skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have no idea what you've just said, but it doesn't make any sense.

Of course parsers are described by recursive functions, that's because recursive functions usually describe a push-down automata or a DFA, which you know, is needed for a parser.

But describing a parser is not easy, even in lispy languages ... you still need a declarative syntax (like BNF or PEGs) for those rules, you still need a strategy (like LL(*) or LALR(1)), you still need to deal with context-dependent constructs, and you still need an AST that must be optimized.

Text parsing is also not one of Lisp's strengths. Many implementations don't even have proper regexp engines ... but indeed, it's easy to translate any language to LISP as long as you're goal is not to generate something human readable.
Higher-value workers, more tax dollars, more dynamic economy, better everything, basically.
False. It's not like people put "watered-down track" on their resume, and most investment banks don't ask for transcripts until after employment (as verification; they fire you if you don't have one, but this is extremely rare).

Investment banks don't care about intelligence so much as the ability to go through hoops, follow orders, and game the system. In fact, if you look at their preferences as far as analysts go, intelligence seems to be selected against.
As Crockford comments, it's remarkably easy to get by in JavaScript without ever actually sitting down to learn the language. There's a lot of weird and funky JS out there written by e.g. Java programmers who only use a very small subset of the language's features - no closures, no object literals, and so on.

I second the recommendation of JavaScript: The Good Parts - it's a great book :)
Spend the Summer with BackType and True Ventures
No context in particular :) Just an observation of how the "inertial scrolling" people are raving about on the new iDevices has a history deeply rooted in Mac folklore (Andy Hertzfeld was part of the original Mac team).

Also note mention of hysteresis and Floyd-Steinberg Dithering which are worth reading up on.
Ya I've read that as well. It seems a very un-Apple move, but the timing is also weirdly coincidental. Not sure where I stand yet.
Owen concedes that his findings don't necessarily mean that training in young children or elderly patients is pointless. But "the evidence is not strong", he says. "And someone needs to go and test it."

This guy is a true scientist and a man after my own heart. He admits that he could be wrong, and responds with an honest analysis of the limitations of his results and a suggestion to go do some more tests to explore those dark corners.
If you application is a server then out of memory error during a request means that the request failed but not that you should shut down the server.

class not found means that some functionality is unavailable but you could provide a workaround that might have some disadvantages compared to the absent version but would work. For example, in Python (ImportError plays role of class not found here)

try:
import cElementTree as ElementTree # fast C extension
except ImportError:
from elementtree import ElementTree # ~30 time slower

Don't panic ;)
Lisp also has a lot of syntax, but it is ON TOP of s-expressions.
It hasn't been released, and probably won't be released in the near future.
This is absurd. Gizmodo owes no apology. They're journalists (however loosely) and a journalist's job is to report the W's, including the who. It's a relevant fact, and one of great interest, how an iPhone prototype wound up lost at a bar.

They've been pretty clear the whole time that it was an honest mistake on the guy's part. Could happen to anyone. They most certainly did not smear the guy at all. I don't think they were rude about it at all, they were reporting the facts.

In fact I'd say they were overly generous. Why the hell was he carrying a top secret iPhone prototype to a place that exists solely to get you drunk? He was careless, and it was his fault. If I were Apple, I wouldn't fire him, as I'm sure he won't do that again, and I generally don't believe in firing people for making mistakes. That's how you learn, and we all do it. But he'd not be taking any prototypes off-campus for a long time.

I mean, the guy left an iPhone prototype at a bar. That's like a CIA agent leaving a map to Osama Bin Laden's hideout at a McDonalds. A large part of his job is to not lose the prototype iPhone, and he failed. To blame it on a bar-goer is absolutely ridiculous.

The guy who found the thing allegedly tried to give it back. He's a better guy than me, I would have called up Microsoft, Engadget, and PC Magazine and had an auction.

Apple's institutionalized dickishness (further proof that corporate culture comes directly from it's leaders' personalities) actually prevented him from being honest. They deserved what they got on this one.
It's really hard for a reader to keep any sense of perspective around popular technology issues like this, isn't it? I think this is why I had to cut out my RSS habit.

To all of you out there hammering away on Gizmodo for publishing this information: Blessed are you, for in the future you will inherit advance review units and perhaps even be allowed to speak to our executives. Namaste.
To be honest with you [[stuff objectAtIndex:5] objectForKey:@"name"] is less readable than stuff[5][@"name"]. And you type this kind of code constantly over and over again, it can really stack up and create something that would be simple to read in other languages.
Facebook shuts down Facebook Lite
Eh...I think they're behind on this one. I used to use GMaps directly to look for places to eat. Now I use Yelp, taking ratings based only on a few reviews with a grain of salt.

