skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah. "Large" dot-coms. Well, I think your intuition tells you that "large" dot-coms are also capable of incurring public liability that is not held in check by their nominal liability. I'd argue that it's improbable that Apple or Google could do damage to the public on quite the scale that BP or Goldman-Sachs or Enron managed, but you could well be right.

But I think you really need to think about regulating risk, not classes of company - except insofar as classes of companies are in fact associated with certain categories of risk. Apple will not be causing a vast oil spill. Microsoft - well, Microsoft might be capable of destroying the global financial markets, but probably not as directly as AIG.

I consider the category of "dot-com" to be entirely orthogonal to this question. It's the risk, not the company. And moreover, it's instances where the risk to the public is far larger than the risk (or cost) to the company in the worst case. That's where regulation has to adjust the balance.

For instance, Google could accidentally deny email to about 176 million people at once, and that could arguably cause some damage. They could choose to stop offering free email with no notice. You could argue that this would cause them enough ill will that they wouldn't do it - but that argument clearly doesn't work for BP or the financial giants. So you might have an argument there.
It may sound trite, but it's true: it all depends on how you define "happy". I'm happy coding in Java, C#, C++, Python and ActionScript 3, to name a few. I was happy to code in Lisp and plain old vanilla C, too. My happiness with programming doesn't depend entirely on the language. I can honestly say that going back to more "mainstream" languages after coding in Lisp has made me even happier, because I had new ways of doing stuff that wouldn't have occurred to me before.

I often run into stuff I can't do in one language that I could do in another. The challenge this poses can be (and often is) frustrating, but it can also be fun: how can I do XYZ as expressively and elegantly as possible in language ABC?

It's the kind of work I do that makes me happy or unhappy, and the freedom I have in it.
A Tale of Two Students
Many people will emotionally latch on to anything for a thrill - hate this, love that; it is all as meaningless as the sitcoms they devour.
> This varies with personality and situation - I know exactly what you mean because I was shouted at for being fat and lazy as a child and it never did any good, but I can also think of many situations in my own life where the opposite was true and people yelling at me for failing provided the impetus to do better...

Yep, absolutely. Maybe it's that I listened to too much punk rock as a kid, but I have this odd personality trait where if someone criticizes me for something that I consider illegitimate, I get this instant, visceral "fuck you" response, and their critique does me no good.

In other cases, I take too much to heart.

Human emotions are silly, fragile things.
> libertarian (classic, not anti-government)

Slightly offtopic, but did you mean 'classic liberal?' I thought original recipe libertarians were anarchists. I only ask because I only recently learned that fact, and found it interesting.
But I've still never seen any kind of link that showed brain function or learning capability linked to genetics. If you take e.g. a racist they are ignorant and close-minded. They could learn (at least as kids they could have) but they chose not to. This has nothing to do with genetics, it is learned behavior.
Such a toy language isn't pointless. Everyone needs to implement a language, even a toy one. If one is working in C, one should learn assembly and implement a toy C-like language. This is really a necessity, so one has a working knowledge of what happens under the covers when they compile a program.

Such a freely available kit with a toy assembly language, a provided lexical analyser, and a toy grammar with no semantics would be a great boon to the programming community at large, especially if the project could be completed by the student in one weekend. Countless lightbulbs going off in programmer's heads all around the world would result.

The one day interpreter project should be done by everyone who wants to become uber-devs in a language like Python or Ruby.
Is Lorem Ipsum good or bad for your web design?
This presentation has a tiny bit on coroutines:

http://nodejs.org/jsconf2010.pdf

> Coroutines complicate the mental model while adding only cheap syntactic pleasures.
Imagine Excel with automatic cell-level revisions, with safe shared editing & control, with better automatic error checking. If someone does that, I'll guarantee you that 'decision-makers' will switch very very fast.

You know the main problem with Excel? Finding out what changes were made, keeping updates between multiple teams/people in sync, sending the correct version of the doc. once updated, etc.

If Google Docs Excel was as good as Excel today (it still lacks quite a bit, esp in UI), we'd never use Excel, simply to save a huge amount of time syncing everybody.
With two digits, it could never be milliseconds. Milliseconds would require three digits and would be ludicrous to render them as the last digit would be just a blur.

Actually, it's frames. At 30 frames per second, frame number goes up to 29. On occasion, you may skip one, as 30 fps is actually 29.97 fps when you are talking about NTSC video timings.

And you seriously claim SQL Server is designed to run for years without restarting? A Windows box running for months without a restart (and without significant performance degradation) is already a technical accomplishment. For years? I never heard of such thing.

