experiment, to emphasize the difference. If you're saying that powerful people in the real world are divided into two groups, that is your own opinion, not something that the study concluded.
Beware Developers: App Removed From App Store At Request of Competition
The OP seems to be confused about his relationship with the company he sued. He uses the phrase: "if you want to sue your company" and "my company" to refer to his customer. They were not his employer, it was in no way his company - they were a customer who hired him in bad faith when they had no money to pay him.
staunch,

So, that's my blog post. The "Buy a Kindle!" links were very much a last-minute addition. My thought process was really more one of "It'd be nice to steer more cash away from this vendor who pissed me off." The "Oh. There is delicious irony in getting the $100 I was 'owed' by referring people away from B&N" thought came embarrassingly late.

My intent in ranting about B&N's poor customer service was to shame them into fixing it or losing customers.

By a strict interpretation of your words, yes, I totally realized that my blog post might get attention and decided to capitalize on it. I don't expect a whole lot, though. The number of Kindles people bought via links from my blog post puts the hourly rate for the time I spent on Savory and the other opensourcy Kindle hacking I did last year at about....what I'd earn working the drive-through line at Wendy's.
Classic computer science problems solved in JavaScript
Allow a different "showdead" setting on the "new" page.

I like to browse with showdead on, because it's interesting to see what comments are being posted from dead accounts, or what frontpage stories are killed.

The "new" page, however, is painful with showdead on, because of all the spam.

My ideal would be to browse with showdead on everywhere except the new page.
Data/IP loss doesn't really compare to loss of life, if you ask me.
Or maybe those two stances are in alignment? Consider:

The submission is a reaction to a reaction to YouTube and Vimeo now supporting HTML5 <video>, which enables users of Safari and Chrome to use those sites without Flash. Today, right now.

Firefox users, on the other hand, must continue to use Flash, due to Mozilla's decision to ask the world to revolve around them.
Have you looked at C--?
Why are we condemning Jeff Zucker & NBC over Leno ?
The way a virtual company works: customer -> virtualcompany host (fairsoftware in my example) -> personal account

This way, the end user has a business relationship with the virtual company host, shielding the entrepreneur, but the entrepreneur stills earns money as an independent contractor of the virtual company host. To me, the best of both worlds (but I'm biased). It beats opening a merchant account, that's for sure.

PS: no 503 for me...
TI hits home run with Chronos sportswatch wireless dev kit
Cecil does know what he's talking about. The Straight Dope is a website based on people submitting questions to Cecil who, in turn, does the research and presents the findings for you along with some of his trademark witticism. It's been a wildly successful website.

The readers know the premise - that Cecil, not an expert but definitely a pretty smart guy - is doing the work for you. And given the wealth of information presented in such a digestible form, I'd say that's fighting ignorance indeed.
Do you run newsvine, then?

Love your site :)
Because in the grand scheme of things people getting commissions will ultimately increase the price of things for me. It's also up to me to decide whether or not he deserves commission. Perhaps I already wanted to buy a Kindle beforehand.
That's a good sketch of some of the complexities involved. I remember that some months after I learned the proof, your rhetorical question 'What is fundamentally different if I replace "real" with "integer" or "rational"?' occurred to me, and I had to spend a few weeks thinking about it before the answer came to me.

In other words, I got to have an experience of actual mathematical thinking without learning much higher math. This is why I love the diagonal proof, and the guy who taught it to me: Paul Lockhart, author of the essay 'A Mathematician's Lament.' (http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_08.html)
512 CPUs with no ECC? Ugh.
Do you know about Barbados Real Estate?
No word on how they got in. Weak password perhaps?
I think your comment reduces to "The board of directors controls a company, and shareholders have the power to vote for members of the board of directors". I agree. And before this event took place, 59% of shareholders votes were held by Sergey and Larry. This means that Sergey Brin and Larry Page held the majority of shareholder votes.
Just how much influence does the US government actually have over the Internet and regulation of it, these days? Not much, I would have thought.

But I think it's great that in theory, we could cut China off from the rest of the world, information wise, which is probably what their sour grapes intimates.

Fuck living in a world where China has any influence over what happens on the Internet in any way except inside their own borders.

I think they're just a bit sore their "asymmetrical warfare" has this weakness - any state of Total War will result in no Internet for them from which to launch attacks.
All Your Twitter Bot Needs Is Love
"Isn't the whole point of math that you expect at some point to analyze the result of the symbol manipulation and 'read off' an interpretable meaning from the answer?'

Ah, and therein lies the rub. In math terminology, I think that that itself is an axiom, in the sense that you can choose it or not choose it, and it will strongly affect the rest of the system. If you accept the axiom, you end up going down the constructivist path. If you do not, you end up in "conventional mathematics" (i.e., what you get for a real math degree in college).

Personally, as a programmer I am also sympathetic to the constructivist viewpoint, but I am happy to settle for everyone involved understanding when they've left the physical universe (real numbers, axiom of choice, etc) and when they haven't. If some people want to screw around in the unreal universe, more power to them, doesn't have to bother me. And they often produce useful approximations for real-life use. As RiderOfGiraffes said, there are proofs that work on reals much better than any actual number, and I observe that in practice the resulting maths work out pretty well in the real world, even if they aren't actually physical.

