skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personally i don't care what someone who doesn't understand language X can make of a piece of code written in language X.

What I care about from a languages syntax is that it makes programs clear to someone familiar with the language.

Like i mention previously C family programmers often cannot make head or tail of a Lisp or ML family program, yet both those languages have excellent syntax where the choices made allow the programmer to express their intentions very clearly.

Contrast this with the popular view of Perl; One persons perl code can be impenetrable to another experienced perl programmer.

Syntax matters, but the familiarity with that syntax for outsides only matters from a purely political perspective. If you want to make a successful language, make it C flavored and baroque. If you want to make a truly great language, make the syntax that is best suited to what you are doing.
But studies don't come into existence out of thin air. You need to put things into conversation for someone to put the effort in to go out and do a study.
What are some common examples where using a platform like this would be more efficient that doing in on a common HTML page elsewhere? Regardless, it's a beautiful little system.
But I know better than to argue with anti-abortionists.

Shame on you. Without that sentence, your comment would have been cool - instead you patronize me.

I'm an atheist, liberal (mostly), and almost certainly not one of the typical "pro-lifers" you're looking down your nose at. My distaste of laissez-faire abortions does not make me "anti-abortionist."

I believe abortion should be very much a "last choice" that's heavily regulated. In the standard terminology that makes me more "pro life" than "pro choice" - yet if someone makes a long, hard decision to have an abortion, I'm in support of them being able to effect that. It just shouldn't be easy to do.
As usual with Scripting News, the comments are of more value than the story. No, it's not a "fact" that they exposed the private data of millions ... At most, it's a fact that they casually handed a privacy-invading gun to people and invited them to fire it.

Nothing was exposed to the public unless you agreed to create your Buzz profile. Nothing is exposed to followers unless you post something. Nothing is shared from your Reader unless it was already set to public.

So, you know, if you're a doctor or someone else who values the confidentiality of your user list very highly, don't go blithely clicking "Yes" when Google asks you if you want to make a public something-or-other. And if you could be physically put in danger by your correspondents, don't make comments like "ooh, this will be handy for my new house, its address is 123 xyz St" in public comments on your shared items.

Google didn't make a CEO-apology-level mistake here; they acted reasonably, if a bit cavalierly, and a lot of people had a hysterical and irrational freak-out, and a lot of those who are anti-Google picked it up as a stick to beat them with.

I don't know when their image changed so much. Perhaps it was the string of weird and useless launches recently. Wave must have cost them more reputation than I thought.

But, really, I think their apology was fine. They should be sorry for causing concern. I don't see how much further they could go. "we're sorry for not making it completely safe for you to click 'Yes' on any box we present to you without any consequences at all. We agree that you should never, ever have to read anything. Oh, and you can log in to Facebook here, and finally we pledge to protect your security-by-obscurity whenever you mark something 'public'. Love, Google."
Are you implying that an MBA isn't a joke?
Why does it do a server round trip every time you tell it to run something?
There's no question that the generated JavaScript is never going to be as pretty as handwritten JS. But that said, choosing splats as your example of bad syntax isn't the best choice, because there isn't a syntactic equivalent in JavaScript.

This CoffeeScript:

send_letter: (name, addresses...) ->
# more code...

Where the array of addresses can be referenced and used as many times as you like within the function body, would need to be translated as this JavaScript:

var send_letter = function send_letter(name) {
var addresses = Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments, 1);
# more code...
};

Which is both a good bit more to type, as well as more work -- you need to figure out the index from which to slice. The only difference with the generated JS is that the variable declaration is on a separate line -- a feature that allows all assignments to be used as part of a larger expression.
Interesting...

Fexprs appear to be runtime-only first-class macros.
Larry Ellison Wins The America's Cup
Yes, she's a joke.

But you won't be laughing when/if someday she ends up President with the nuke codes on her desk.
Oh, goodness. I do tire of the melodramatic pronunciations of Buzz's death less than a week in. Though some of the points the author makes are valid (esp having the "Email this" link so prominent), to extrapolate so far as to call the entirety of Buzz dead on arrival is ridiculous. As I've already said elsewhere on HN, Buzz has had a horrible rollout that cost Google a serious amount of goodwill, but the product itself has a lot going for it.

Sure, there may be problems, but they've already shown that they are willing to fix them. Next to search itself, Gmail is probably their single-largest profit center, so if they take the bold step of integrating Buzz into Gmail, that can only indicate a long-term commitment to making the service work. In short, no, Buzz is not dead already. It's getting off to a less than stellar start, but it's very far from dead.
Industrial Farming and Urban Sprawl Wreak Havoc On Chesapeake Bay
There is an excellent reason not to base your language on fexprs: their equational theory is trivial (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/pubs.html#Wand98). See http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3640 for more discussion and a modern approach (http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~jshutt/kernel.html) to retaining the appeal of fexprs while avoiding this drawback.
"We could really do with a devaluation."

