skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is not the big difference dynamic vs. static scoping?

That was a matter of much debate that started to conclude when RMS did GNU Emacs, in 1984 when Common Lisp was also officially released for the first time, the latter's biggest breaking change perhaps being static scoping.

Were you thinking of anything else?
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1476029
"I'm not trying to be mean" - this is awesome feedback tyvm :)
Yeah, there's an extra /qa/ in the URL. Removing that works.
Webfetti | Cool Free MySpace Glitter, Add Custom Graphics & Codes
Microsoft killing Kin
Joel & Jeff are selectively rolling out new StackExchange sites.

The selection process for new sites is community-driven:

http://area51.stackexchange.com/

. . . but it looks like a stats site is close to being a reality:

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/33/statistical-ana...
For those of us who want to support this, but live in countries other than the US, UK or Canada, is there any alternative to MagCloud?

I know there's a donate but I want a dead tree edition too.
This is completely wrong for some obvious reasons

1. If ideas meant nothing there would be no patent and trade secrets.

2. Big companies are very good at execution but start-up still can compete against them. Most of the times because big companies don't have or don't value ideas that start-ups adopt.

3. Most people making this argument haven't had any great ideas themselves. "Ad hominem" attack but people need to reflect and make up articles.

4. Author is referring to iterating on initial idea as execution. I think, that is also part of creating idea not exactly execution.

Seed however small holds everything to generate a large tree. What is important? Soil and water or seed...
It's not just tickets, every part of the Greyhound experience is piss-poor. Never again.
HAvroBase: a searchable, evolvable entity store on top of HBase and Solr
Score 1, Still feel like I am close to failing.
I hope I was in CA, but then again, my problem was so peculiar, and so tough ( NP-Complete), it will probably take more time to build than it might require doing other parts of business.
I certainly hope so.
That making it work will pay off eventually.
I like to compare myself to Google guys.
Only in that they tok close to three years before the search engine was good enough to take investments. Of course, I think they were smarter, so does that give me more years to work on. I hope not..

:)
Very good point. They should measure standard of living, not just income.
Fusion Ads & Tweetie: It’s Been a Slice
Absolutely. Most people leave before they get fired in my experience. When something's not working, you tend to leave. Sometimes for good reason.
Its funny and entertaining, but I still feel more confused than informed.
Thanks, I'll read that.
I'd just like to point out that in your string example, you gain nothing by keeping that string copy short. The compiler doesn't see lines, all it sees are tokens, and what you've written there is fine for a compiler to read, but difficult for a human.

Instead of adding parentheses, try writing it like this:

while(*dst)
{
*dst = *src;
dst++;
src++;
}

It's instantly more readably, it's very obvious what's going on, and you've lost no performance. There's also no parentheses to add.
Come on - a Hyundai full of twenties! Read the letter!
Economics is Hard. Don’t Let Bloggers Tell You Otherwise
Stephen Wolfram on Alan Turing
The first and only true story of his adventures, Jesse James Jr. 1875
I understand that was the intent. The problem is that it teaches rote work, which is quite a bit less useful than triage and delegation, I think, when it comes to general 'responsibility'

I /always/ will have more tasks that i want done than I have time. I need to decide what tasks I drop on the floor[1], what tasks i delegate to others, and what tasks I do myself.

[1]dropping tasks gracefully is a /huge/ part of being 'responsible.' part of this needs to be thought out ahead of time. Don't promise things you later are going to drop on the floor. If you must drop something on the floor that someone else is expecting (and you will need to do this, sometimes.) you need to notify them as soon as possible.
My gut feeling is that Google would probably be pretty ok if you just generate some (very specific) links to their search.

If you scrapped their results and embedded them into your page, that might be a different story. (They wouldn't like it.)
I was so moved by the movie/story, decided to do some research. The book is a great read, if you liked the story.
> So no, if you give it to one person you don't have to give it to everybody else.

However, if you give it to someone, you have to give (same) it to the US govt.

It's illegal to charge the US govt more than you charge anyone else.
what if you are building a product in top of other product? Is there a way to know how big is your market?
"I bought $5000 of Google stock last year."

