skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well it's easy to disagree with him on many points.

The use of macros that I've seen in CL source doesn't indicate that people are creating other programming languages out of Lisp. In fact, it makes the source easier to read by allowing a natural level of terseness by way of abstraction.

Python's method of abstraction is via encapsulation in it's class/meta-class/object model.

However, this is an argument for another post.

Funny how these Lisp posts continue to flame across the net.
For a couple of days, new Like button stuck showing only 5 likes for my site whereas I'm sure there are more, so I removed it.

But, implemented a Facebook login though the new graph api and it's really nice to work with. The documentation lacks a bit but enough to integrate it to my site in a day.
The Startup Lessons Learned Conference
iPhone apps on iPad both suck and are more awesome than I expected.

Anything text based is pretty poor. Nice that it's an option, but not something you want to use regularly unless you have to. Especially because they use the iPhone soft keyboard rather than the iPad one.

Games, on the other hand, work just fine. I usually forget I'm playing a scaled version once I start. Kind of like TV resolution: 20 minutes into my movie, I've totally forgotten whether I'm watching 720p or 1080p. (Others certainly have different experiences, though!) I've found that several iPhone games (mostly graphical adventures) that I didn't have much patience for on a tiny screen are engaging and fun on an iPad. So for me, the biggest problem with some iPhone games on iPad isn't the resolution, it's the controls: most games with a "traditional" control system (joystick on the left, buttons on the right), would be much better if you could move the controls farther into the corners. Between the iPad screen bezel and the black border that gets added to iPhone apps (they're a slightly different aspect ratio than the iPad screen, so they don't entirely fill the screen), it's hard to reach my thumbs to the controls.
Why Cloud Computing Will Never Be Free
Macros aren't always a great solution. I think Haskell is the best example: many features, such as the lazy evaluation, the type system, and especially referential transparency would be very hard to add on Lisp without making it very verbose and ugly. Here's an example:

http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/monad.html
Help Get More Good Programmers
(defun take-1 (it what)
(cond ((eq what :all) it)
((eq what :none) nil)
((and (numberp what) (plusp what))
(subseq it 0 what))
((and (numberp what) (minusp what))
(last it (- what)))
((and (consp what)
(= (length what) 1)
(numberp (first what)))
(nth (first what) it))
((and (consp what)
(= (length what) 2)
(numberp (first what))
(numberp (second what)))
(let ((end (if (minusp (second what))
(+ (length it) (second what))
(second what))))
(subseq it (first what) end)))
((and (consp what)
(= (length what) 3)
(numberp (first what))
(numberp (second what))
(numberp (third what)))
(let ((end (if (minusp (second what))
(+ (length it) (second what))
(second what))))
(loop for e = (subseq it (first what)) then (nthcdr (third what) it)
for i from (first what) below end by (third what)
collect (first e))))))

(defun take (thing &rest description)
(cond ((null description) nil)
((and (consp description)
(= (length description) 1))
(take-1 thing (first description)))
(t (loop for e in (take-1 thing (first description))
collect (apply #'take e (rest description))))))
Same way you would do it in lisp - you'd build a function to do pattern matching and use conditionals to test which pattern is matched.

(defun solve-poly (p)
(if (match '(+ (* ?a x) ?b) poly))
(-b/a where b, a come from (extract-values-from-pattern-match poly))
(some code for second order)
))

(Some code borrowed from lispm's comment. Not sure which library the match function comes from.)
How To Catch And Use Your Dreams Part 1
"Mr Robot Paint" image processing algorithm (pics)
I actually wound up in an email discussion about that with Guido. He made it clear that it wasn't just that he didn't find a syntax he liked, but that he didn't try hard because he's not convinced that code that makes heavy use of anonymous functions is a good idea. And the latter seems to me to be his real objection.
Given two lines on a plane, find integer points closest to their intersection
Disclaimer noted, but as to your lisp/HTML example, HTML and lisps actually have a lot in common - if you strip away the end tags and the angle brackets, you get something very lispy looking