As I understand it, there's a/the problem. The PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) very much want a devaluation right now, Germany and maybe France say "no way".
I think it's more learning things that you have had no need for, so you wont use it to learn it. I think co-ops should start very early in people's university careers so they can see what they need in their educations.
In the US, "negro" was once the accepted term; you'll hear it in old TV and radio or in literature, and all in the same tone as one might say "caucasian" or "asian". Eventually, we decided it wasn't so great and switched to "black". When you, in Spain, say "negro", it's the equivalent of us saying "black".

I don't think any of us say "afroamerican", but we do use "African American" even when the person in question is not American--it's kind of silly.

And yes, we say f*ck (censored because I don't remember the HN rules) constantly here too, but that's generally in a specific context: working on something with friends, out with other college students, etc. My friends and I, and most people I know, tend to not swear much around our elders or children; it's censored on TV because the audience is much wider than the couple friends you're hanging out with.
The instruction ``call _a'' pushes the address of the next instruction onto the stack.
It doesn't matter if you're a fundamentalist Christian or a liberal progressive, the temptation to take something at face value and act morally superior is stronger than the one to interpret the intent behind what's being said.
Go to another country/state where education is a significantly cheaper? Europe maybe?
Very good description, and I'd even say there are some problems missing from it. Actually, increased salary demands due to student loan balances lead to:

- exacerbated income disparity, since only the elite are hired, which makes the job market extra-tough on all but the most capable new graduates, as well as

- higher professor salaries, since professors and potential professors in the field have attractive non-academic options, but also

- more willingness of students to take on more easy loans, since "everyone knows" that lawyers, etc. make so much money that it's okay to take on a lot of debt.
I would say the same, a lot of the uni I've done, especially the straight computer science stuff has been basic looks which I picked up before I took the classes online.

There are though benefits in that these classes kind of force you to take a slower and more in depth look at some things and you end up learning the area better. I know with my operating systems class, I already knew a lot of the basics about how it all worked, but taking the focus to learn it well taught be quiet a bit I think.
If the author doesn't want their content mirrored, they're free to throw up a robots.txt file, assuming Scribd respects that. The internet requires middlemen to make multiple copies of content for each request to successfully complete, so I'd call an HTTP 200 status code implied consent.
Now I'm just plain confused. I had finally figured out that the tooth fairy, bigfoot, jimmy carter, and women with a genuine sense of humor were all just made up by my parents. And now you tell me that at least some of them are real?
Amazing. Only I thought Pattison was guilty of asking too many softball questions. There's not a single question here on the parenthetical sideswipe that teamwork is “vastly overrated”.

There is some business wisdom about having a backbone in some areas that trip many small companies up, but when I got to the "vendor financing" remark, my judgement of this man was much harsher than "penny ante" as his tough love jumped the shark for a splash landing on shifting-the-burden.

My financial discipline is my vendor's financial shame. Nice one. Always want to be your vendor's least favourite customer when they run into a production glitch. Shite happens in the supply chain no matter how vicious your management style, and it ripples through on a selective basis.

This is classic Taleb: painfully grind out a one cent advantage every day, then take a $20 hit when the black swan rides again, at which point you excuse positioning yourself to take the brunt of the pain because 99% of humanity is weak in the knees, which is another view he expresses.

PS: thanks to y-comb for letting me type this out before demanding an account. Love that up-front business attitude.
Is that a compiler bug?
Perhaps, but I think for this particular market they had no choice but to launch big. Look at Orkut, their previous (dead) attempt at a social network. Facebook is extremely entrenched now, and there's little to no incentive to users to opt-in to something else. To attack the power of Facebook/Twitter, this was really the only way of doing it (although I agree, perhaps a Labs feature would have been a better way of introducing the concept for a couple of months at first).
It's really a matter of the size of the walled garden. You could call the entire earth a walled garden if you want. If the walled garden is big enough, people are okay with it.

For the majority of apple customers, the app store is plenty big enough. Apple customers are like those animals in the safari sized zoos where they can run around and feel free enough to not care so much about the fences keeping them in.
The latter.

E.g. as an initial step, one that sure looks like it will have to happen absent a bailout, is that Greece withdraws from the Eurozone and starts issuing its own currency again. The government would offer every holder of a Euro denominated government bond repayment in that currency ... and that's where it starts to get very messy. What about Greek banks? What about Greeks holding Euros (physical or in non-Greek banks)? Who externally will accept payment in that new currency for physical stuff (e.g. food)?