SQL Server is Microsoft's greatest software accomplishment and is a quite impressive body of work, but I see no reason to go with it unless your problem falls into the very narrow (and increasingly narrow) space between what SQL Server can do and what PostgreSQL (and MySQL) can do.

And in most cases, I would pick Oracle over MS SQL Server anyway.
Google predicts Eurovision Winner correctly (Again).
Am I missing something? Why is this being upvoted?
First on the Blub School note: it's interesting that MIT is now a Blub School since with the purging of Scheme from the curriculum a student can graduate having written code only in Python and Java (shades of the changes to US Boy Scouting that for other reasons drove me out of it, one could become an Eagle Scout without ever having camped out, built a fire or cooked food over an open fire). Wrapped in cotton batting, as it were, I wonder if they will even learn recursion well enough....

This was an entirely political exercise (the command to entirely purge Scheme from the base undergraduate curriculum), now that I think about it an example of not letting a crisis go to waste, for the department panicked over the enrollment crash and SICP was replaced with flashy robots for students to play with.

Anyway, the old official philosophy was that functional programming should be learned before imperative (serious OO wasn't even taught, that got added to 6.001 but not SICP later when the OO mania took a firm enough hold); in spring 1983 6.001 Sussman stated with a variation or subset of this famous quote by Dijkstra:

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

You do have a good point about sequencing. Many have noted that the people who learn and appreciate functional programming best are those who have been thoroughly scared by imperative programming experiences. I for instance took 6.001 exactly 7 years after my start with punched card IBM 1130 FORTRAN "IV" (only numeric IF statements) and by then a lot more imperative programming including a fair amount of C, and I sort of got it. I get it a lot more now that I've gotten many more scars (back then I sensed there was something really big here, now I feel it in my bones).

I can well believe what I've heard from others as well as you that many less experienced programmers don't get it when they do SICP early in their programming careers. On the other hand, there's a lot more to SICP than functional programming ... and there's pretty much no way to give students enough scars in 4 years of undergraduate programming so that a late functional programming course will be certain to "take". So for those who aren't autodidacts I'm not sure what to recommend....
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Thanks for the feedback.
We will be implementing server "tagging" soon, which will allow you to sort/filter the servers.
While the supercomputers themselves are interesting, I really like graphic. I think it displays the information in a more clear and compelling way compared to something like a stacked column chart, like http://www.highcharts.com/demo/?example=column-stacked&t..., which would just be too busy with a lot of information.
Naturally, if you consume 25% fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight. However, you will be less healthy as a result. There's a very narrow band where you can actually lose weight in a healthy manner. It varies from person to person, and furthermore, you are making yourself weaker and more vulnerable to disease if you are eating less than your caloric requirements.

So you're saying "you're fat, that's your problem, you should just eat less." The issue is that eating less causes its own problems, and for some people those can seriously outweigh the benefits of being thinner. For some people, their ability to metabolize fat is so retarded that what you suggest really isn't feasible. They will likely starve to death before they get rid of their fat.

These people are, of course, rare, but the same issue exists in lesser values for other segments of the population.
Well, in 23andme, my obesity probability is listed under "disease risk" :)

Interestingly, the average obesity risk according to 23andme is 59%, which is higher than any other "disease" that 23andme offers risk evaluation for. (Type 2 diabetes comes in 2nd at 18.2%)

If something is found in the majority of the population, that sounds less like a disease and more a systemic problem.
"bright ideas that just didn't work out"

I'm pretty sure foursquare, farmville, hydrogenated oils, auto-tune, tanning beds, plastic grocery bags, and some other stuff on that list are still 'work[ing] out.'
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In the US "libertarian" means something different than it does... everywhere else.
I'll accept your own experience, and am happy for you. As for how Mr. Norvig's coping -- let's wait for him to post his own.

I could see a language designer (say someone like Guy Steele) who has made major contributions in Lisp happily moving on to his or her next research interest, pursuing a completely new design. Those of us stuck in the "real world" of trying to make a living with our software skills are a different matter.

In my experience, once having worked with Lisp I found it extremely difficult to switch to programming in Java. I spent a lot of time trying to make Java look like Lisp, which in my opinion made my code more readable, but to other programmers I worked with - not so much.
My point is, Lisp can be a mind altering experience, much like LSD (I suppose). Some have the ability to compartmentalize the experience and move on with other pursuits and some are forever hooked on the "forbitten" fruit.
Yep, absolutely. Maybe it's that I listened to too much punk rock as a kid, but I have this odd personality trait where if someone criticizes me for something that I consider illegitimate, I get this instant, visceral "fuck you" response, and their critique does me no good.

