skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would never say never, but I haven't been able to think of a better way to represent programs than s-expressions despite many years of thinking about the problem.

I wouldn't be surprised if sexprs are the end in the sense that the integers are. I.e. you might go on to discover new things but they'd ultimately reduce to sexprs.

Is there a textual representation for ASTs? Could you write programs directly in ASTs?
A new version of DotComGuy ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DotComGuy
One of PGs essays discusses similar ideas (http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html). I agree that segregating teenagers may actually be harming their development instead of aiding it.

The problem is specialisation and aptitude. First part of the problem: Underlying most modern education is the idea that each individual is suited to a different profession, and that both the individual and society benefit when people are allowed to pursue that specific profession.

Second part of the problem: there are more specialisations, professions, then ever before. How many basic professions can you think of? Farmer, sailor, doctor, ... There are hundreds or thousands. And every one has hundreds or thousands of specialisations. In some professions these change on a yearly basis.

Thus education becomes a search problem, and like all search problems the key is scaling: how do you find the ideal speciality for each of the millions of students? Modern education takes an iterative approach, where students learn the absolute basics of everything, then learn a little more of a slightly narrower subset. The early iterations (i.e. school) are long and concentrate on building up foundations for later choices. The later iterations (i.e. early jobs) are shorter and concentrate on quickly narrowing down huge numbers of possible specialisations.

Reality (young brain needs real world) vs. Idealism (direct each person to an ideal profession). The trick is how to compress the spectrum - incorporate reality into a system built on an ideal.
A tip: It seems the Perl job market varies a lot depending on where you are. If you're willing to move, you can probably get a Perl job. (See history at jobs.perl.org for ideas.)
Good points, but remember it isn't an either or. I had several friends in high school who worked in addition to class. And yes, most of those were "McJobs" but for at least one young lady I know that "McJob" brought in a nontrivial portion of the income for her entire household. And another ran his own business. Granted it was just a lawn maintenance business, but it was his and helped him start saving.

In college it is even easier to do both because there is more freedom. I worked full time in tech support while I was getting my undergrad. Now I am going for my masters part time while working full time.
I once met an angel investor who introduced himself as "Angel Investor to Rockstar Entrepreneurs." Then I said, "cool, I have to go to the bathroom."

p.s.
That angel investor is actually a regular poster here on HN.
Very few, true.

I almost feel as if we need a return to a semi-apprentice model - for high schoolers, at least:

For some of the day, you take classes teaching you theories, history, and so forth. For the rest of the day, you work an apprenticeship at a company. You don't get paid for it; the employer doesn't get that much work out of you; but you apply concepts that you're learning in your classes to what you're doing at your apprenticeship.

Don't like your apprenticeship (the line of work, the subjects, et cetera), change it. But your classes stay largely the same. If you stay at the same apprenticeship throughout school, you likely have a paid position (or, part-way through, a part-time paid position) as soon as you graduate. The employer could decide to subsidize your higher education, if you need it. But this model should work well enough that most of what you need to be entry level at that position is taught to you by the time you graduate. The rest just rounds you out.

It worked well enough for the "makers" of the 17th century: why would it not work well for the "makers" of the 21st? Not only computer programming, but numerical analysis, musicianship, and so on and so forth would work fine for this. Some professions that absolutely require a higher degree (nuclear engineer; architect - though that's arguable, and already uses an apprenticeship system; structural engineer (doubt you could learn all that math in high school); etc). Even such a thing as research assistant would work well as an apprenticeship.

Note, of course, that there's no geographical limit on what a student could take an apprenticeship on, with todays communications advances.
Found a YouTube channel where all the videos were uploaded, at http://www.youtube.com/user/djs61257.
My point is that majority of western news about China are biased and sensational and taken out of context. You form your opinion based on the source that is already filtered by the journalists.

You will have much better view of the whole story if you can read Chinese media, just for the full story. You might refuse to do so because they are controlled by the government. I ask you to talk to Chinese, you refuse as well because you think there is no need. How "sound" do you think your opinion will be?
It seems to be. He has more photos of her on his blog, too: http://stellerphoto.com/blog/archives/207

And revenues of $200 million for the company who puts the pages up! http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/16/business/fi-demand16
> Why are you complaining about Universal healthcare when both your examples of low costs France and Germany include universal healthcare?

I'm pointing out that experience with US govt healthcare suggests that universal healthcare provided by the US govt is likely to be very different from what other countries have done.

Remember - we don't get France or Germany running US govt healthcare - we get the US govt doing it.

> PS: Much of the savings of a universal healthcare system only works as you cover everyone. EX: Massively reduced paper trails, subsidizing the cost of medical school etc.

Sorry, but the "paper trail" argument doesn't fly. You have to track medical histories, which contain far more.