(We have way larger problems dealing with floating point, monsters of our own creation, than we do in dealing with the fact that our equations of motion are defined based on real numbers that don't actually correspond to anything, where the inaccuracies are typically beyond our measuring ability and dominated by general inaccuracies of the input data which are far larger than the granularity of the universe.)

But I do think maintaining that distinction is definitely important. I further observe that while I can't speak for all of mathematics, the mathematicians are very careful to distinguish what takes the Axiom of Choice and what does not, just to draw one example. They are pretty good about showing their work.

I guess the takeaway is that you certainly aren't alone; many people agree that real numbers are ridiculous in the way you are sensing. But they can be a useful fiction.
Replicating 'Build a startup in 7 days' challenge?
I originally saw the 'Build a startup in 7 day challenge' "http://autocarlog.com" on HN earlier today and got hooked on the idea. It just seemed to happen, I came across a project I'm excited about and can be done in 7 days.
The project is actually based on John Nunemaker's post, which I mistook. It was about Projet Euler, a quiz site about mathematical questions which requires the help of computer to solve.
My project will be similar except will feature programming questions. It isn't like Stackoverflow, which is more of an answering service. I figure every week I'll post a question and anyone with an account can answer it.
What do you guys think? It will be written in Rails and maybe Haml. I'll open source it if you guys want.
I'm more interested in if this project will be viable and if it has already been done (I can't find any.) This project is meant to challenge amateur/expert programmer whatever the language.
"Some consumers and doctors are becoming convinced vitamin D can help reduce the risk of a long list of diseases, despite a lack of gold-standard research proving it."

http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2010/01/04/vitamin-d.html
I think the Kindle gives authors a passel of excellent opportunities to bring their business practices kicking and screaming into the 20th century:

1) Amazon offers free samples of most books, where you can get hooked on a chapter and on the last page it has a call to action like: "Like this? (linky)Buy the book(/link)" It is one or two clicks (can't recall) until money has exchanged hands and the book is winding its way down the tubes to your device. This implementation is genius and they need to do more: for example, EVERY sci-fi/fantasy book needs to have, on the last page, "The epic tale of heroism, sensuality, and gratuitous buttkicking continues in (linky)Librarian Unchained(/linky)!"

2) Every author should have a blog. Every author should have an email list. You should be using both of these to sell or give away things to your fans. ("Hiya guys! Happy Valentine's Day! Since you've been so good to me, I'm giving you a little treat: a free sneak peak at my next novel, and one invitation that you can send to a very special someone.") It is absolutely insane that I can spend literally hundreds to thousands of dollars on books from one author or publisher and yet nobody at any point tries to capture my details to sell me more of the stuff that I clearly want to buy.

3) Apparently the book industry thinks word of mouth drives most book purchases. First, that is probably malarky, an old wives' tail which has no basis in empirical fact. The majority of books are probably sold due to being the event books which receive heavy promotion, go to the top of the lists, and can be picked up or clicked on without being searched for. (The Kindle -- wonderful device that it is -- SUCKS for searching for books, except by going to the genre stacks and sorting by sales. It is like it was designed by the same guy who did the App Store.)

Instead of using unscientific malarky, they should start actually TRACKING to see who is buying books and why. People will happily tell you this if you give them a reason to do it: for example, the author who they consider a close person in their lives just asks them to, or they're offered a freebie for their time. (Amazon is in a much better position to do this than either authors or publishers. If one player in the market is structurally guaranteed to be the only one with accurate analytics, I think I can pick the winner already.)
Tests reveal 'bomb detector' cannot work
Biceps Workouts That Get You Growing Quick
There is a huge difference between "not valuing freedom" and "valuing advantage X more than freedom". This is not all or nothing. This is not a case of "you are either with us or against us".

Repeating "stupid" and "dumb" over and over will not make it real. They don't restrict anyone either, they just stick to their values.
Debunking Dvorak vs QWERTY myths
Thanks. That's a very good answer :-)
I think SeaMicro is supposed to be 1/Nth the price of Niagara, and it's x86 so you don't have to recompile.
"... I think he also cheated by opening a bank account and incorporating. That's overkill at the stage he's at ..."

I'd normally agree, but I think you have limited understanding of what is going on.

"... Working from his car, he was repeatedly frustrated by having to write down his mileages in a logbook, a logbook which would then be misplaced, lost and chewed by the dog. Logs would be jotted down on the back of receipts, discarded wrappers or scrap paper. Ultimately he wasn’t recording every business trip and he was therefore unable to claim the most he could come tax time.... it had wide appeal – 7 million Australians claim work related expenses each year on their tax returns. ..." ~ http://www.semi-blog.com/2010/01/startup-in-7-days-day-one-t...