Does this become congagious, with one or more of the remaining PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) following?

Then what? (I'm not at all clear on that.)
"You like that, baby?" is pretty porny, though. Guy just needs to grow a mustache and a mullet, he's all set.
I got curious, and for what it's worth the actual Mary Elizabeth Williams article is better than this one quotation might suggest.

Near the end of the piece, she says herself more or less what you say here:

So When Mr. Jackhammer asked, "Does that feel good, baby?" he may well have really been trying. And did I pipe up and say no? I did not. I ran away and never saw him again, prompting a friend to say with a sigh, "Now he's just going to go do that routine to some other poor woman."

For all the sex we watch and all the fancy moves we know and all the people we've ever seen without their pants, sex remains one of the hardest things in the world to speak truthfully about.

http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2009/11/01/make_love_like_...
Sensitivity to something is invariably decreased by exposure. In my life, I've gone from a picture of bare breasts being a big deal and a huge turnon, to seeing graphic movies of any kind of sex imaginable free 24/7 on the internet. I don't think there is any question that this has made the average male expect their partners to do things that their partners mothers would never have considered doing. Whether this is bad or not is a separate question.
Good point, but why isn't it already if so? E.g, Shopify? Shopify actually lacks even per-item discount codes.

Group buying isn't a proven feature for websites, nor is it cross-site interaction universal. Visitors have to know what it is and trust it in a form of knowing what to expect and what not. That is the space SyncFu should occupy.

Basically, SyncFu is just a free* version of Groupon, Buywithme etc. The main reason for developing it is bringing this feature to any website without the 20-50% fees that these sites snatch. The only cost is the reservation fee, and it is charged to the customer, which is a dissolving cost.

You are certainly right about big vendors, if you throw a bunch of resources, it is too easy - but most little/medium web-shops deploy custom, features-less shopping carts - e.g. all the customers of Groupon and BuyWithMe.

Plus, I have no clue how would any company justify any costs of developing such a concept / experimental "feature". Well, for sure it isn't happening since there is very little innovation in online payments. Therefore this simple thing is isolated for any company to deploy on chosen products/services in a very simple manner.

Besides, this little component offers more than just group purchasing. Promotions are easily made, e.g:

- free signup for the first 100 reservations (price goes down to 0)

- pre-orderings of future books, directly by the author

This is of course my personal opinion, but SyncFu was built to verify the hypothesis :)

Thanks for the comment, and regarding the too easy, well, it took a long time to ditch features and shape minimal single feature product - praising Unix philosophy. The js code is of course publicly available:

http://github.com/dejanstrbac/SyncFu-Widget/blob/master/widg...
The positive power of mockery needs to be embraced -- shame seems to have no effect.
That's the set-up. The joke is that to fix this "problem", she is only going to adopt a "special needs" child who is also expected to die soon, thus negating the "problem" (that the child will still have "special needs" when you are 80), while being in our paradoxical cultural calculations even more praiseworthy than adopting a "special needs" child who is going to continue to be just as needy for much longer.

It can't really be parsed as mockery of "retarded people" unless you believe she was being earnest and sincere in her calculation and really believed what she was saying. She wasn't. She is a comedian.
That's only a nice feature until you pull out the Decorator or Adapter patterns to get around some class marked `final` in a library somewhere you can't modify and for which you have to appease the type system because classes do not imply interfaces.
And besides that it's pure trolling to get the percentage vs. absolute tax payment argument kickstarted.
> contributes to increasing their availability

Increased availability is not always good. This is a clear case where getting the loans was a terrible financial decision, since she's only earning enough to pay off a tiny fraction of the principal. We should be decreasing availability to people who have no realistic possibility of paying off the loans, especially when they don't even have the option of bankruptcy.

The idea that making loans available to people with marginal prospects of paying them back is always helping them is bogus. It removes pressure on colleges to trim their costs to help poor students, as well as encouraging people who financially won't benefit from a degree to pursue one anyway.

I'm saying this as someone who got mired in debt going through college and spent years climbing out of that hole. Things worked out for me in the end, but the loans were so easily available that I didn't consider the alternatives. Now I'm so allergic to debt I don't even want a mortgage.
"I suspect most people have their own personal caveat to this essay."

I believe anything is OK (even in large numbers) as long as it is easy for one's mind to treat it as one "item". Books (and probably your raw materials) are uniform. You put the next one with all the others and forget it, so it creates little additional drag on you. Yeah, up to a point when you need to expand storage, but the general rule remains.
in case you are skeptical about clicking the link. This is the unofficial blog of the CBS show, "Big Bang Theory."