<div>
<span>Hello</span>
</div>

has the same (prefix) order of operators and operands as

(div
(span "Hello"))

Off the top of my head, the "hiccup" package for Clojure has an 'html' function (macro?) that translates just that sort of stuff directly into html
I'll have to try it on Safari, but that's not supposed to be normal no... Sounds like a wicked bug though! ;)
>analysts Visible Measures add in all copies of a video together with spoofs and pastiches, and their list of the top fifteen videos is as follows

I disagree with the reasoning that "spoofs and pastiches" belong to the "complex business model" set of videos and not the "creative amateur" set.
This. The performance improvements in modern hardware are primarily beneficial to developers, not users. Developers have always aimed for "fast enough," and the less time and effort it takes to reach that goal, the more functionality can be added in the same number of man hours.

The problem is that people have different definitions of what fast enough means, and edge cases might not meet anyone's defenition of fast enough, if they just weren't considered.
True; if pieces consist of 3-5 blocks, then it's not Tetris. It's Tri/Tetra/Penta-is.
Awesome Foundation, Spreading Awesomeness Across Universe, Expands to West Coast
>> If your image is a photo or something photo-like, you should use JPG.

Keep in mind that many, many things produced by computers these days are photo-like, as the OP demonstrated with the icons, so this might not be the best rule of thumb. No argument that simple images should be PNG, but toss in a couple of gradients (which your HN screenshot does not have) and your PNG can start to blow up.
A "blub language" isn't an inferior language, or one with less features. It's a language in the middle of the ladder that goes from assembly to the ideal language. All the languages you described except Lisp are, in PG's mind, blub languages. Notice that Lisp can be applied to every of your examples: just use it as a code generator (which is very commonly the case for HTML, and I've seen it done for C as well), or use an appropriate dialect (eg. bitc for low-level, arc or clojure for web programming, CL for AI).

What you're describing is just a less powerful or a less appropriate language.
"Crunchman" Draper, most if not all of the old L0pht crew, Condor, Woz, Dark Dante, etc.
Also, AFAIK people generally use Lisp to generate HTML, not as a replacement to HTML.
Because most people aren't geeks and just don't care about their computing environment enough to make the huge move of seeking alternate employment. Not to mention that in this lousy economy, your average person is probably quite short on options.

Besides that, how well do you think a site would do if it told you to find a new job - are you going to find a new job, or a new site?
Maybe it's me being an old weirdy beardy, but what's with all the oooooold hacker folklore on HN recently? I keep expecting to see someone post 'more magic'. Can we not just post a link to the Jargon File and be done with it?
That is not what I meant, actually. I meant rendering a logo via some paint methods, where all the information the methods have is some text, color and style attributes, etc. Then the logo gets drawn on-the-fly by the user's browser. It could work for simple logo's, I believe.
Alex. Proj. Chap. 15: The Alexandria Project Makes the Evening News
I think this is just a symptom of a greater issue. Many of us assume that when we post something on the internet (facebook) it should be private. The reality is that you are handing your information over to another entity, and you are doing so willingly. That entity has vast resources and the ability to change the terms of service and rules at will.

If you just have the mindset that anything you share on facebook will be posted on a billboard in Times Square, you can know for sure that you are getting the privacy you want.
Google Launches New AdWords Certification Program
Hmmm, not really a good article:

To get about the same clock, you need to pay $325.

The Core-i7 980X is made on a smaller process node, 32 instead of 45 nm. The two processors aren't easily compared, the cores in the Core have half the L2 cache of the Phenom (256 vs. 512KB) and the shared L3 is twice as big (12 vs. 6MB).

As for the pricing, according to Wikipedia there's just this one unlocked Core desktop part, vs. a couple of dozen Xeon server parts and 8 4 core dual processor parts. It sure looks like to me like Intel is selling all the server parts it can and is throwing out this one desktop version for the enthusiasts with a price to match.