At first I wasn't so sure, but now I'm convinced that apps diverting a lot of traffic away from search.
For prospective buyers who are still on the fence there's a handy 1000-word review comparing and contrasting The Good Parts with the Definitive Guide recommended above:

http://jmesnil.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/RzRcw.j...
Techstars Grad Sendgrid rasies $5 million
Greater transparency around government requests
I don't think it supports hulu, but the roku is much cheaper and is designed to stream netflix..
Will they be able to get it back?
moved to zerigo this spring:
http://www.zerigo.com/

been happy with it, and they have an easy to use API so if you are doing ~cloud~ things, you can script adding DNS entries etc quite easily from most programing languages.
Space shuttle Discovery landing
SproutCore: Introducing GreenHouse
Does any one else have this problem? If so, would you pay for the solution? If lots of people answered yes... this could be a product for a startup!
I really liked the concept of this article. I've been impressed by your other posts and just wanted to thank you for the insights you provide. As I get closer to launching my own ideas, I can't tell you how helpful it is to learn (or attempt to learn) from the experience of others like yourself.

A side note - I noticed you're using slicehost. With the "cloud-y" providers available (Heroku, AWS, etc) would you ever consider a move to them? Could that help eliminate any of the moving parts, or just relocate them?
Linux kernel for some time. Not the most well documented, but is full of great examples of how to wring every little ounce of performance from the machine. And, inspite of the low level nature of the code, it's beautifully modular.
Cool, thanks. I've been using ZoneEdit without any problems, but I may look into those providers also.
Wait, Lisp is a programming language. Unix is an operating system. Category error?
Business model innovation is making SV less important as a startup center
Eloquent Javascript is a really great ebook.
Duh, put adwords on all my personal pages! (joke)
Google reveals statistics on government requests of its data
In the same spirit I say "a classical liberal or an economist is a man that believes that societies are nothing more than markets".

Ridiculous strawman. If anything, it's the left that acts as though society is a simple system that can be effectively steered by central planning. And of course, selfless regulators will only steer in the right direction...

I'd add 4) the state must protect the values of a society, also

Which values? Christianity? Defending the sanctity of marriage? Preventing mixing of the races?

Universal health care, avoiding abortions, protecting the environment, controlling proliferation of drugs are ethical values. The state must do it because it is just wrong not to do it.

Ah, the values that you personally like. And it's wrong to not ruin the lives of recreational pot smokers?
Http://www.docangeles.com/
Excellent article. Let me start writing my check list now.
Also posted at:

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1278900
I don't think anyone has sincerely said that about the programming aspect of my work, ever.

The design, yes. The writing, yes. But to people I talk to, the code is whatever, the invisible shit that makes it work. They don't care.
Points for Everything
Georgia legislature bans involuntary implantation of microchips
Reading this just reminds me of Temple Grandin lecturing on her experience with autism and treating autism. There are so many behavioral treatment options in addition to prescribed medicine that can help autistic children.

Video Here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wt1IY3ffoU#t=5m20s

I'm not on the mother's side with this one. Try the treatments that have worked for others before you throw weed at the problem.
On Hacking Drupal Core and Contributing Back to the Project
Visual Basic - VB .Net - SendMessage Startmenue oeffnen / schliessen
Very close from what I gather from the web. It has macros similar to Lisp. They take an AST and return an AST. http://perlcabal.org/syn/S06.html#Macros

Do you think that Lisp style languages with sexps are the end in language design, or do you think that something better will be invented? (or has been invented)
Hacks/Hackers Unite: storytelling/hacking day for iPads and tablets, May 21-23
I got a chance to read it. You're right, it's much better than I thought.

But still, I disagree with the premise. It's a gamble. Better to just charge more to begin with.

The best freelance pricing advice I've ever heard - and ever given - is the slap-across-the-face rule.

First, you slap the client across the face.
Then you tell them your rate.

If they're not more shocked by the latter than the former, then your rates are too low. :)
Well, it is useful but not universal, and may be a bit confusing in a few places. For example, the "repl" entry for Common Lisp is M-x slime which of course is Emacs-specific (and M-x shell for Clojure is setup-specific on top of that).

There are a few items missing (eg regex substitution in Emacs Lisp). But in general, a nice resource, thanks!
Gorgeous Blonde (Who's Not DHH) Takes Over Official Rails Sites
i've had a couple proposals for projects that offered a perpetual royalty instead of upfront payment. i had to weigh the cost of development against the feasibility of the product "taking off" or just dying on the table and earning nothing.
White House Caught Altering Stimulus Baseline Projection by 7 Million Jobs
Media playback is offloaded to a "VX855 Media System Processor" which handles 1080p video.
I just bought both. The Good Parts to wet my appetite for JavaScript and the Definitive Guide to have a (hopefully) complete language reference.
If you haven't seen anything, did you actually look around?

Common SQL : http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/sql-tutorial/index.ht...

