skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Common Lisp's userbase has become one of the most bitter, self-important cesspools of snobbery the programming world has ever seen

You are absolutely right here. I am not sure what caused this to happen, but I have never seen a programming community that so actively discourages code reuse. Ask why two libraries don't work together, and the answer is usually, "you shouldn't be using libraries!"

Yeah. SBCL is a nice VM, but the community needs to die.

Then again, the Haskell folks piss me off for other reasons - after studying such things in the context of real math, it's infuriating to be talked down to by people that just "got" monads and think that their shallow grasp of the concept entitles them to wield Genius Points over everyone else's heads.

You're sort of doing the same thing, right? And in reality, the people that actually use Haskell are not like this. Don't let someone that read about Haskell on Reddit yesterday, opened ghci, and typed "let fibs = 1 : 1 : (zipWith (+) fibs $ tail fibs)" put you off. People like to be excited about things, and people that read too many programming blogs get themselves unnecessarily excited about simple things. Then when they sort of understand that simple thing, they feel the need to tell everyone.

The clojure community has the "omg monads!" problem too, but that structure isn't particularly useful in Clojure and that is obvious, so people aren't as excited about it. There is plenty of annoying Clojure fanboi-ing, though... but that is true of any language. (OK, there are no Cobol fanbois.)
Bikram Yoga and the iPad
Position fixed doesn't work in IE6.

(But it's better to use it in browsers that support it, of course.)
I'm not trying to discount you with a strawman here (you make a good point), but I'd take issue with the idea that "anything is worth discussing if both parties see the benefit." Here goes my extreme example: Child prostitution. The child makes money to pay for living expenses, the customer relieves his sexual tension. But no one would argue that, despite the benefits to both parties, the downsides of this arrangement vastly outweigh the benefits.

Again, I'm not trying to make a strawman here comparing this investment scheme to child exploitation. But while this scheme may indeed be north of "not even worth discussing," the idea of "selling off" any part of your life is not something to be taken lightly, which I imagine you'd probably agree with.
Brilliant. Thanks for the link.
I've recently started using Chrome (for the first time seriously since it was released) and I find it much snappier than Firefox, but there are two major issues I take with Chrome.

1) The lack of slash searching, like vim, less, etc. I know about the type-ahead extension, but it doesn't use the native search option that you'd get with CTRL+F, or F3. / is the natural search key for me, and I find it distracting to have to use CTRL+F to bring up the search. Furthermore, Google employees have stated in support threads that they have no intentions of ever allowing slash-searching, which I find rather disturbing: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=095c...

2) When maximized the tabs at the top of the bar are bothering me, since I keep a small Winamp window on the top of my screen. This interferes with Chrome's tabs, and can be quite annoying (screenshot: http://sigmafiles.com/gulp/forum/16932/chrome_max.png ).
Set a time when you are going to do something, then arrange things so as many distractions as possible are eliminated during that time so you have no other choice but to study, or whatever your goal is. Without distractions, you will eventually get bored enough that you actually work on what you are supposed to be working.

If you failed your first exam, that indicates it is not as boring as you thought. Calculus, specifically, comes up constantly now that I'm trying to understand Machine Learning, for example. Whatever you are studying, if you can figure out what some real world applications are, it should become much more interesting.
Painkillers, sleeping, and a laptop doesn't sound too different from my normal life. Except I don't get the painkillers.
I don't think the authors intention is to compare the relative merits of the languages in the context of a particular project. Its more about horserace and market niche. And these are terms in which startup founders are accustomed to thinking in - in the absence of data, you look at related trends and use your reasoned intuition to think about the spread of new ways of doing things.

My guess is that a lot of people read that comment and figured that it made sense and captured conventional wisdom in a succinct way.

As an aside, because language adoption has network effects, the fact that a lot of people can get interested and excited about Clojure is itself meaningful, which is why I upvoted it.
I would want myself to want the 20-year-old to get the transplant instead of me. Whether or not I would make that decision while lying on my death bed is another matter.
The childish, self-gratifying attitude is the part where you think because you achieved some success in life, you owe nothing to the society that made it possible for you. People of that sort of moral stature don't tend to have the firmitude to succeed in other ways, in my experience -- it's more typical of college republicans than it is of actual business leaders.
Yes, that's the point. This is the actual PDF which people can now go read without clawing open their veins from horror & despair with the Scribd Flash mess. Was my comment really that hard to understand?
I think it misses a <ul> in the example.
Some friends lived with me for a few months while their daughter was in the NICU because she was born extremely prematurely. I don't know the final tally, but at some point the calculated the total cost to be just north of $2,000,000. I don't think it is possible for me to rationally discuss if is worth it because I'm emotionally involved (they now have a beautiful, healthy little girl), but it's easy to see that it doesn't take many cases like hers to jack insurance premiums up pretty high.

