skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very cool, but like all games, some flaws. The biggest one I saw was that some of the test inputs are less rigorous than they should be. The level that says your robots have to end with double blues, I could design a conveyor system that would pass all of the given tests, but would fail if it ended with triple blues.

The only reason I'm slightly annoyed: I designed a neat way to avoid failing on triple blues, but then the game never sent a triple blue my way...
Well, that's not really the case. Parentheses are the main type of bracket used in most Lisps(which can be nicer than having [], (), and {}, some of which frequently have entirely different meanings depending on what syntactic context they are used in(for example, languages which use "{}" for both blocks and dictionaries, or "[]" for both list/array construction and indexing)). However, in Common Lisp for example,(with many present in other lisps) there's also the quote, the semicolon, the double quote for strings, the backquote and comma for partial quoting, #\ for character literals, #' for functions, #( ) for vectors, #* for bitvectors, #: for uninterned symbols, #. for read-time evaluation, #B for binary rational literals, #O for octal, #X for hexadecimal, #R for arbitrary bases, #C for complex numbers, #A for arrays, #S for structures, #P for paths, #n=foo and #n# for labeling objects for back-reference, #+ and #- for read-time testing for available features, and #| |# for comments. And of course, Common Lisp supports reader macros, so you could end up with a lot of potential syntactic punctuation.

Of course, most of the time, you won't need most of that syntax. And, it does have the advantage of mostly being defined in Common Lisp and being fairly consistent.

But parentheses are definitely not the only punctuation in Lisp.
Create 3D scenes using language
I was sitting here laughing out loud when I read the $300K/year and calling it a 'treadmill' bit, it is really funny when you consider the vast majority of the people here would probably happily give up a kidney for that kind of money.

Especially recurring. Makes me wonder if the GP isn't really a microsoft recruiter in a very complex disguise ;)

I think there will be a large number of applicants to the treadmill because of that comment.
> Where do I apply for the $300K/yr life sucking anonymous treadmill job?

Predictable :)

GP owes me a clean keyboard.

Really, it's hilarious to put treadmill and $300K / year in one sentence. That's one for the book.

I realize they're separate concepts, but most start-ups would be pretty happy if they had that kind of money to divide up between the partners. Sure, the hours are longer and the food is worse so there is compensation, but still, you know.
In actuality, the pipe-style programming paradigm is like a data flow language. Similar to LabView (https://www.ni.com/labview/) or XEE (http://www.futurepointsystems.com/?page=products).

Output from one becomes the input to another component. Most takes on it that I've seen (like the two above) slap a graphical interface on top for flexibility.
Comments on the iPad in Academic Settings
Hacking DNA
Yup: http://uuorld.com/gallery?image=89
It sounds like the guy who compiled the data is thinking of doing that too:

http://www.bluemoon.ee/~ahti/touristiness-map/
> Wow, so you are just going to quit working at Microsoft because of some agreement you made with your wife.

Yes, just imagine that his wife should have a say in their future. Unbelievable.
While I could make any number of sarcastic and cutting comments on this, note the tiny bit about Sweden. Many would say they were/are the leading European "lifestyle superpower", but when they found themselves at the brink not too many years ago they drew back and are therefore much better positioned now that the Great Recession is dragging on pretty much everyone.
What's wrong with that assumption? There are some efficient mechanisms that evolution hasn't invented because they could not be reached by a series of gradual refinements. The wheel has long been said to be one of them, but I guess now we know that that's not strictly true. But nature's wheels are all very small and are bound to remain small because of their purpose, even though many organisms could benefit from large wheels.

It's true that replication is evolution's specialty, but maybe the initial construction of grey goo would require some specialized environment that doesn't naturally occur. Nuclear bomb isn't so complicated that evolution couldn't figure it out, for example, but it didn't and won't anytime soon.
Man Behind the Music Service
IPad caveat: Solution seeking a problem
While I hope they do slash the iPad prices, I'd much prefer they keep the same form factor for a few generations.
What is the overlay of the testers face good for without any eyetracking capabilities?