(loop for columns being the records of
[select [*] :from [SpeciesList]
:where aardvark]
do (print columns))

Common SQL provides some kind of embedded SQL that gets expanded with read macros and macros to more low-level Lisp code.
You can add syntax rules to Perl's parser. And you can add handlers for when a new syntax rule is triggered. As a result the handler either returns a string or a syntax tree.

Don't know how Perl is doing it and to what extent (only saw some samples), but I've seen it implemented in Boo (http://boo.codehaus.org/) ... where you have access to the entire compiler's pipeline.
If I'm reading the IRS page correctly. You only need to report it if you are bartering as a business. Since I didn't want to get involved with tax ids and 1099s I feel I fall outside the requirement. Plus the value of transaction was small enough that I don't need to declare it. But I'll see at next tax season.
That's how much they paid for the iphone, not how much income they made. As someone pointed out elsewhere in the thread they sell ads for $8 CPM so they probably made around $160,000 from it.
the system can recall the direction in which the stylus was moving when a particular stroke was made

Shooting white-boards or sheets of paper with a phone cam is probably more convenient than scribbling on a screen, but that requirement ...
Spend the Summer with BackType and True Ventures
This is a one of a kind opportunity to join a YC startup for the summer and learn from one of the top venture firms in the Bay Area.
To which one reply is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_Logic
"One of the most annoying things about JavaScript is that it has no scope for variables. Any variable, function, array or object you define that is not inside another function is global..."

One sentence explaining that JS doesn't have variable scope proceeded by a sentence explaining that it actually does have scope? JS absolutely does have scoping rules. The follow up to this sentence (the section labeled "Anonymous Functions And The Module Pattern") seems to be ignorant of the presence of prototypes (in a prototype-based language!) and uses a needlessly complex and confusing way of explaining how to expose functions. What's wrong with the prototype?
I didn't get it?? Something wrong with my eyes?
From zero to more than $1 billion in 18 months
The lowest dominated strategy for the "smallest unique integer" game with 3 players.
I don't have personal experience with Heroku or EC2.

My feeling is that, coming from my background (system engineer: I can do basic Linux administration but I don't breathe it) and at my scaling requirements, EC2 is more complexity versus "as simple as dedicated" VPS providers like Slicehost without any compensating advantage. Heroku seems like it would potentially be amazingly useful for folks who swing more programmer than systems engineer, and quite possibly for me as well, but I just have never gotten around to trying it out for a test drive.
Pusher: cloud service to push events to browsers
Giveway: Zappos.com CEO's eagerly waited new book
Instant Utility, Optimal Execution, & Syntactic Sugar
LOGO Version 1
Cool project! How did you get Sphinx to index MongoDB?

Link: http://www.ocwsearch.com/
One guy tries to live for a year solely on virtual money
Going "alone on a wing and a prayer" is fine, but you gotta make damn sure you know who you your god is.
You originally stated that, "Over the past 30 years funding per student has declined". What is your evidence for this? The paper I cited states that funding had no general trend over the time period, although with ups and downs based on the economy (for instance it declined from 2001 to 2005).
They're journalists (however loosely)

If by "loosely" you mean "not at all", then I'd agree.

and a journalist's job is to report the W's, including the who. It's a relevant fact, and one of great interest, how an iPhone prototype wound up lost at a bar.

It's a relevant fact that it was lost at a bar. Publicly shaming the individual, though? Doesn't add a damn thing to the story.

In fact I'd say they were overly generous.

I'd say they ought to be reading up on laws governing receipt of stolen property.

They deserved what they got on this one.

Yes, as we all know: two wrongs will always make a right.
You're citing benefits of education. But what is it that gives the State incentive to make that education low cost?
Here's a shortcut to what we're all really interested in :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22-Ji8_kDwg&fmt=22#t=2m55...
I think it's pretty childish on Gizmodo's behalf, what extra value does it bring to anyone besides getting a kick out of public humiliation.
Given the audience here, it would be super cool to add Arc in the fifth column for comparison.
Indexing lectures instead of courses is more useful.
'almost'
Clicking on China is interesting. I had no idea the Chinese government considered these things to be 'state secrets'. The data Google posted here isn't even information on what exactly was removed / requested. It's only broad stroke information - How many requests - how often there was compliance - what time of content was requested removed.

I wonder if this information for China were released if there would be much outrage... I can imagine:

-Outrage with Google for how often they complied

-Outrage at China for the sheer number of requests

-Outrage at China for the types of content removed

All in all, releasing that information would probably hurt Google far more than it would hurt China.
The people who wrote this entry have too much time on their hands. Hey I must have to much time on my hands to make this comment about people having too much time on their hands thus presenting at least a ironic situation and at most a Time Wasting Paradox.
I'd say the most important moral obligation of a free software author is to not waste people's time. The primary way to not waste people's time is to be accurate about claims you make regarding your software.

