skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My sibling poster is dead on that 'normals' don't care about URLs. Often, I don't either. In my app, I have a bunch of "real" web pages, and then a bunch of "accidental" URLs that only exist to handle ajax requests. These aren't real pages, and what they return is of no value to the user unless they're on the page that generated the ajax call.

I don't want to go through the process of creating a new URL, figure out what its parameters will be, and then map those HTTP parameters to arguments to a server-side function. I want to magically link a client side action to a call on the server that may perform a side effect or return HTML, or both. The URLs are an implementation detail that I'd rather not think about.
You might want to have a look at Haskell, if you like this trade-off of making writing somewhat more complicated but reading much simpler.

Also if you browse some PEPS (and other sources) you will find that Python and Haskell's history are more intertwined that one would guess at first.
They should have left this kind of thing to iGoogle I think. Even if people like it, it's going to subtly dilute their image of Google being The Dead Simple choice.
No need to apologize, because while this seems to mostly be an issue of ethics and social factors, I am not very interested in these issues and more in the specific legal issues that this practice and these potential trials bring about.

To be more specific: As we all know, one IP address does not equal one user (in many instances). So let's say that a case regarding the matter at hand is brought to trial. Could a potential ruling be that the lessee or provider of the IP address is the one liable for damages? It is my opinion that it is a necessity for this issue to be decided upon because we are not dealing with Kazaa and any individually distinguishing characteristics (such as a username) really other than the IP address. If the lessee or provider is found to be the one liable, the consequences of this decision would be massive. And I feel that this is an understatement.
Etude for iPad is out
Ask HN: Can anyone recommend any seed funding sources other than YC?
Wondering what the other options are and how they compare
Obesity may directly be the result of physical or psychological problem. Even worse, issues like these can create a feedback loop. You feel worse, so you eat more, so you feel worse, so you eat more.

Problems like this may be obvious to outsiders, but completely invisible to the person experiencing it. By learning to recognize your situation and substitute behaviors to form new habits, you can change what you are without necessarily changing who you are.
Rnpu zbivr vf pbaarpgrq gb gur bar rvgure fvqr bs vg ol na npgbe jub fgneerq va obgu. Va guvf pnfr, Wbua Yvgutbj (Sbbgybbfr) naq Zbetna Serrzna (Qnex Xavtug).
Nope. Bad writing, boring story.
Television is already the perfect UI for passive users. I would simply avoid that whole market and culture and pretend it doesn't exist while we starve it of creativity. Eventually active consumers will outnumber passive ones (or active behavior outpace passive behavior, minor difference)

Assuming your not designing for television watchers, then the simple matter of the distance from the screen does become an intense source of changes in UI design.
When you say "compatibility break" I hear "your 1.5 to 2.1 apps won't run on 2.2" not "2.2's increased performance enables a new class of applications that won't work on phones with an older OS".

I'm not seeing the problem here...
Inter-core mutex is MUCH slower than single-core. Because of the "memory boundary" problem. See, any lock depends upon a single memory location that is atomically test and set. When more than one cpu is involved, then the memory has to be plumbed down thru caches until its in memory common to all involved cpus - which is probably main memory when more than 2 cores are involved. On a single CPU its the L2 cache.
What if someone published a textbook through the Kindle store? This would be available through the iPad, which either has or will grow into a lot of the same features.
Getting there. The Ruboto project seems to be making forward progress. An IRB implementation is at http://github.com/headius/ruboto-irb; Check out http://ruboto.com/ for new information.
This is an interesting article on the subject:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/05/dont_pay_your_fare_on...
So? You can just sell your app on your webpage. The market is not that compelling; it's hard to search and it's hard to read real reviews on your phone, so most people that actually need some software are just going to Google for what they need. The market mostly benefits developers of paid fart apps.
I have no experience with non-web based stuff, but I have had o.k. results with press releases (with p.r. web and writing on my own) for new product launches.