Facial expressions? Whether someone looks confused or is smiling?
Rate my App: AppEngine Python Site Directory
Manolo Blahnik Zip Back Sandal
Jinni Taste Engine for TV and movies envisioned as a Google TV app
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/UsabilityTestingwithM...

Perhaps you don't find it useful without more rigor; that is up to you. But it most definitely is usability testing.

Most startups never do usability testing. Or put it off too late. Focusing on a million details is a great way to put it off further. Just put the laptop in front of the first person walking down the hallway. The first 30 seconds will be more invaluable than any heatmap.

"What is the overlay of the testers face good for without any eyetracking capabilities?"

It's good to detect boredom, distraction, urgency. That pause in the cursor, was he confused? Oh, she just got distracted by somebody.

I just watched myself grow increasingly frantic as the time ran out on an auction.

Wake up sheeple, you don't need no stinkin' eye-trackin'. Just get it in front of somebody already.
Would be nice to see this by time of the year so you can plan your trip when everybody else is not at your destination.
I had a similar experience at Nalgene: they had published an internal 50% off staff promotion coupon. That coupon made it to slickdeals.net, and lots of people bought lots of goods. Nalgene honored the purchases.

The difference: what Zappos noticed in the course of six hours, Nalgene didn't notice from about Saturday afternoon 'till Monday morning.
Blast from the past: On2 complains MPEG-4 patent pool violates antitrust laws: http://www.itworld.com/020411mpeg4
My favorite:

Bloombug: A bug that accidentally generates money
Winter.
In a battle between Grey Goo and a Paperclip Maximizer, who wins?

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
I think that it depends on what is being photographed. In rural Turkey, it will be toursists photographing each other, in Western France it will be tourists photographing the Eiffel tower.

Plenty of very highly visited areas are not that memorable by themselves other than that they receive a large amount of sunshine and this alone will attract large numbers of tourists from the North West of Europe.
Not for the Alps :)

And not in the Southern hemisphere either.
Seems rather unusable with a Dvorak keyboard, unfortunately.
That's the kind of thinking that leads you into wondering how the hell your code base got so bad, how you fell so far behind the competition, etc. A lot of critically important aspects of modern software engineering and craftsmanship are extremely subjective. The difference between success and failure in software can often come down to having the right group of people with good judgment in charge.
Amazon's Universal Wish List button: add anything on the web to your wish list
I'm not sure I agree that I shouldn't be offended. If someone tells me that I'm being immoral by their moral code, I don't have a problem with that. But to simply say that I'm acting immorally is to assert that their moral code is the standard by which everyone should be judged, which in my opinion is offensive.
Likely inspired by Facebook's universal Like button. Now AMZN can know what you like (and would pay for!) across the whole web ... very smart move.
Brownian motion moves beyond Einstein's equations
Hire Your Kids, Get a Tax Break
Windows Server 2003 Network MCSE 70-291
The problem in obtaining quality 70-291 study guide materials is not that there are too few sources - rather there are so many sources for information, it is increasingly difficult to find an outlet that offers all of the features, products and materials that you need to take and pass your 70-291 exam.
Psychological Principles Con Artists Exploit
Harmony search: a metaheuristic inspired by musical improvisation
Ask Dostoevsky; it's not my idea.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1213770
A thing of Beauty: First MP Pandora in the Wild
Replica Japan Rolex  Watches
Yes, but laws about to come into effect in Canada basically halve peoples legal entitlement to disability benefits while keeping their payments the same and removing their ability to get fair arbitration leaving lawsuits the only option.