Anyone have an idea of what the different L2 and L3 cache tradeoffs will mean in practice?
After reading the article, and reading some of the problems with it, it sounds like we should hope that this bill dies a quick death.
I too immediately thought of Freakanomics and Malcolm Gladwell, as well as Thomas Friedman. There seems to be a trend of writing books around "anecdata", as the OP calls it - anecdotes presented as patterns, while failing to account for selection bias in the process.

Of course, there's probably an irony in the fact that I drew a trend from merely four anecdotes as well...
This change provides an added benefit of cleaning up the Twitter app ecosystem. Twitter is changing, and if an app developer won't make this change they probably wouldn't ever be inspired to update their app to use new features^, and users would go elsewhere (in this case sooner rather than later).

^ Single-use apps--visualizations come to mind--deserve a pass. They do one neat thing and don't necessarily need to grow and evolve outside their niche. I'm sure one app or another will be missed.
Winer need to turn turn down the font scaling in his site. It's absolutely HUGE on the iPad. If he doesn't fix it, I'm not going back. ;)
2-year provisional patents - USPTO call for comments
I don't have a .jpg optimizer, but a PNG screenshot run through pngcrush has been consistently smaller than a .jpg compressed to the wrong side of tolerable for me.
Ask HN: Where are the WebGL JS game engines?
There have been a few JavaScript game/graphics engine HN submissions lately, and even a 3D engine submission, but none of these used WebGL. Considering the speed of OpenGL, and that OpenGL (and OpenGLES) is useful and in fact quite suitable for 2D work as well as 3D: where are the WebGL engines?

The only one I've heard of is CopperLicht, created by the guys behind Irrlicht: http://www.ambiera.com/copperlicht/
The IT Optical Illusion
I'm flagging you. I was one of the people paying 50 bucks for it, and this just starts some kind of stupid DRM battle. The guys did the work to accumulate the data, they're not asking for your firstborn. Giving it away is just screwing over somebody else's business model simply because you can.
Mahalo is no better or worse off for this incident.

The people who hate Jason and/or Mahalo still hate them. The people who like Mahalo, well, I can't imagine they quite match up with the profile of the average YC reader...
I think macros do have certain disadvantages (they make debugging seem to look harder, more syntax, etc, ...).

But I find things like extensive use of MOP also make maintenance of programming more challenging.

Common Lisp has never tried to take away 'power' from users.

Scheme had a different philosophy: reduce everything to the most basic and pleasing constructs. But that approach has its own disadvantages - if one arrives at the bottom of programming language constructs, working 'upwards' is a problem.

Take for example the argument lists: Common Lisp has things like keywords, optional and rest arguments. Plain Scheme only has rest arguments. Adding other argument interpretation is possible, but is only really use if the language would support it and would make use of it.
What happened to that spreadsheet? It's been completely cut down (and not even to the top-N as there are many other tech companies with better numbers that were removed). Folks added many more companies than are currently showing and we had columns for Profit and Profit per employee (which I think is a much better metric).
Adding a Python style yield to C++
Got it, and yes you're right. Ponzi schemes are devastating, and I see how my post could be misinterpreted. My bad, really.

To clear things up regarding Facebook and the original link as well, I should explain that I have a really hard time believing what the original poster says about their ads. It might very well be that a lot of people fail to use them in a meaningful way because they haven't thought through what makes Facebook advertisement unique. I am certain that a sizeable fraction of the ad market can and will exploit them, and especially the infinitely granular targeting.

My experience as a user is a bit mixed (lots of crap and/or scam, and thankfully less and less social games silliness as I've downvoted it), but I've seem true gems too (job ads targeting my university + degree + class, pretty neat! -- or a nice ad campaign by Hulu in its early days that targeted a show I had just listed as one of my interests). All in all, the future of FB is pretty bright in my book.

Edit:
Also, I should point out that I do not think at all that Facebook's business has anything fraudulent, improper or immoral. My original post (second from the top) was just trying to explain why someone who held the post's author's views on FB ads could believe the company was fundamentally instable and depended on perpetual growth for survival. I personally don't agree with this view, and think they'll be just fine -- and apparently I'm not alone: http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/20/facebook-valued-at-14-billi...
> Why shouldn't the guy post it online, really?