I've also had pretty good luck with contacting individual reporters, so she might want to try and get in touch with the local fashion or business editors.
The Uptown area in Dallas is one of the nicest areas in the US.
Is the full video available anywhere or will it be? Damn these clips!
On the Moral Splendor of the Early Adopter
I find a strong correspondence with physical health. Some health issues severely limited my prior ability to "get in the zone", let alone stay there. On days when the physical symptoms receded, I could do so.

Actually, this was one of the most frustrating aspects of the health issues.

If you have trouble concentrating, do not overlook or discount your physical health.

A separate comment. For me, personally, it can take an hour or two to really get into the zone. That can be a challenge. Once really there, distractions fade into the background and I can work a good 8, 10 hours, until outright exhaustion overcomes my concentration. I may take some breaks, sometimes just to walk around by myself. Actually, this can aid the overall process. I stop the conscious concentration and heavy (in my work, typically) visual input. A walk, maybe a cup of tea, etc., engages my other senses and different sensory processing. The work remains in my subconscious, and not infrequently, the change in attention allows me to make subconscious progress that I might not have achieved or so readily achieved through conscious attention.

In such a state, I don't just consciously, step by step, put "pieces" of information and steps of processes together. I tend to form an increasingly developed "Gestalt" of the material and my ideas, and new ideas and relationships reveal themselves as my overall attention (conscious and subconscious) continues to analyze and infer. It's one of the more enjoyable sensations of living.

Until I get deeply into that mode, interruptions and distractions can be quite disruptive. Once I do get there, sometimes -- blessedly -- they fade into irrelevance.
Like cynicalkane alluded, Buffett donated tens of billions to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation -- he didn't even create his own eponymous foundation! He did, if I recall correctly, set up a foundation in his wife's name, and that may well be how he transfers some wealth to his children. But at the end of the day, he could have made them each multi-billionaires, and he chose not to. In a small way (with a few hundred million or a billion dollars), he didn't put his money where his mouth was. In a much larger way, to the tune of tens of billions, however, he did.
There are several websites calling for user engagement where the money source is not user data. It's about "creating a community" around your product.

I can assure you, in publicity and marketing circles, when social media is mentioned it is precisely to attract consumers for your product.

The type of interaction between HN and YC is not new. It's just hard to replicate. Companies are trying this since the dawn of the internet. Think about what is the forum on the World of Warcraft website. The social media craze is an attempt to apply this community feeling to other markets.
I didn't say that I would, actually. I was defending the decision made by the author of this site. I've been defending practicality over spending a lot of one's time trying to get certain kinds of layout elements working in all browsers across the board. If you cannot appreciate that then let's just agree to disagree.
The article does link source you can use to reproduce the problem: http://www.mailinator.com/VariableStorage.java
How so? It's an optional feature. It's not enabled by default, so only those who want this feature will be using it.
Even users of Gmail have lost all data from Google, so it is always safer to have control of your data by backing it up (with Backupify) where you can keep your data and download it right to your PC.
Check out Popplet. I think something like this could be used as a framework to enable most of the functionality shown in Microsoft's Courier vaporware video. (But in a multi-touch friendly way)

http://popplet.com/

If other applications could be integrated, such that arbitrary docs could appear in a Popplet-window, then this gives us a task/document-centric way for users to integrate and organize all of their data. (Such that applications disappear into the background, and it's their data that matters.)
We don't know our Internet speed, but we like it anyway
Alternative, it keeps away those who deserve to get rich but cannot overcome the artificial market barriers.
Python is a Lisp - I do not understand this. Howso?
> I apologise... the last reply I kinda retract, as you say - it was a bit silly.

Thanks, I appreciate that.

> I have to admit your posts came across as the old "My Language is As Good As Yours" argument, but it appears your a Lisper too?

I'm well-versed in Lisp, but I don't typically choose it for personal or professional tasks for a number of reasons.