For instance, if your site says that your software does X, and points to a "Howto do X" document you wrote--and that document is actually for an earlier version of the software and fundamentally won't work with the current version, and it won't be apparent that its fundamentally broken until after I've spend several hours going through the tricky steps of the Howto document--then you have wasted my time.
I thought "42" was the meaning of life?
In this particular case? $0.

No one is going to care in 3 months when this is released. Apply fanbois will still be wetting their pants to be the first on line when it comes out. In the meantime, the media that are going to "lose money" are actually getting an advance.

Ayway, since when is it everyone else's responsibility to keep Apple's secrets secret so the media can get more page views?
It indexes the PDFs in the zip files. It's not just the courses, but the full text of all the lectures in each course.
Netflix Founder Acquires Online Education Start-Up
Over the last year we completely re-evaluated the quality of our articles and we set up new quality standards and guidelines to meet the expectations of our readers. We are trying to get better all the time. And we are always glad to get constructive criticism and feedback from our readers. Thanks for visiting Smashing Magazine.
The Day Einstein Died
The author isn't only talking about the regulators being corrupt or incompetent. He's also talking about market participants like Madoff and Lehman Brothers.

Removing regulation will not suddenly turn the bankers into honest people, as the author seems to think.

"Better than multiplying rules, financial accounting should be governed by the traditional principle that one has an affirmative duty to present the true condition fairly and accurately—not withstanding what any rule might otherwise allow."

He's suggesting that we take away the regulations and just ask the bankers to be honest. Maybe I'm just cynical, but I don't think that's going to work.
NAME (dispersion model) - used to model the volcanic ash cloud
Lisp has portable libraries for regular expressions.

Like this one: http://weitz.de/cl-ppcre/
Other companies get products leaked all the time, and no one blinks an eye. I really think Apple will have a tough time calling the verification of existence of an upcoming product "trade secrets".
Thanks!

I used the xmlpipe2 data source for Sphinx. A PHP script reads MongoDB and prints out the XML. Works a treat.
WordPress "Surprise me" plugin experiment to make publishing a little more fun.
Oracle now charging US$90 for ODF-Office plug-in
the switcher (http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...) story is also pretty interesting. i can't believe apple paid that much for what seems like a (relatively) small utility.
they are often good programmers but not very good software engineers

Agreed. There was a gentleman I had the pleasure of working with years ago who wrote an application in Perl that literally performed an inventory of every switch, router and attached device and did so faster than anything I've seen commercially available.

He quit on negative terms (I can't remember the specifics) and upon examining his code, it was FORTRAN in Perl (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/04/you-can-write-fortr...).

He was a brilliant individual. Myself and a few of his coworkers enjoyed bouncing ideas off of him, often is areas outside of his expertise. When he didn't have an outright "try this instead", he knew what questions to ask to get us mere mortals to think about the solution differently.

If I didn't know the man better, I would say that he intentionally obfuscated his own code. But I get the impression after reviewing several of his projects that he simply thought differently and that expression was displayed in his work. Unfortunately, it made him an island and all of his projects a one-man effort. His manager didn't know good code from bad and didn't require documentation or review. Nobody could support this guy's code except this guy.
>Modern liberals have greatly expanded the list of government functions, but, aside from totalitarian regimes, I know of no modern political movement that has shortened it.

We hear conservative and libertarian voices constantly decrying the expansion of government power, but what about the expansion of corporate power? Government deregulation is totally meaningless when virtually all industries are controlled by a handful of super-corporations with more capital and internal legal structure than most countries. The only way deregulation can have a whisper of a chance of ushering in a better market is if we also insist on the abolition of the multinational corporation, and break up the behemoths into competing regional conglomerates.

Of course, without any regulation, a single victor will soon emerge to impose its own will.
A spotted a few from this large collection:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dailypoetics/sets/7205759410438...
> As a natural one [English] is one of the simplest.

Strongly disagree. I think it's one of the most baroque, with too many special cases, irregulars, and gotchas. It doesn't have specific types of complexity. For example, its morphology[1] seems pretty bare, at least if you compare it to other Indo-European languages, but even there it's more complex than Japanese or native Hawaiian. To your point, that makes it mostly amenable to search-and-replace filters, which is convenient.

[1] Changes to the word reflecting grammatical usage, such as "-ness" signifying a noun or "-ed" signifying a past tense. These are usually the bits of other languages that English-speakers think are "hard."
Ha, Brasil is first. A friend of mine was the admin contact for the .br domain for a large internet company. When he went back to Brazil on a visit, he was summoned to the police station for questioning (!!) over some stolen credit cards that had been used on the site.

The law is pretty strict there about ownership and responsibility for what goes on on your servers.
This is a bit unrelated, but does anyone know how google manages to make those three pages load without showing the refresh flash? It doesn't look like they are being loaded via AJAX so I can't figure it out...