As our medical skills are improving we can keep people alive that used to die. Unfortunately our medical skill isn't advanced enough to do it cheaply. Perhaps the luxuries of time and money will get us there one day.
> You seem to ignoring the amendment process as detailed in Article V

No. He's using an enumerated powers argument. He's claiming that the Federal govt can only do things that were authorized by the constitution and that none of the things mentioned in the BoR were things that the Federal govt can do according.

I'm sympathetic to that argument, but the modern interpretation of the interstate commerce and general welfare clauses say otherwise.

The 14th, which isn't part of the BoR, says that states are bound in some way by something.

The first cases, which had to do with state govt officials silencing, disarming, and killing freed slaves, concluded that the states weren't bound at all by the bill of rights. That's the precedent that Chicago is pushing.
Very interesting article! I would like to know how much time was spent on developing the bot.
Competitive feels like not low enough, to me.

After all, you don't get any physical copies, which is something a collector may like.
It's not hard. Just choose to do your schoolwork BEFORE you have fun reading your lisp book. Then you can truly enjoy reading it because you know the b.s. schoolwork is done for the day.

Here is your new mantra: "What is the most PAINFUL thing I have on my list of to-do's?"

Figure that out every hour or so, and go get it done.

(It helps to realize that four or five years is a really short time. I know it doesn't feel that way when it is like 25% of your current lifespan, but really.. it will be over before you know it. And what's more - you'll actually get to enjoy it because you're not flunking out.)
Light: the new look of Ubuntu
Things You Might Not Know About jQuery
I sincerely don't understand the standard flaming /about/ the CL community. I've read this complaint for years. But my experience is very different. I have been learning CL in the last two years, and I've found that most people (including the usual suspects) are quite helpful. It is true that comp.lang.lisp has a very low tolerance for stupid questions and a bizarre and occasionally harsh sense of humor, but I've never had any problem with it.

What I find alarming in the CL community is something different: I feel that there is practically no innovation. It is magnificient but dying culture. The underlying idea is either that CL is a peak of perfectibility, or that the world has no more the force needed to change anything in CL anyway.
Depends. I don't consider my browser my primary application my computer so I like it to save as much memory as it can for the truly horrid memory hogs like Adobe suite and my development IDE. I have 8gb on my laptop (macbook pro), and its still not enough.

On mac, there's no worse culprit than Firefox. I'll regularly need to kill it after I see it taking up 2.5GB of ram (even when all tabs are closed).

Chrome might lose the micro memory usage benchmarks, but its much more stable. Even after opening/closing hundreds of tabs for days, it'll never start taking up GBs of ram.
I'm not interested in many of the measurements done.
- Startup times: I usually always have a browser window open and never shut it down
- Memory footprint: Don't really care unless it leaks
- Rendering speed: I don't see a whole lot difference between browsers and the margin of error in the tests makes it difficult to come to any conclusions.

I use firefox and love it. It's consistent between different operating systems, mature and most importantly has great plugins.
It can't be a "right". You might ask for it to be a "limited" right, but medical care is expensive and a constant struggle between cost and benefit.

The tough part is admitting that either some disinterested third party should specify what's worth doing, or people should be responsible for their own care. My personal belief is that a properly functioning market (ie: something vastly different than what we have now in the US) allows for more nuanced and personal decisions regarding what's worth paying for than a blanket set of policies. I also happen to think that letting people allocate their own resources between competitive providers is the best way to find that lovely equilibrium where prices are as low as they can be for a reasonable level of quality.

Assuming you disagree with me, you still can't consider unlimited healthcare an achievable human right. If your kid is sitting in a hospital, someone is making a decision based on money. I'd rather I be in control at that point. I also assume that in such a happy fairytale of a free market, I'd have planned for such an occurrence and purchased a reasonable level of medical insurance to cover that sort of event.

Be careful not to paint America with such a broad brush. Most of us are "victims" of fearmongering and policies that are well outside of our control. It's a sad byproduct of a dysfunctional system that's grown well outside the bounds of what it was originally designed for.
I'm glad I don't live where you do.
I didn't get what this sharing code was about until I read the earlier post: http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0008.2/0201.h...

I think this is a typical engineering argument and its got nothing to do with curse of gifted etc. If you share code and they divert later on, even if to a small degree, it gets harder and harder to maintain them. That's what linus says, and I do think that is simpler. Linus (and a good engineer) always favors the simpler solution. The more gifted, the more simpler. So ESR is just arguing the other way around.