> I have to also admit everything I have seen/heard says Lisp is the original self-modifying language and is damn good at it :)

The original self-modifying code was assembly language (or, really, machine code). It's a useful trick when you're working with extremely constrained computers whose memories are measured in single digit kilobytes, but long ago was recognized as really difficult to use in writing quality software. Real self-modifying code, which means code that actually overwrites the instructions the processor will execute, makes it incredibly hard to reason about programs and debug the resulting software. Real self-modifying code was long ago relegated to the likes of Mel (<http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html>). As I understand it, most Lisp programmers simply mean that their system properly handles the replacement of most (all?) functions/methods/definitions at runtime, which is in large part true of Python as well.

I open to being corrected by a Lisp programmer using a modern Lisp (hence my request for SBCL) to show an example of real self-modifying code, but I really don't expect that any will, because I don't think anyone's seriously written such code since I was out of elementary school.
Matlab also recently has gotten much better in its support for function approaches. You need those for e.g. numerical integration and solving differential equations.

The earlier solvers took strings with the name of a function whenever they needed a functional argument. Nowadays Matlab provides `function handles' to refer to a function without calling it. The syntax is @function_name, they need this special syntax, because just mentioning function_name itself in your code, calls your function without arguments.

Matlab even support proper closures with lexical scoping, now.
I read a little while ago that Bing's numbers are holding steady (not sure if they are growing now) while other search sites are shrinking (other than Google obviously) -- guessing this has something to do with it
Perfect experience, which is different than UI. I'm focused more on UI in this post. The experience end is just as fascinating. A lot of people ripped on nowmov when they launched, but I think they could be one of YCs biggest successes. They're trying to bring that instant on and easily passive experience to web video. That's desperately needed.
Joe Armstrong: Message Passing Concurrency in Erlang (video)
QWERTY was designed as a compromise between speed and jams. Characters which are frequently used as pairs together are placed on opposite sides, one for each hand. This has the effect of letting you use both hands pretty frequently. One of the compromises was that only the vowel 'a' ended up on the middle row. 'Maximally efficient' layouts like Dvorak are not provably any faster under real conditions.
Regarding the combover:

And, of course, at what angle does the combover look best?

Straight on, no wind, good overhead lighting... you know, the bathroom mirror.
Congratulations Dan!
Let's not forget about magazine apps either. There was a recent submission about Wired's app being 500MB for one issue. If all of the magazine apps end up being the same size, you could only get 4 mags per month and nothing else.
Opera 10.6
AT&T Drops Unlimited-Data Pricing
Starting an open source business: preliminary thoughts
Maybe we could retroactively grant the Nazis some certification.
What I said was not restricted to retroactively applying a license. HN cannot automatically apply a license to new content either. It was at first unclear to me how you meant for HN to apply the license. It seems clear now that the intention is that users would have to explicitly grant HN permission. This is good, and I'm all for it. It does need to be clear though that users are explicitly granting permission. And I agree with others that an opt-out is definitely a good idea.
The price is a steal. Sure, Xelements is cool, but this completely is reason alone to buy the iPad. Congrats and hope that some day soon orchestras could have this.
Bing is hardly the first search engine to use a photo as a background image. Ask and Wikia Search are two examples off the top of my head that have offered that feature as well (most likely before Bing was launched, too.)
I don't see a helluva lot of point. It seems like it's just a thumb in the eye of bing and everybody who has said "I like bing, it has pretty pictures". But it completely avoids the actual value of bing, which is to give you a new and interesting pretty picture every day. And in fact, just reading this article made me go look at bing's last few pictures.

If I want to look at one of my own pretty pictures, or some other picture I've chosen myself, I'll just make it my desktop background.
lol, nice tumblog, is that ur photography?
heh... http://imgur.com/rUt1A.jpg
To me as a Lisp user, Python breaks more than it fixes. Lexical scoping? Nope, can't have it. Code as data, data as code? Not really. Literals for data? Compilation to native code? Compiler/interpreter warnings? Warnings for name collisions when importing? Standard for the language? Nope.