It expands on the concepts in the show and explains them to a layman. The first post is about the LHC because the characters were invited to go see it. It also talks about graphene because the tall skinny guy was trying to figure out why electrons have no mass moving across them.

Kind of neat. Might be better to have read these posts before the episode airs to have a better understanding of the concepts and humor during the show. I didn't now what graphene was when i watched that episode, but after reading the blog post, the episode makes a lot more sense.
> I'd say Java has longer tokens than some other languages. By my definition that doesn't make it any more verbose.

I don't know, that seems to be the very definition of "verbose" to me.
Spain is a bit further down the euphemism treadmill than we are--calling black people "negros" (btw, in America calling them "black" is acceptable) is okay because the actual racists still go to soccer matches and make monkey noises and throw bananas on the field whenever an African player has the ball[1]. In America, racism is taboo and that kind of nonsense will get you kicked out of the stadium (plus it makes no sense to heckle the majority of the athletes), so the actual racists can only act a little coy, forcing the rest of us to be extra polite, just so we don't seem racist.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Etoo#Racism
It gets boring to repeat this comment so often, but: Buffett's income is mostly in the form of capital gains and dividends. These are paid out of the taxable income of corporations. So he pays a direct 15% tax on something that's previously been taxed at 35%--a low rate, if you ignore the 35% part.

It would be like claiming that the average worker's income tax is zero, since federal withholdings essentially mean that their employer keeps the money and remits it to the government. (Obviously, people make this mistake when they pretend that half of social security taxes are paid by employers, not employees--as economists have long since realized, the economic effect of a tax is, discounting transaction costs, independent of which party in a transaction gets taxed.)
Agreed. I see many parallels in in article's argument against porn and and arguments against violence in video games. Both, i.e. the porn and video game violence, can do well-acknowledged and serious harm against social mores: degradation of sexual intimacy in one case and simulation/glorification of violent behavior in the other case.

Both are also frequently made scapegoats and blamed for problems with society at large, be it lack of adequate sex-ed in school, unhealthy gender role models, or deeper, unacknowledged cultural glorifications of violence.
As my dad was fond of quoting:

"A worker uses his tools. A journeyman knows his tools. A craftsman makes his own tools."
Well, which is it?

It's both. A Language-with-a-capital-L is the libraries it includes, the libraries it allows, and the libraries it makes unnecessary.
I Would Only Fund an Entrepreneur with High Integrity
Hi Andrew -

Techcofounder.com is not a job site. It's meant to help entrepreneurs find technical people who are interested in doing a startup. Engineers create profiles listing skills, experience, etc. They aren't posting job ads.

-Ben
Watch out. White people saying the word "nigger" because they're trying to be funny end up being this guy: http://www.tmz.com/2006/11/20/kramers-racist-tirade-caught-o...
Yep, "programmer" is too long, which is why i used the term "coder". I'm a programmer too and never thought it had any negative connotations.
> I have never known a man who was selected against because he was dominant.

Harem attendants where eunuchs for reason. :P
...without giving much in the way of explanation why.

You'll notice that these so-called 'PIIGS' have a much larger dependency on tourism from the US and UK than any other Euroland countries. At the moment the USD/GBP devaluations are killing them.

(Yes, most of them also have grave public spending issues, but Ireland has dug itself out - at least to the extent that its debt is coming down and because of that it's not paying super-premium bond rates.)
HN User's response to Chris Dannen of FastCompany
All our apps are free.

We haven't publicly announced our numbers, but we have a "nice" multiple of the daily download numbers you posted.

Sorry for being vague, I need to check with my co-founder before talking publicly about this.
You are sooo cool---Chat Roulette Russian kid --- whoever you are. You are in fact a global peace maker and connector of people-ideas. I was a little revolted of course--like most---at first-but then I started playing my guitar for people and singing and they played back at me and we did songs together. But then of course it all broke down when one of the guys at the singing chat party ran into his bedroom---got a guitar and whipped of his clothes and put a sock on his dick---but you know---it's the thought that counts! kudos to chat roulette my friend from katy in eugene oregon!!
To be perfectly honest, I think it'd make sense to ban ESR's stuff here, because (a) when speaking of technical matters, it's usually wrong, often offensively so and (b) it just degenerates into stuff where we're all complaining about things that are, to most of us, obvious.

Simply put, a competent programmer reading ESR's posts quickly and correctly comes to the conclusion that he's just not a very good programmer. It feels a bit gratuitous to keep driving that home publicly.
It looks interesting, but I'm REALLY confused as to what I'm looking at with the graph, countdown timer, lowest price, etc.

What is all that junk? Why does the graph show a price in $000 but the price per unit is $2.00