And, we already subsidize medical schools. More to the point, that spending is in the noise. If Obama wants to spend more money there, he'll lose at most half to the remaining private sector and can easily reduce the losses to 0. (As a condition of receiving "extra aid", folks can be obligated to work for ObamaCare for n years, just like the military academies. And, if you find that folks are unwilling to take the deal, that's worth knowing.)

I find the lack of interest in the trial period interesting. Most folks jump at the chance to prove themselves. Few think that they should be given complete control without any previous experience, let alone negative experience.
Hooray! Somebody who has someone with more experience and authority to cite than "my kid" or "PG says."

JTG and related changed my life.

I quit school at 14 and never looked back. And never once regretted it.
20 April 1889

Well done, Sir !
I disagree

>> someone who obtains your password will use it immediately, not sit on it for weeks until you have a chance to change it

True, but I've personally seen several cases where someone's email or facebook account was being used for unsolicited advertising and pornography, and they didn't even know it. They may use your password immediately, but they may also use it for a long time before the average person realizes it.

Furthermore, their conclusion was justified purely by economic motives - about how much financial damage is done by cyberattacks, versus time spent changing passwords. There's no mention of the obvious privacy concern when a spammer has your password - regardless of the financial damage they may or may not do.
Couple of interesting startups launched today at GeeknRolla
Pownum, a new take on user ratings, and iGlue a Hungarian company that wants to "wikify" the web. There were also a couple of music industry sites (sorry I don't remember the names and I'm too lazy to check) and a games network that seemed interesting.

Other than that, 4 out of 5 early stage investing panelists didn't invest in startups, but told us how cool venture capital is, a VC explained how to use BCC in emails to a connection when following up after asking for an introduction and a UK company founder told us about her dream to be funded by US venture capital as that would help obtain a bigger exit (I'm not kidding).

Then Morten Lund totally crushed it. A genius.
Noam Chomsky is America’s greatest intellectual.

What is the point of this "article", or posting it on HN?
I had the chance to see it at the theater on the release day long before all this parody videos were created. It's an amazing movie, the best featuring Hitler in my opinion. The theater was pretty crowded and lots of people cried during the movie. I'd say Bruno Ganz's performance shares a big part of the responsibility for that effect, one of the best actings I have ever seen. You should all watch it, really.
So this is basically the DMCA protecting us from an unfunny copypasta meme? Awesome.
Failure As A State Of Mind
it's easy to make people think you're some kind of misunderstood genius without having any kind of valuable work whatsoever

Are you kidding? It's incredibly difficult to impersonate a rockstar. Even I, who have not watched a single minute of American Idol, know how to tell a true rockstar in thirty seconds: Auditions. You hand them an instrument or a microphone and tell them to perform.

And a rockstar needs a portfolio and -- if possible -- a fanbase [1], and these are also hard to fake. Evidence on Youtube suggests that Stefani Germanotta had a lot of musical talent and intelligence as a sophomore in music school, but she didn't become a rockstar until she'd developed a persona, adopted a stage name, released some tracks, and sold them to enough people. Real rockstars ship.

Analogously, we all know that when a programmer comes through the door claiming to be a rockstar you have to insist on seeing their portfolio and watching them perform. That's what all the discussions of the interview process are about.

---

[1] In practice, the software metaphor rockstar really means something more like "aspiring rock star"; it doesn't necessarily refer to a programmer with a "fan base". If you actually want to hire Linus Torvalds, or Lady Gaga for that matter, you don't put out an ad asking for a "rockstar". You phone them up personally, or phone their agent.
Enhancing search using subtraction.
The director probably has about as much to say about the use of the end product as the janitor. Witness OK Go.
More likely it was someone with an addiction to substance / alcohol and they weren't planning on using it for themselves but instead selling it on for a quick buck.
HTML 5: Not Any Time Soon
"Here are some of the “aha!” moments I’ve had in the past"

He doesn't say how long ago in the past.
It's more of a chronic problem than a sitedown problem. You might be surprised how crappy some hosts and resolvers are.

Using dual 3rd-party DNS does give you one very good advantage in acute situations, though. When your host goes down hard you can still repoint domains, receive email, etc.

In general I recommend dispersing services: put your company's blog on a subdomain hosted somewhere else like Weebly, and use something like Google Apps to handle your domain's email routing.
KahelOS 050110 Review and Screenshots
To your question: yes, the Perl syntax (the macro system supports quasiquotation). This is exactly the same as in Lisp. The difference is that Lisp syntax looks more like how the data structures are represented in memory. I think you can also build up your programs with data constructors (i.e. like doing (list 'lambda (list 'x) (list '+ 'x 1)) in Lisp). But note that I haven't used Perl6, this is information from the web.
The grandparent is getting modded to all hell, but there is a genuine point here about the sort of writer Douglas Adams was. Not that he's a bad writer, but that he's the sort of writer who would say his main character has no existence outside the sequence of words designed to create an idea of this imaginary person in people's minds.