And I don't really buy the argument that Python is simple and clean. It has multiple inheritance, metaclasses, operator overloading, decorators and whatnot. Also the type system is broken, a deriving class can define an overriding method that has incompatible signature, rendering isinstance powerless (yes, I know you probably shouldn't use isinstance much anyway, but dammit, it should at least mean something).
Can you go into more detail about how Python fixes maintenance? I'm really curious what language features of Python are conducive to good or easy maintenance, and how those features are unique to Python. Color me skeptical, but I can be convinced.
I actually found it refreshing to see a human face instead of just text.
I've run OpenBSD for a few years. Before that I ran Debian for many years. I prefer OpenBSD for most purposes.

OpenBSD's base system is really nice. It truly is a complete system. It has everything I need: text editors, build toolchain, version control, openssh, tmux, etc.

And all of this is built together and configured with sane defaults. By default sudo insults you if you type your password wrong. If you have a key in your .ssh dir and you launch xdm it automatically runs ssh-agent and ssh-addkey and so on.

Everything in the base system is documented and documented very well. The OpenBSD man pages are incredible. They are so good I use them even if I am currently on a linux system. Nothing is allowed in the CVS tree if it is not documented.

OpenBSD has fewer drivers, certainly, but the ones they do have are excellent quality. Check out the driver for a device supported by both sometime. Often the OpenBSD driver will be 3-5x smaller and far clearer to read. This is especially the case with wifi drivers. The userland is simpler too. To setup a wpa connection on OpenBSD I just type:

# ifconfig wpi0 nwid my_net wpa wpapsk \
`wpa-psk my_net my_passphrase`

On linux you'd have to call ifconfig, iwconfig, and run wpasupplicant after configuring it. I've never been able to get my 3945ABG to work under linux but it works out of the box with OpenBSD, etc.

> Linux just feels more open to ideas, more open to anyone playing around and crazy having ideas that

I don't know about that. Do you really have enough experience with both communities to make such broad statements? If you want a great example of a walled garden check out GLIBC sometime.
The Future of Computer Science And Why Every Other Major Sucks
It looks lovely, and I'll probably grab it (especially at that price). However, as an Etude for iPhone user, I have to say - you really need to get some more scores into the store. At the moment, months after launch, you still only have material from 21 composers. Everyone I've shown it to loves it, but it's a really hard sell with such a limited selection. I've no problem with paying for sheet music, and I'd probably pay more for the convenience of this format - it just needs to be there!
But it won't have the mouse overs that gives you little factlets? Does anyone know where Bing gets the images and facts for the mouse overs? Is it someone's job to put those together?
Very cool, any chance you will be adding drums? :)
It isn't, and people who say so probably don't know Lisp very well.
The preferred development avenues for Nokia smartphones (Symbian & Maemo/Meego) is either the Qt SDK [http://www.forum.nokia.com/Tools_Docs_and_Code/Tools/IDEs/No...] or WRT (Web RunTime) [http://www.forum.nokia.com/Technology_Topics/Web_Technologie...].

I agree that Qt is "surprisingly nice". Personally, I enjoy the iPhone UIKit framework, but the Qt SDK is almost as good (and in some areas better). I don't have much experience with the WRT, but in the N8 the demos I have seen are quite impressive performance-wise.

[disclaimer: I work for Nokia, take all I say (on this matter) with a grain of salt.]

Edit: Minor spelling.
See also: Platforms are for Suckers: Why you should build one, and sucker suckers into building their business on one.
Garbage collection, syntax modification, runtime code evaluation.
More scores are coming. I finally did add some Chopin today! (those scores are iPad only for now though)

We'll also be opening up our converter so users can put their own scores in the app, as well as trying to finish these content deals.
You can't get 500MB downloads over 3G. The App Store forces you to wait for wifi.
Assume for the sake of argument that you agree it is a harmful feature for Google's image in the long term. In that case does making it an optional feature make any difference, beyond minimizing the damage?
Hey, I've updated the tutorial from your feedback. Hopefully my explanation is more fuller now! Give it a go?
You seem to think a hyperthreaded system exposes to the OS 4 "real" and 4 "virtual", slower cores. This is not true, if you have 2 threads executing on a single core at the same time each gets equal attention / performance.