Punishment is the trickiest of all behavioral modification techniques. It is very likely to backfire, which makes perfect sense. If punishment was very effective on a given individual, he/she would be a perfect slave. Being a perfect slave isn't so great from the perspective of the slave, though it is good for the master. Since human biology doesn't make it easy for a large population of slaves to be related to a master, it makes perfect sense that we'd evolve defenses against punishment. (By contrast, ants and honeybees are all children of their queen, so their arrangement makes perfect evolutionary sense.)

One psych teacher of mine pointed out the behavior of Wile E. Coyote as plausible -- often punishment of a complex organism can result in the subject trying again and again in different ways, despite punishment, particularly if there is a possible reward to be gained.
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Most people that follow the startup world, yes. I was surprised too he hadn't heard of this high-profile competitor.
Articles on these "rationalist" sites often tend towards a mix of smug superiority about one's ability to analyze other people's supposed biases, and lots of references to pet concepts.

There should be a name for the 1st phenomenon, so that websites can use it as a tag. The latter would be too hard to distinguish from citation, however.
> wrestling with problems and the straining toward creative insight

That sounds like engineering to me -- when it is based on some determinate material with at least a few known logical principles -- which software is.
The comparison seems a bit unfair, in that the SQL Server stuff is going to be installing a boatload more stuff - much of which will be useful to administration (management tools - backups, schema mgt, etc). In cases where you don't need that, pg or mysql can win, but a SQL Server install is so much more than just the engine.
Shop this around with VCs as a "square competitor". If the market is great, then there's room for more than 1 startup.
Well, the fact that much of what passes for food in the US wouldn't be legal in Europe has something to do with it as well.
True. At that point it comes down to a level of trust. Do you trust the organization based on your knowledge and experience.

In this case I would say Yes. For many others I would say No.
It's quite impressive that one guy managed to invent two of the entries on that list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr.

He invented tetra-ethyl lead and CFCs.
Hmmm, that's true in the US as well. Are there any countries/cultures in the world where "technical people" get a seriously greater amount of respect?

MIT takes it position as the world's preeminent technical school seriously and in the mid-80s decided this was the single biggest external issue it/the STEM professions had.
Or automated procedures.

You can't call your immune system stupid when you have a severe allergy. It's just doing what it evolved to do.
Out of curiosity, did you read the full article? It does a great job in making the point that disease/not disease may not be the right question to ask (which is a good thing because it isn't straightforward to answer).
"the least good are CS majors, the best are usually engineers or physicists.
The reason is that CS is a theoretical degree..."

I found the same thing. I think the reason is that CS in general is easier than engineering/physics (or math) so on average the engineer/physicist is smarter than a CS person (lots of exceptions of course). Just look at the math involved (I've been in the three places btw).
Simply apply the accusations against BP to the realms in which these companies operate. There's a lot more than privacy at stake here.

The theory is that BP cut technical and engineering corners for the sake of saving time, aka profit.

All of these companies could do the same, to great potential public harm.

Say Windows ships with a flaw that causes all machines to shut down at noon on a certain day. Or Apple ships an entire generation of phone that puts out a high level of radiation in certain circumstances. And so on. Amazon sells computing instances. Google has fingers in nearly every pie out there.

These companies can cause significant worldwide harm, financial and in some cases physical.

What if they cut corners to meet goals and endanger people as a result. Do you really believe this will never happen?
New Coke indirectly made the company TONs of money. Before New Coke, cane sugar was used as sweeteners (expensive). They used high fructose corn syrup in New Coke and caused everyone to "hate" it. When they released Coke Classic, they used the old formula, but kept the corn syrup. Because people had become used to the taste, they did not notice the difference. This allowed them to considerably lower the cost of the materials.
actually, only the core SQL Server engine was installed - no management/reporting/xxx tools beyond the bare minimum the installer allowed.
Sounds good! What about pricing?
I actually don't think there's a particularly strong anti-MS bias on HN. There's just a lot of uninformed commentary by people who haven't even heard of more than half of MS's businesses.

I don't think that's the case with any other company or subject.
GCC starts move towards implementation in C++
Be careful of words with political annotations -- liberal, conservative, libertarian. The problem is that there is the theory, and then there is application of the theory. For instance, "liberal" has changed quite a bit over the last hundred years, as has "conservative"

You can cherry-pick various people or parties that have called themselves liberal or conservative and come up with all sorts of positions. It's a fun parlor game, but the only thing it proves is that people can take a simple idea and twist it into all sorts of things. Doesn't mean the idea is whacked.

Libertarian is the same as the rest of them.