I see this all the time in hot lkml discussions. It's often the more gifted who sees through to the simpler solution, but others can't. Don't know if it is true for all gifted, but definitely for the best software engineers.
They've disabled it.
http://www.livejournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=106017...
Interesting, I always thought of the separation between personal and corporate responsibility in just one direction. Could you elaborate?
http://drivingrevenue.com/ was the firm running the redirector... Looks shady as hell.
People don't see it as spending their net worth. The article opened with that, in fact. People expect that the insurance their companies provide pay for anything under the sun, and they sometimes get it at the expense of everyone else in the group.
I hold a bachelor's in math. In my current job, I use basic algebra and trigonometry on a regular basis, and occassionally basic calculus.

I have never had to use the theoretical information or complex analysis directly, but the practice gained in studying the theory and the proofs has helped me indirectly many times in programming. For most people. in depth knowledge of mathematics is of limited use, but in depth knowledge of problem solving gained by studying math can be invaluable.

As you mentioned, it varies wildly by your career path of course.
HAHA, excellently put...

Personally I don't like the way 'zuck' forces us to communicate with eachother. Also the fact that he has been actively grabbing patents and attempting to monopolise social networking is cause for concern.

large companies, Please stop trying to own everything. It's ruining things for the rest of us. Apple and Facebook are two of the biggest culprits right now.
Ask HN: What do you want to know about closing angel rounds?
Naval and I are recording a Venture Hacks interview tomorrow on "How to close an angel round." The emphasis is on turning meetings into money.

What questions do you have? What wisdom have you discovered while raising your own angel rounds? (We'll also try to give credit for your questions and tips in the interview.)
Winning the UCSD Data Mining Contest 2009
Agreed. Wild speculation, but I think the Firefox codebase might have hit critical mass and its just too hard to manage it. I'm anticipating using Chrome much more once webkit improves their dev tools to surpass firebug (what's the hold up!?).
Interested in learning a new job skill? how I chose python
An Honest Look at Seam – Part 1: How Seam builds on Spring
Remote Pair Programming
If nanotech and anti-aging succeed, they'll push back the costs.

Yes, anti-aging is the best possible research we could be funding. Unfortunately most people shut down when it's brought up, because thinking about your own decline and death isn't pleasant.

If they don't, there's going to be a lot of scaling back on things that don't work or aren't proven.

How will the "scaling back" be accomplished? Governments can and should stop paying large amounts for treatments that don't do much, but unless private services are banned, lots people will spend whatever they have to try to keep themselves or their loved ones alive.
Politics-Oriented Software Development
I wish. =\
I dislike the fact that "zuck" is worthy of writing about like this. He's no genius, he seems to have gotten very lucky, which is fine.

He's a terrible public speaker and he's terrible at conveying his ideas. This smells, given that it's written on FACEBOOK's blog. What's the point of this?
Ada Lovelace, Creator of the World’s First Computer Programs
um, aren't you commenting right now?
"The issues you describe were caused by some new LiveJournal code which produced these unexpected effects."

I'm not sure how any of that could really and truthfully be "unexpected."
Ah, yes, I should have realized that, especially as someone who considers Wickard v. Filburn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn) a decision that will live in infamy.

On the other hand, it has been argued that prior to the 14th, the 2nd Amendment ... pierced the states rights veil, you might say, although again that's a restriction on states, not individuals, akin to the requirement that they have a "Republican Form of Government" (small r republican, of course :-).
Google only published because they felt secure with the advantage conferred by their patents?

That idea only makes sense if Google now starts enforcing their patent-granted monopoly on these techniques: suing people who are doing the things they've published. They haven't.

Until they do, this model of Google's patenting/publishing motivations is flawed.
Our startup would not be as fleshed out if we only had one person. In addition to having two minds and four hands working at the same time. We actually have synergy going when it comes to fine tuning our vision and then putting it into operation.

We eat dinner together every night and most of the time, the focus of conversation revolves around where we are now and what needs to be done to get where we are going. It really serves to keep the fire lit on our efforts. It’s like having a half-time pep talk in a football locker room every night. If you sat in on one of these dinners with us you would come away confident and energized, ready to put your all into it without reservation. Synergy is an amazing asset.

I think that there is so much to do on a startup that having the right person to work with makes it more valuable, especial if you have synergy between the founders.
Digital proposed this back in 1997 or so (before Digital was swallowed up by Compaq, then by HP). They called it Millicent.
http://web.archive.org/web/19970601153143/http://www.millice...

There's a patent and everything. http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7110979.html

I think Stephen Glassman (formerly at DEC) is now at Google. Not sure if he is/was involved in Google Checkout.
I think Google meant per year here because Google apps product pricing is $50 per user per year which gives 25GB of space per user.
horrible gamble. but obviously correct when you don't have to pay.
You rent movies all the time through Amazon, but do you do it from Ebert's page? No, you go straight there and do your thing.