Yes, Europe has been the superpower in this, but the same effects are happening everywhere, it's just not nearly as good a story.
Levitating glass bead proves Einstein wrong
How useful is the wheel without roads? In terms of mpg efficiency, weight efficiency, and off-road capability, the wheel seems comparably less efficient than evolved legged locomotion. At least for the purposes that are more important for animals.
That's one of the coolest maps I've seen in a while. Thank you.
I'm non technical, but I am a designer, so I can definitely hold my own. I am finding it pretty difficult to find a technical cofounder.
If anyone wants, I'll write about my experiences going in the opposite direction -- from the start-up world to Microsoft.
My favourite: Megamoth.

Stands for MEGA MOnolithic meTHod.
Often contained inside a God Object, and usually stretches over two screens in height.

Megamoths of greater size than 2k LOC have been sighted. Beware of the MEGAMOTH!
Analytical skills for Literature Term Paper 

Literature term papers require students to study the text in a critical manner and analyze it thoroughly. Once this is done, students will have to interpret and discuss the opinions of other scholarly experts as well. This will ensure that their opinion is also backed by sound opinions of others, which will provide credence to the paper.
The title is a bit link-baity (but it is the original title), Einstein was wrong about our capabilities to measure, not about some fundamental theory.
DocJax.com | The Document Search Engine
Unrelated - but I love the look and feel of your site. It doesn't feel like a web page at all - more like a document. Its pretty striking.
What about replicators escaping labs and evolving on their own?

Maybe we would have multiple species of replicators trying to outcompete each other.
The haskell port is HLedger:

http://hledger.org/SCREENSHOTS.html
Regarding point 3, MS isn't so much a 60K company as it is a coalition of variously sized groups, usually from a few hundreds up to low thousands.
I'm not saying you should hire anyone with MS on his resume. If someone doesn't want to work for a startup, don't hire him. If you think someone is overspecialized, don't hire him. But if your policy is just not to hire anyone who's worked for a big company, you're losing out...and even in that case, your prejudice is against all big companies, not Microsoft.

If someone's worked for Microsoft, it means he's probably smart and probably has experience working with other smart people to release real software. That's exactly the kind of person I'd want to work with.
For those interested in the topic, I highly recommend this book by Steve Krug
http://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Surgery-Made-Easy-Yourself/dp/0...

This app looks like it would work well with Krug's recommendations.
Do you see the last release of Mac OS as a commitment to the platform?

Depends on what they do with it. Mac OS X has a really good foundation now; the question is whether they intend to build new stuff on top of it, or switch mainly to maintenance until the iDevices can fill its content creation roles.
Indeed, it is disappointing that carriers are doing this. I suppose Google has the power to stop them if it wishes, but that might require a rewriting of the Android license agreement. I don't know, I'm not an expert on this stuff.

I currently have four Android phones, but I only really use my N1 since Sense is basically unusable compared to standard Android in my opinion. If only the UI were configurable, I might use all four.
That, and it's not just a graphic.. it's an actual, playable HTML5/JS game.
I do prefer disk cloning images.

Check out http://www.linuxlinks.com/article/20100220020013726/DiskClon...
It wasn't long after Yammer moved up from LA that I joined, so IMHO it was a good move :) SOMA is just about the perfect place for startups: tons of converted office space, access to both City and peninsula engineers, it's easy to get to, and technology permeates almost everything you do.

The only real drawbacks are the cost of living and that we're in an echo chamber (SOMA) that's inside an echo chamber (Bay Area); it can be hard to remember that Uncle Joe doesn't check in on FourSquare, has never bought a coffee with Square and doesn't know who @aplusk is. Some startups really lose that perspective. I've worked at some of them. Yammer has perspective, a business plan, and Sacks and our CTO are the best leadership I've ever worked for. If we stay on our current trajectory, someday we'll graduate to needing a campus office park in Palo Alto. But for now, SOMA's a great place to work.
It's funny, I've never actually looked at haskell, let alone HLedger. I think maybe I'll take a look.
I'm wondering if you're being too choosy about the jobs you're applying for? If you really think you'll blow your chances at job A which you really want, apply for job B. The experience of working job B might give you a more precise insight into what you want/don't want in a software job.
Can you please provide the numbers you used to compare the mpg and weight efficiency of wheels vs legs?
I've had an account there for a long time and bought lots of books, so it's not a new vs old account thing. I bought a book on Friday and still haven't got it. Emailed them and just got the bog standard "apologize for the inconvenience" form letter.
During my 4.5 years I haven't worked on anything but incubation projects. Meaning I have never been on a team with more than 20 full time employees.
Agreed, and it may be pedantic of me, but I fail to see the Lisp-ness of this; merely using a defun function and a list data structure does not qualify.
Why Macs (Don't) Suck
I'm lucky enough to currently not work with collegues that could coin names for my failures, I'd hate to imagine what a 'jam' looks like. It might be 'idiot move to add one item to a firewall access list that locks out the idiot and the rest of the internet, requiring a live body to transport himself to the hosting facility'. Of course this never happened. I wish.