The requirement is for tax deductions, to use the service probably numerous requirements under Australian law. Hence the licensing of business and bank account. I noticed the - "registered software provider" by the Australian Tax Office (ATO) so ~ http://ato.gov.au/ This isn't just a website but a system that hooks into the ATO Electronic Commerce interface (ECI) as a Business Activity Service (BAS) has statutory requirements: certificates, Australian Business Numbers (ABN) ~ http://ato.gov.au/onlineservices/content.asp?doc=/content/00...
My dad built the house I grew up in like this in the mid 70's. Big south facing windows with large overhang. Brick wall sucks up the heat for the night. Our greenhouse had huge 20ft high cylinders filled with dyed black water. Worked great.

What happened in the 80s and 90s to make this not as popular?
Whats the point of inventing yet another language? Its far better to use existing and proven languages for both a completeness/stood.the.test.of.time point and time it takes a new developer to get up to speed.

Granted I hate C++ with vengeance my poison if choice is C99 + LUA which creates a really powerful lowlevel and high level combo. Using lua to drive it, farming bits out to C, instead of the opposite "scripting language addon" approach. Yeah lua isnt quite as powerfull as lisp but gets pretty close and dosent look like alien space talk to new devs.
Live answering service
Phone answering service is a type of help centre or an enquiry centre in any firm. Today having this service is in practice in almost all of the companies which is supporting for them in business development in many ways.
http://unposto.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/how-to-sue-your-empl...
All languages (except maybe Lisp, COBOL, and FORTRAN) were "yet another language" at some point. This is how innovation happens.
"... Personally, I'm surprised at the $500 budget. Maybe coffee costs more in Australia. ..."

* Web hosting: $4.40

* Static IP: $3.30

* Domain name: $13

* SSL certificate: $66

* SMS modem: $172.50

* Bank account: $6.50

* SIM card: $5

* Custom number: $22

The costs [0] look reasonable to me and the coffee is better in Aus :) ~ http://searchyc.com/bootload+coffee

[0] http://www.semi-blog.com/2010/01/startup-in-7-days-day-two-r...
I'm not so sure this was a hiring problem. It sounds like everyone he came into contact with treated him well, while he was in contact with them. The individuals who promised to get back were probably in chaos, and/or told to say exactly that and then take the next call. And the next. But they were probably doing their job very well, within the system they found themselves in.

It sounds to me like a large part of fulfillment was outsourced (not so unusual) and there was very little involvement from BN during the "channel design" (don't know what you call that, I'm not in the biz) and channel operation. Basically, some vendor was allowed by BN to screw BN and its customers.

The VP who denied the $100 gift card was probably staunching a hemorrhage of gift cards.

None of this is an excuse. But it sounds like BN actually hired well, at the point of customer contact.
yet with those languages were derived from constructs in math - new is always relative to the context.

Guess it depends on whats the advantage of doing this is? just for fun? or for a serious practical application.
You can do the "after" right now.

named_scope :limit, lambda { |num| { :limit => num } }
Have you? I have been a Norman Ramsey stalker since 1997, I dabbled in every project the man ever touched, and C-- is not what the author needs. He wants C performance with higher abstractions. C-- is C performance with assembly abstractions (i.e. lower)
It looks like a constraint programming language; sorta like CLIPS/LISA, am I right?
Principally, you care because you might have been manipulated into reading an article with a catchy name just so the author can make some sales.

If it weren't someone that we all know, then that might be an issue. But Jesse has been around the hacker and entrepreneurial community for a long time, and has a reputation to uphold. If you've been to OSCON, YAPC, etc. you've probably seen him speak and possibly met him. He's not some random dude trying to cash in on this new-fangled Internet thing.
Long story short, early adoption invites a lot of problems.

Not to discount the OP's valid issues, but shipping and customer service problems have been evident with most every new hardware release that I can remember.

edit: plus at the end of 2009 i noticed that while the local B&N has a big Nook sales kiosk right when you walk in, staffed by a salesperson, when you go to buy a book the big Nook banners behind the sales desk have small 'sold out' banners taped across. obviously a bad sign.
How would you run your company?
Its such a simple question I've asked to many people and yet gotten blank stares or simplistic answers. Figured, you guys would give me much better answers. Before I started my own projects, I had many ideas, but then reality hit me and I'm struggling with even my basic ideas. What about you guys?
Or Steinbeck's "The Short Reign of Pippen IV".
Ask YC: Licensing your startup's code?
[I'm a Hacker News regular using a throwaway account for the sake of anonymity.]

Does anyone have experience with licensing the code behind their startups to other companies?

I have been approached by several people recently which have expressed an interest in some of the code behind my startup. They haven't shown any interest in buying the company; only in getting the code (I guess because they think it would be cheaper/faster to buy rather than build). Right now none of them are competitors, but they might become competitors in the future.

I keep on going back and forth between "any money is good money" and "if they're going to end up competing with us, anything we have that they don't have is good". If anyone has experience with this sort of thing and can say how it turned out, it would be a great help.
i like the author's writing style, and i think he's onto something. i've long hoped for a decent language for writing low-level stuff. so far, c++ is the worst, except for all the alternatives.

i think this is a grave 'leaky abstraction' waiting to happen, though. when his 'amplify' system screws up, it's going to do so in a way that nobody else can understand.
Where is most ice located?