This is why CPA ads and affiliate links are a bad deal for content sites. You come there to read stuff, not buy stuff. When you want to buy something, you search for it directly.
It seems unlikely that medical technology will not continue to advance. As such, there will always be new techniques which are, by their very nature, expensive relative to older proven means. So, yes, we'll be able to provide today's state of the art medical care "cheaply" in the not too distant future... but that will no longer be the standard by which emotionally-involved people judge "good enough" care.
and I think everyone underestimates the demand for dirt cheap computers that can browse the internet. go to any library, university media center, or other place with publicly available internet and you'll see hundreds of potential customers for this sort of thing.
Driving Revenue is full service affiliate marketing solution comprised of online marketers, developers and analysts. Our mission is to equip site owners with a variety of powerful and innovative tools designed to maximize their online ventures. We use cutting-edge solutions that provide a compressive and customized approach to your Internet environment. In short: we help you monetize your existing traffic.

Well, it sounds like they leverage core skillsets and world-class team synergy to provide clients worldwide with robust, scalable, modern turnkey implementations of flexible, personalized, cutting-edge Internet-enabled e-business application product suite e-solution architectures that accelerate response to customer and real-world market demands and reliably adapt to evolving technology needs, seamlessly and efficiently integrating and synchronizing with their existing legacy infrastructure, enhancing the e-readiness capabilities of their e-commerce production environments across the enterprise while giving them a critical competitive advantage and taking them to the next level.

Joke aside I do seriously wonder how they came up with the "compressive and customized approach to your Internet environment"...
Ceteris paribus, language choices affect latin as well. ;)
IIRC he built a million dollar product while still in hs. "Luck favors the prepared mind."

I see an inordinate amount of vitriol directed at him online. I assume it's mostly jealousy. He built a monster product that in hindsight seems very obvious, and you didn't.
The interesting subtext of this competition is that to an extremely good approximation, everyone who was interested enough to write a competitive entry used C/C++, even though the organizers went to great lengths to support as many languages as possible (e.g. Haskell, Scheme, etc.) This is with a small self-contained problem where performance wasn't a main difference between entries, and fast prototyping and experimentation could be extremely valuable.

What I take from it is being more convinced that the claims of dramatically increased productivity from other languages, in practical terms, are at best extremely overblown. If this isn't a practical problem where a Haskell or Scheme programmer could be competitive using advantages of those languages, it really makes me question what is.
Helvetica Cookie Cutters
Because those things require some kind of metadata added by the author while line numbers don't, and line numbers work for any type of text i.e. code. Not that those things aren't also really convenient for navigation, but I'd still want to be able to get at line numbers (though I'd also like to be able to create views, e.g. by zooming, that break up on-screen lines differently than the actual line breaks)
i'm all for giving a dying man his dreams, but we spend comparatively zero on dying kids in 3rd world countries. that much dough could allow a bunch of children a chance at a whole life.
The whole point of Wikipedia is to be an open source encyclopedia i.e. they're trying to open source expert's knowledge. There's no point in open sourcing open source knowledge, as you can't get reliable sources (i.e. acknowledged experts) to talk about that kind of thing much, and it's already open source anyway.
I think that's the idea behind http://www.flattr.com as well
It's an interesting argument, but if you make it a file, will the system know that:

cat file1 > proc/mail/coworker@company.com

cat file2 > proc/mail/coworker@company.com

are two separate messages?
Boone Pickens (on Energy): We're the Dumbest People in the World
but you're talking about spending your own money, not mine! euthanize you, and donate the money to a charity helping starving 3rd world kids get a chance at a whole life.
It's even worse - not only is it stripping links, it's often actually breaking them. The www.glutenfreebay.com example actually should redirect to glutenfreebay.blogspot.com, but instead it's heading to ebay.com.
The spec has now been posted: http://ostatus.org/sites/default/files/ostatus-1.0-draft-1-s...

I find this new Web 2.0 flavor of spec mashup as hard to follow as a Twitter conversation. I wish people would provide a complete spec (if only as an "informative" adjunct to the real spec) rather than including-by-reference ten different sub-specs, none of which make sense in isolation.
Are you serious? This is the company that gave us Buzz, the security-flawed thing that exposed everyone's private addressbook such that even one's urologist or gynecologist was exposed, or let your bad, discarded clients get to see all your good clients so that they could contact them.

Second, take for instance an ad campaign I had that contained the word "WordPress" inside. Google publicly stated that this was finally okay and I could place ads having the word WordPress inside. So, I did and so did many other people. Google on WordPress and keep hitting the search button and you'll find many USA companies with search engine sidebar ads that have WordPress in them. But not me. No, not me. My creative gets disapproved on AdWords. Google can't even be consistent in their own policies.
Searching for a decent set of cans for the office...