Some writers would consider their characters to have some kind of additional existence inside their (the writer's) own mind. They would "know" things about their characters which they never put into print; not to the level of what sort of computer they used, but certainly a more fully-functional mental model of the character beyond the words on the page.

Douglas Adams wasn't one of these writers, he was a writer for whom the characters were always to a certain extent subservient to the joke and the narrative. And Arthur Dent is a particularly strong example of this since there was never all that much to Arthur's character; he's essentially just an unidealised version of Douglas Adams himself who travels around the universe reacting to things in pretty much the same way that Douglas Adams would if Douglas Adams found himself with no home planet and no tea.
As usual I warmly welcome any questions/criticism anyone has. Part of the reason I love HN is because the feedback you get on ideas is instantaneous and incredibly useful!
I think the magic only works when other knowledgeable people say someone is a ninja-rockstar as a compliment.

I have seen both kinds.
It's not a TED talk, it's in TED's "Best of the Web".
Distributed earthquake monitoring using laptop accelerometers
I'd be interested to see a study of people, like my folks, who were in their teens in the 60's and 70's. Up north where my family is from, you generally left school at 16, got an apprenticeship with a company like Caterpillar, or hit the coal mines or shipyards. There was no coddling, no indeterminate hiatus from responsibility, and it seems to have produced a generally successful group of people who rank amongst the top contributors to a variety of industries the world over, some of the largest and most successful companies ever brought to light having come from people within this generation. Something else I find interesting, and something I see in my own age group (30-40), is that a lot of the South Africans who were forced to undergo conscription into the armed forces seem to have a deeper level of self-discipline, which you'd expect from a military experience of the kind that they were subjected to. I'm not saying that you require a drill instructor to develop self-discipline, but it did have the advantage of forcing you to take responsibility for your assigned tasks, even if only to avoid a run and indeterminate PT to sooth the ruffled feathers of your shouty DI.
For some reason I cannot reply your comment, maybe because my karma is too low now.

"Normal citizens, with full rights under the law, are being openly convicted and suffering harsh penalties for speaking out against the government."

I would argue, in most cases, they are not normal citizens, even though in western media, they are portrait as freedom fighter. I can even tell you how to find information to prove this point: check out the China Study program in John Hopkins University (the top one in US), and they will tell you the conclusion in political science field is the freedom fighters from the Tiananman Square in 1989 are extremists. I don't think the reporters will go out and interview those political scientists. There are other good China Study program you can get academic opinions from, including Univ. of Iowa (another top 1), UW is good as well.

I am not arguing with you that there is no human right issue in China. There are, but the problem is presented out of the context and in many cases with false information. I am only suggesting that people do more firsthand investigation and talk to Chinese for some full stories, but looks like I am getting enough down-votes now.
LOOP is a good example of syntax creeping its way into Lisp (defclass, not all that much IMO).

As a counterexample that almost makes LOOP syntax look quaint, consider Perl regexes. That is some syntax right there.
What is the difference between virtual money and real money?

If he is able to get by using "virtual" currency, isn't he just demonstrating that it is actually real money?
Reports of Trojan as a Chrome Extension Emerge
This is of course a function of when you tried it. Its been out for over a year now, and in that time we've built out support for a lot of the built in widgets, especially for our 0.8 release. Things like TableView work very well now (which last time I checked is a class that isn't even that well supported in SC at all). And again, the proof is ultimately in the pudding: most of the apps that are shipping today have used either nib2cib or Atlas, and we have very few users who don't begin development today straight from our nib2cib based projects.
What a strange idea! "My website is boring, so I'll add something to distract people from my content to make it less so?" Seriously?

How is it different from just opening a game in another browser window, and why would users keep coming to my website to play the game instead of some centralized location?
I quit school at 14 and never looked back.

I'm not normally one to advocate my own career path -- I didn't leave school until I was twice as old as you were, and that was probably too long -- but just because you don't look back doesn't mean that others won't.

School can be a lot of fun, if it's your thing and you approach it properly. For example, I don't regret having taken the time to learn physics. It's nice to understand physics, quite apart from its economic value.
Artists like Weird Al use entire songs for parody, so I don't think a 5 minute clip would be too long.
I think what prevents this from being "parody" is that the thing being copied is not the thing being parodied. A "Downfall" parody video about Star Trek isn't a parody of Downfall, it's a parody of Star Trek, or maybe a parody of Star Trek fans.