Also, hyperthreading really does make a lot of sense on today's hardware. The gap between CPU and memory performance is wide and getting wider each year, when you have a cache miss and your core has several hundred cycles to get its data from memory, you's better have another thread that can keep it busy.
Yeah, but its also really nice to have a decent sized screen when actually trying to read and think.

I'm sure that it will make books cheaper, as it will remove much of the distribution overhead, but the fact remains that writing a text book is extremely time consuming, and the market is small, so the only way for authors to get any sort of reasonable compensation is to make the books cost a lot.
Exactly, in this, the rich only get richer if they continue posting valid comments.

Otherwise they get poor real fast.
Where's George
I'm really curious what language features of Python are conducive to good or easy maintenance

My guess is that "Less is More" in this situation. Python often does tend to read like pseudocode.

The problem with this, though, is that idiocy has seemingly infinite resources on its side. Occasionally, you will have an outlier who has vast holes in their understanding of programming and writes large amounts of jaw-dropping bad code and can do this even in simple elegant languages. In fact, there's one on the team I'm working with right now. (He was maneuvered onto the testing team to mitigate the damage.)
> A 30 second YouTube clip doesn't always tell the whole story

This just provides an incentive for the police to wear their own cameras, no? Wouldn't this solve your problem?

What if it became irregular for a policeman to be on the stand retelling events that occurred while he was on duty but not to have video corroboration? In a future world where all police wear cameras while on duty, and the court expects to see all relevant footage, not just the footage picked out by the prosecution or by the defence? Wouldn't this be a good thing?
Blog That Found a Market for Sports News Is Purchased
Of course, since delivering pizzas is a more dangerous job than being a cop, I'm sure it's only natural if they use more than sufficient force on occasion, too.
Pothon (poe-thon) sounds better to me.
Updated my comment with a link for you.
All this time and effort you're spending on worrying about potential competitors doing trivial stuff is time not spent on making your startup successful.

While I'm sure there are exceptions, all the startups that I'm familiar with that were paranoid about competitors failed, due to being in stealth mode, a lack of focus, etc.
That is not what that program is for. It is only for internally developed applications for use internally. Useless for a vast majority of things.
And like all such charities, it will take care of his children and their children and probably beyond.
Hey, cheers! I've updated the tutorial to explain fst, let, etc. hopefully it's a bit more friendly now.
* Founder collective (Chris Dixon & co.)

* Betaworks

* SV Angel (Ron Conway & co.)

* And the billion or so other YC knockoffs: http://kaljundi.com/2010/02/19/upcoming-startup-incubator-de...
I'd say, small is good. Because smaller might lead to too small.
Big congratulations! This alone is a reason to buy the iPad.
If it was possible to practise having more self-control, you should probably work on a training schedule.
It's not Common Lisp, or Scheme, but it's a "Lisp" in the sense that it is a dynamic language with properties in the spirit of the original LISPs, with the notable exception of not writing directly in the abstract syntax tree.

I wouldn't actually call it a Lisp on its own. It is a derivative, a less directly powerful form. "It's a Lisp where..." in the same way that a unicycle is "a bicycle where..." or something.
It cost the flotilla more than ten human lives. That's not free.
I think it may be all of them. Remember that they also include "in a public place".

I figure, public place is public place. If you can take a picture of A, why not B, and how does one enforce that anyway? I'd think it'd fall on the side of free speech, similar to how you can tell someone about police abuse.

How is any person not photographable in a public place?
> (part of the passivity comes from the idea that any sloppy thought will be immediately shot down (rightfully so))

You can still make a meaningful contribution by asking questions, if you want to.