Shit happens, don't worry about it.

And I think that there are a lot of 'Flakey Toms' on HN, even when they're named George or Sally :)
Ask HN: How can I retrieve my hotmail account from a hacker
My email was hacked and the person changed my alternate email and my secret question/answer.

I cant find any way to contact a Hotmail employee. Anyone here knows how I can get back my account.
I would like to make an outlandish suggestion: 10 years of pension / retirement / paid healthcare. Take it whenever you want after the admittedly arbitrary age of 30. After that, you're on your own.
Agreed, it pretty much follows population density. Some notable exceptions are Utah, Colorado, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, the Smoky Mountains (on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina), the Carolina beaches, Vermont, northern New Hampshire, and the Adirondacks of New York.
Personally, I just write. I write pages and pages of stream-of-consciousness thinking about the application, everything from how it will look to how the backend will function to how it will make money. Once I'm done with that, I sleep on it (as it's usually 5am by that point), and the next day work on mockups and DB schemas if it still seems like a good idea.
I suspect InclinedPlane was...well, thinking of surfaces other than inclined planes. Some terrain can be crossed with legs but not with wheels (of comparable scale). I assume he was talking about that, rather than making a quantitative comparison across flat surfaces.
25 years of AOL: A timeline
OP, your title reads like a cheap ad. It would be more appropriate to put the main feature/benefit in the title and stay more neutral, e.g. "Silverback is a usability tool that let's you..."

edit: title has been updated since my comment
Or mud season. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mud_season
You have to root the phone.
Sometimes it's a good idea to own a "desirable" item rather than go with the masses with a commodity. When it's time to sell your old convertible, you'll find a buyer. The old sedan is basically scrap metal.
I'm refuting your point about the teachers union, while conceding that teachers do work hard and deserve to be compensated. The unions do appear to bear most of the responsibility for retarding school improvement. I don't see a reasonable excuse for running interference on merit pay, for instance.
Yes, I considered adding it to my bookmark bar and then I thought about how it would make me want to buy a lot more things, so I didn't.
I have one just now, it inspired this comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1332560

I noticed a certain bug actually caused me a bit of extra income so I left it in place. It still is, it still makes money, and has been going for about 5 months now.
These are really funny. Especially the Object Oriented Pasta.

I've seen some of that and had to clean it up, it made me wish for a shotgun and some ammo at times.
A huge OMFG thanks to zrail for posting this. I had never heard of ledger, and had just started coding my own CLI-capable double-entry accounting system from scratch. Diving into Ledger now, and thrilled. Thanks again.
Also IBM mostly does enterprise software. Microsoft has been successful in many different types of products: video games, operating systems, software development (IDEs, programming languages, etc), search engines, office applications (word, excel, etc), just to name a few. I think regardless of how much IBM has made from software compared to Microsoft, it is safe to say Microsoft has been much more successful at delivering products in a whole gamut of industries.
Shame you have to register to try it.
There's another site called "Exit Mundi" that has a lot of doomsday scenarios. In particular, the grey goo problem: http://www.exitmundi.nl/graygoo.htm
The other week we were looking into the Facebook like buttons for a client who was thinking about installing them on their website.