Similarly, when Weird Al Yankovic ripped off Nirvana to make fun of Nirvana he didn't need to get permission to do so, but when he ripped off American Pie to make fun of Star Wars Episode 1 he did. (For the record, Weird Al nowadays always gets permission from the original artist anyway.)
"The trick is how to compress the spectrum - incorporate reality into a system built on an ideal."

It's actually much, much simpler than that. Schools simply don't give a damn about teaching students about anything- their primary purpose is just to keep the kids in one place all day long. So give the sufficiently motivated/intelligent kids, who have proven that they don't need to be kept in one place all day long, an opt-out option.
The other problem problem is that the current system has a lot of people and organizations invested in keeping the system running as is or adding more days to the system to add to income. Children aren't the issue, paychecks are the issue.
And Crockford always insists he "discovered" JSON. So please don't misrepresent him, based on the words of someone else.
In my case:

6 AP courses, start your own business after school, or drop out and start your own business.

I like option C.
You can call me whatever you think of as "the guy that's worth the most money". ;-)
Man loses part of finger in iPad theft
Personally, I've lost access to more accounts due to forgetting the password rather than having those accounts be accessed by outsiders. So I agree with this study's conclusions.
Hey, it worked for Facebook :P
Fair enough. I tried to keep my criticism firmly in the past tense too, because I wasn't sure how much love nib2cib has had since I evaluated it.
...or it doesn't need a name
Artists like Weird Al get permission from the original artists, they also don't use any original material, typically. For what it's worth.
I hope your head falls off
New Startup Asks: Would You Videochat With Your Shrink?
The other problem is that dumping millions of teenagers into the workforce would decrease wages for older people.
The interpretation of this study is astonishingly over-reaching. The BBC researchers designed their own cognitive stimulation program, applied it at a very low intensity in healthy young people, and then saw no effect on cognitive function. To then claim that their data shows that "computerized mental workouts don't boost mental skills" is akin to saying "sugar doesn't help with a headache, and sugar and aspirin are both molecules, so aspirin must not help with headaches either." This is an elementary logical fallacy.

There is a tremendous body of published evidence showing that certain specifically designed cognitive training programs drive real benefits:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19220558
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17565162

If the BBC researchers want to contest those results, they should use the programs and methods used in those studies. This is a fundamental principle of the scientific method, and its surprising to have to point it out to working scientists.

The only conclusion from the BBC study is that very limited amounts of everyday cognitive stimulation does not improve cognitive function. This is an interesting conclusion, and the study should have reported it as such.

Henry Mahncke
http://www.positscience.com
I am a researcher at Posit Science, where I design and test cognitive training programs.
"Never let school interfere with your education"
I've always thought the reason behind changing your password frequently was to thwart brute force attacks? Is that not the case?
A Look Back At Summize
Why is that odd?
No reason, it's actually a jquery plugin that is configured to make random effects by default. I can change it.
I think it's cool to have a widget that you can embed within your website, just like you embed a youtube video... but it looks like with heyzap, when they play a game, it lightboxes and obscures your website - they may as well have been redirected to heyzap to play it.

Do heyzap do a small game widget that sits within the page?
Thank you. My plan is to rely on PPC. Can you elaborate more on the affiliate concept?
Gizmodo could have written nearly the same exact article without mentioning his name and without showing his photo. It would have gotten nearly the same amount of pageviews. It was very, very cruel of them to do such a thing when they gained so little by doing so.
Glad to see you liked our project porras! As soon as the judging period is over we will publish an updated version that rocks.
I'd rather hire a samurai programmer than a ninja programmer. They're fiercely loyal, well-educated and much easier to find.
Just like Comcast? RCN accused of throttling P2P
If it was possible to give a standing ovation to someone via Hacker News, I would. This is perhaps the most sincere, mature, well-thought out commentary I've ever read on anything to do with the Iraq war. Spoken like a true soldier.

edit: to clarify what I mean, I grew up shortly after there was a civil war in my country - and as such I really appreciate soldiers who, having fought on soil that was not their own, are able to recognize the tragedy that occurs on both sides, regardless of politics.
Eh, it's a cheap form of social signaling which is performing it's function perfectly. Like how baby names move from high class to low class through diffusion, someone advertising for a rockstar 3 - 5 years ago was a good signal that you should consider applying and someone advertising for it now is a good sign that you shouldn't.
Emporio Armani Ladies Stainless Steel Cuff Bracelet Watch
Goodwill works when dealing with clients in small companies who have margin to offer goodwill.

Start dealing with a BigCorp and there is no goodwill to be had. In fact, this pricing mechanism may backfire because the person you are doing the work for isn't the person who signs off on the budget.
Did I understand this correctly... it's Reed Hastings himself buying the startup and NOT Netflix?