Because now on the first page when you google his name you'll find a post about him leaving a company after 12 months and posting a private exchange with his (former) boss on his blog.
Not a very scalable solution, but if there is a file named -X where X is any option to rm, * will expand to catch it, and if illegal, rm will exit without doing anything. Someone taught me that in college back in the day (sequent/dynix).
"I installed Google Chrome, it said everything will work. But after installing I again go back to internet by clicking "e" and it doesn't work"

Compare this to when they install the Chrome Frame plugin:

"I installed Chrome Frame and it rocked my 'e'.."
Your security, and privacy, is based on the kindness of strangers.
Or I didn't want to talk about pre-production. I meant to talk about the begin of the normal production run, where demand for hyped devices (say: Wii, Nintendo DS, iPhone, iPad) far outstrips supply.

By the way, it may be rational for companies to let this happen, since mass production facilities cost a lot of money to set up, and they have to aim at the longer term demand instead of the spike at the beginning.
Formalising Bonds with the Informal
A Short Introduction to the x86 Instruction Set Encoding
Very kind of you to share, I've seen a lot of data like this in the past, it looks pretty familiar in terms of the type of stuff on there.
For a "bulletproof" demo, it would be OK if it didn't contain bugs. When I tried this in FF 3.6.4 32-bit (Windows 7, 64-bit) the UI seemed to indicate that the details where already expanded, but I had to click it twice to actually get the details.

Haven't tested with other browsers yet though.
Here is the follow-up post, mentioned at the end of the article, about the three Ghost Army alumni artists:

http://blog.seattlepi.com/bookpatrol/archives/198123.asp
This could only work for people living on their own. What's gona happen if one person wants to watch tv and another wants to shower? Also the tinted windows would get very annoying after like 1 day, they would make you feel sleepy. Very cool design though.
I don't know what the developers expect to get out of this. Do they think that it hasn't occurred to Apple's engineers that this might be convenient? I think, as with copy/paste and background apps, the issue has been how to implement something like this and not harm the user experience.

I suspect the big thing preventing wireless sync until now has been the lack of 802.11n on the iPhone. Syncing 4 gigs of movies out to your phone on 802.11g has got to be painful (and a realy battery drain).
"Chrome Frame doesn't turn IE into Chrome, it turns IE into something similar to Chrome when on YouTube. When not browsing YouTube, it's still good old IE."

I'm afraid you're mistaken. Chrome Frame replaces Trident, and renders any page just as it would be in Chrome. It also uses Google's V8 javascript engine, again without restriction as to the site you are visiting.

http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/
Video Game Dropshippers| Dropship wholesalers & companies
I guess you can pretend to pay with a credit card, then cancel the transaction (or something). Since you have the product now, you have a debt with them, and could pay them with cash.

Of course, in theory they could counter that by having an artificial hight price (say a few millions), but give you a discount (down to the normal price) if you pay with a credit card. This way you wouldn't want to pay cash.
So what was the answer? My guess is "A Riddle"
If you haven't read it, I do highly recommend Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies as a worthy attempt to quantify the process of collapse as a function of diminishing returns on added complexity.

I recall it being damned expensive to buy, but you should be able to borrow it from a well-appointed library.
Summary: iPad and consoles are restrictive
(Agreed, but those who read past the first paragraph - which held such promise - probably know this already)
> The reality is that you are handing your information over to another entity, and you are doing so willingly.

The perception is that when you gave that information over to the entity it will stick with the privacy rules you had setup at the time. In this case, Facebook's new systems are ignoring those privacy settings and making things public that were previously set to be private. At the very least, they are adding new features that give new views into your data that make your existing data public.
I guess it's time for me to try Plan 9 in a virtual machine again soon. Last time I tried it, I wasn't able to get it up to the point that I could use the Web browser. That's kind of necessary these days, if one wants to stick with an OS.
It seems when you hit saturation point for apps an obvious next step would be for some of the competing apps to throw in with each other either simply by merging, or working from a common code base by factoring out shared functionality.