I'll go with first line in the wiki article The term libertarian in a metaphysical or philosophical sense was first used by late-Enlightenment free-thinkers to refer to those who believed in free will, as opposed to determinism

Historically yes, it was grabbed by anarchists. And you can find examples of libertarian "thought" being used to justify all sorts of crazy stuff. But the point here is that if you are telling me that I am good or bad, you are applying deterministic thought which implies some sort of control. Better to say that we are both free agents acting in our own best interests. If I cut off my toe, you may get very upset. What a bad thing to do! But it was my toe, and if I didn't like it, it was my right to get rid of it. Your tendency to view my actions in terms of your morality is an attempt to layer your version of deterministic morality over my right to do things which may frighten or offend you. The next step would be for you to start labeling my toe-cutting a form of sickness that society would be justified in "fixing" for me.

It's exactly the same thing as the church did, it's just dressed up in science and medicine instead of religion and myth.
The goal is to show Windows folk that the Linux ecosystem has changed greatly over the last 1/2 decade. I know _a lot_ of Windows dev who are afraid of Linux - thinking they have to grab source, make/configure it when the right options and hope like hell.
Related: http://antirez.com/page/picol
Java 7 : Add “public defender methods” to Java interfaces
Let me clarify: don't think JS is bad or anything. I just personally don't like it as a language.

With so many projects coming out using JS as the primary scripting language, I am probably going to have to suck it up and learn to love it methinks. Just not yet. ;)
That is my point. How many times have you seen people offer their expert analysis of IBM on HN? Never? Once?
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety." -Ben Franklin

But seriously there's no reason to get so strident about it these days. Because of rational pricing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_pricing), it's extremely doubtful you could find a single economist at a respectable institution who thinks shorting is bad.

In a sense, it's such a abstract issue that I can never see a politician stirring populist sentiment against the sober advice of economic policy advisors. It's simply a short term fail-safe to give politicians time to act.
"Neither, they should be held responsible for their actions. Only a change in their actions can change the outcome."

Experiments strongly suggest that choice and strength of willpower have little to do with body weight. Controlled overfeeding experiments in humans have demonstrated a wide variation in weight gain. Some people's bodies are simply resistant to storing excess food, while other people's store it avidly and gain weight rapidly. After the overfeeding phase of the experiment finished, they then lost weight rapidly with no perceived effort or exercise of willpower.

Meanwhile various nonhuman animal experiments have found that body fat is fairly sensitive to things like gut microbes, details of food composition, and subtle differences in the environment. Not one of these can be changed by simply resolving to eat less.

"Real treatment for obesity is liposuction."

Obesity is a disorder of food conversion and storage, not body fat. Liposuction causes temporary and cosmetic changes. Real treatment is a drug that alters the brain centers responsible for metabolism and hunger. (And indeed such drugs exist and are spectacularly effective. Unfortunately the existing ones also have spectacular and dangerous side effects, but much better ones are rapidly being developed.)
Showing a terminal window doesn't help calming the average MCSE...
It's almost in the definition of a dot-com, large and small, that the impact of any particular action they take is greater than the cost of that action to the company. That's why tech startups are so appealing.

But if you have such leveraged benefits, you also have such leveraged risk. The same leverage that lets a small team create great value also puts them in a position where they can cause great harm.

I used large dot coms because there was some insistence in the thread that regulation was only worth talking about with large companies. A red herring, of course, since the mom and pop corner dry cleaner is a regulated business, and for the common good. Size isn't really an issue.

The difference is that it's almost a tautology that dot coms have influence, good and bad, far out of proportion to their size...
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Say what you will about pg's writing. But he's been involved in the funding of plenty of startups that didn't write Lisp code. I think you should pay attention to where his money is going before you read too much into his essays.
This pretty much matches my university experience. I went to a public university which ranks in the top ten for computer science programs. It appears there is a large divide in the quality of computer science education.
Continuous Picture Slide in Flash
On some project you must be requiring products scroll from any direction, but you need it should scroll forever without any interruption & jerk and no body should know that which one is first picture and which is last picture. So I’m going to tell you a technique in Flash, so that you can create a continuous slide. I’m also going to put Source FLA file. Very very useful technique, must try please, not a difficult tutorial.
Indeed, Rhino is such an important project but still it does not receive any attention.
I used this on a Canon A480 to take periodic pictures while the camera was hanging from my Kite. The pics didn't come out well when I tried it, I think it was just way too windy. I'm sure I'll have another go later though.

The firmware is pretty neat though. You can just load it off SD card when you want to and not modify anything on the camera.
Forgive me, but ... what's the relevance of that word? Isn't a flotilla just a bunch of ships? Why would Twitter censor it?