The conclusion we came to was the same as this article and we calculated it using almost the same route. For cnn if 1,000 people like a story, given that there are 400,000,000 Facebook users and if we assume my friends visit cnn with equal probability as other Facebook users and that I have 300 friends, we get that their is a ~1/1000 probability that my friends like a cnn story. Sum up over 10 major stories that day, we get that I only have a 1/100 chance of seeing any activity at cnn.com from my friends. And this is the case for cnn, one of the largest websites in the country; the probability of seeing any friend activity on a smaller site will be much much lower. The numbers just don't work out for mainstream adoption of the Facebook like button.

This does however work better on a site like yelp or pandora, where if my friend ever liked a restaurant it will stay relevant for a longer period of time. Still, I think that the Facebook like button will only make sense for a few websites on the entire web (and likely not one that anyone who is reading this is working on).
Isn't this just general political liberal v. libertarian debate about the proper role of the state, not really hacker news?
I can't believe no-one seems to find this interesting!
I left MSFT at the end of 2008 after ~3.5yrs (search, Mesh, Azure), took 6 months off, and started my own company. In the processing of recruiting & fundraising, the experience at MSFT was almost always a good thing (people respect it)--but I got a couple of comments from investors saying "it's a good thing you left when you did, > 5 years is a red flag for us".

I also have the same reaction hiring people now...a few years means I'll always interview them, MSFT's selection process is generally good. But after about 3-4 years, I've found most people (even the ones who express an incredible, proactive desire to "do a startup") never actually follow through on the decision. I think this is what Joel was referring to as the $300k/yr treadmill.

Finally...a couple people pointed out that the skill set you develop at MSFT is of marginal utility externally in specific settings...the specific setting that most HN readers assume is Silicon Valley. :) Assuming that's your goal as well, .Net-specific and Windows-specific experience isn't highly transferrable to LAMP down here. Obviously good developers can pick up new languages pretty quickly, but you are missing some depth there. And clearly the MSFT process isn't going to be helpful in most companies < 10k people, or honestly most web companies (and I worked on services there :) ).

Long answer short--I think 5 years is longer than you need or want if you want to go elsewhere, especially a startup...I'd vote for 3 years.
You get a similar sort of experience with concatenative languages too.
But parenthesis are the only required punctuation. Any of those others you mentioned can be equivalently expressed by parenthetical expressions. Homoiconicity is preserved.
Thx. Me and http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=martian wrote the software to make it. Martian made that particular map.
Start the video demo at 2:25 to skip the incidental details.

EDIT: And you can stop at 3:40 to skip the other incidental details.
I've been using an iPad in an academic setting as well. Just one note on your notes --- I talked to the GoodReader folks a little while ago, and they're about to add annotations.
Node.net - Node.js implemented in Javascript on the .NET runtime
> I can't say that I love the sheer number of parentheses required by the language.

Come up with a better way of representing an Abstract Syntax Tree in text, please.

> However, the code is data idea seems genius to me.

You know, I think that the reluctance to use functions as values in programming by some of the early luminaries is that functions as values in Mathematics just isn't considered as "normal" outside of fields concerned with the fundamental basis of mathematics. Since the computer itself doesn't need to be described nor does it necessarily benefit from those terms, it doesn't immediately take hold that programs running on computers are a lot easier to reason about once you've got functions being treated as values.

I mean, take differentiation and integration: fundamentally, those are two functions that you can run on another function to get a third function as a result. Does it ever actually get taught that way? I mean, is the implication of that really remarked upon? You go over the fundamental theorem of calculus in about twenty minutes in the first introduction to it, and then bam, here's all the shortcuts for differentiating. No reflection on just what the implications of that are.
Just How Popular Is Google Chrome/ium On Linux?
Headline writers of popular press love to prove Einstein wrong. Einstein sells.

http://www.google.com/search?q=einstein+wrong&hl=en&...