How well does Android support these open source development methods?
Lots of speculation going on in that article, still, I hope much of it materializes, an open video standard and new browsers will facilitate the adoption of HTML5 and after seeing what can be done with the technology mostly through the daily demo posts here on HN I would like IE to fuck off quite frankly.
And the relevant tidbit: "Facts and ideas can't be copyrighted, but their expression and structure can. You can always write the facts in your own words though."
Yes, but the others I want to let know are my friends, not some random person I don't even know
That Lost 4G Phone
That's probably unbeatable :) (ok, short of India probably, and I don't want to try and beat it).
Logos should be easier to copy and paste because people do that a lot. Think of a journalist writing an article about some site, if he needs a image he might use your logo. Also, Facebook uses images on the page when you post a link to identify that link.

There are so many reasons for a logo to be an image.
Neat!

(^x.x x) (^x.x x)
InternalError: too much recursion
Google doesn't care if IE goes away, as long as IE is a standards-compliant, performant browser. At that point, it's just a commodity offering from Microsoft and not a strategic weapon used in an attempt to hold on to an eroding Windows/Office monopoly.

Google wins when browsers become good enough to provide for so many user needs that a Windows PC becomes viewed as a specialty device for gaming, etc. Google's cloud printing initiative is further evidence that they hold this view. Grandma might be happy with a ChromeOS netbook sitting on the coffee table so she can videoconference with her kids, but she still wants to print photos of her grandkids for the refrigerator -- so, she still owns a Windows machine instead.

What does "win" mean for Google? The obvious benefit is that breaking down the Windows/Office franchise cuts off a lot of Microsoft's air supply. The oft stated benefit is that Google is best positioned to monetize a Windows-free world, but I think that breaking down Windows/Office is likely to lift all boats but one.
If performance, compared to intel, is anything like magny-cours - it's nothing to write home about. http://www.anandtech.com/show/2978/amd-s-12-core-magny-cours... I would like to see some benchmarks though (especially rendering like cinebench).
They pronounce it somewhat similar to like an English person would pronounce `Yerker'.
that's actually pretty cool. How about an option to also store it in the "cloud" somewhere so that one can retrieve the fridgelist from another location?
I'm not a lawyer, but per Feist v. Rural, facts cannot be copyrighted in the United States. Collections of facts may be eligible for copyright, but it requires authorship, and hinges on the creativity of presentation (the author must select which facts to include, how to present them, etc.) but the facts within the collection are not entitled to copyright protection. If this collection was generated automatically by accessing the Google API, it would probably not qualify for copyright protection based on a lack of creativity in its creation.

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US...
MobileDL - Instapaper for video
Actually they telegraphed the change long before that, but the problem is that OAuth changed in the interim and is now a moving target. So any developer that got on board and implemented OAuth is getting burned twice.
What was the email about? Do you have a pointer? Why didn't you want it published? Did you say in the email it was private? Was it in response to something public? Was it abusive?
Active discussion of this with the developer posting on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/bvzzt/hey_reddit_i_ma...
Yes we're using node.js on the server-side with a combination of long-polling and normal polling (for slower devices like iPhone). I can't talk about any other server components as much of it may change. We'll post details when we think it's good to go!
Inverse Fourier Transform of a Bee Swarm in the Fifth Dimension
It's not a fact, it's a database and databases are protected by law.
Video: Founder Dialogues - EnerNOC's Tim Healy & Founder Collective's Eric Paley
Punishing Security Breaches
Haml/Sass 3 RC1 released
Android on the iPhone?
Steve Jobs to Nike: Get Rid Of The Crap
Isn't it fake...?
The one thing I wonder about is disconnecting during the sync. A couple of times I have disconnected iPod Nanos during sync and had to restore them. It wasn't much more than a nuisance, admittedly, but on a slower sync with more data transfer (say 20 or 30 GB of video), the likelihood of disconnects being a problem may become significant.
The selector inheritance with @extend looks especially useful; it makes it much easier to take a DRY approach to CSS. There's a separate blog post on it here:

http://nex-3.com/posts/99-selector-inheritance-the-easy-way-...