And obviously the people from who you bought it burned that 5K in a bonfire....

An illiquid financial system helps no one (well, no one good).
How would i be able to add the comments on the left? So far, i was only successful in generating the source code on the right.
Really thank you for that. I was trying to use quora for this purpose, but it's not specific enough. As a machine learning phd student from somewhere far from most good research centers (I'm in brazil, and how many brazillian ML papers have you seen in NIPS/ICML recently?), I struggle a lot with this folk wisdom. Most professors around here haven't really interacted enough with the international ML community to be up to date, and I often find myself recommending papers to my advisor and his peers. This can save me a lot of wasted time and effort; more than once I have spent a couple of months trying to solve a subproblem of an idea I had only to find out it is (a) trivial or (b) impossible with the current state of the art, and being able to find which of these is true in a couple of days does wonders.

I'm trying to disseminate this site to my peers and professors, to see if it will help people around.
Dollar cost averaging to zero is still zero. Best to stay away from hot IPO stocks until they have a history of earnings.
If you don't have a significant number of investors then dividends can be a good way to save on income tax. If you do have investors however you're throwing company money back to them which is not good for you and not that good for them.

For smaller companies the vast majority of accounting is not accounting but just book keeping. This is actually easier than it seems (it took me 4 years to realise this though) and is much easier if you use www.xero.com than Quickbooks. I hated all the usual "accounting" packages as they didn't guide me. Xero does a great job and whilst not perfect is definitely the best of the bunch and worth the monthly fee.

From having run 3 (small) companies this is what I now focus on:

1. Making sure I keep a note of everything that I spend and what it was (if you ignore everything else, do this)

2. Keep a note of which account I spent it from e.g. petty cash, bank account, paid directly by me

3. Making my "list of accounts" (i.e. categories of spending) meaningful to me and ignoring all the numbers that accountants give to them. Whether it's "domestic flights", "taxis", "computer hardware" or "web services" - I make sure it's a category that's meaningful and actionable

4. Paying my salary taxes when they're due & use a payroll company

5. (easy if you've done the others well) Filing my tax return on time

It's through getting all of these wrong that I've learned which ones were right :)

One last thing that I've found very helpful is having a google spreadsheet form with a link on my iPhone homepage to enter the amont and detail of purchases as I make them. This makes it much easier when it comes to remembering what each individual bank transaction was for when you import them.
I'm on the other side of the state, so close but not quite. I'll send this thread to one of my college friends in that area, and she can decide where to go from there.
I thought only of the dynamic scoping. I just found out that Emacs Lisp doesn't have tail recursion optimization, thus dooming you to use side-effects (because recursion can't be used for loops).

But I also understand that Lisp isn't a family of function languages. Functional is just a style that's possible and encouraged in Lisp, not required.
All I've stated thus far is that Capitalism is a stepping stone to something better.

That is in itself an argument. You are asserting that capitalism is not an ideal system but you are not backing up that assertion.

The core idea of the free market is religion.

What does this mean? And you don't even back up this claim.

but we humans operate on incentives.

Yes. The entire point of the free market is that people act in their own self interest.

I can't semantically parse the rest of your text. Can you try restating it?

Capitalism isn't evil, it's a cloak.
The promise of success keeps us all herding towards the door of opportunity, but only a few pass almost regardless of intelligence, morals, motivations or intentions.
When your insurance refuses coverage, it isn't because there's an evil asshole lurking to ensure you don't get what you deserve.
Company A announces incentives for employers for saving the company money. Those who aren't on-board get reviews, get fired. The workers who respond to incentives deny your claim. You're now fucked, to put it lightly. Company A is now full of incentive-driven bias.
This is just 1 course of Capitalism. You don't need me to dig up research or some book about societal structure and how it applies to Capitalism. You see it everyday.

I don't understand any of this.
Lawsuit: Dell Knowingly Shipped 12 Million Faulty Computers
Is Microsoft Kin dead?
sell Tesla and buy Apple: wow, it's almost as if he's front-running. :)

why do I say that (only half in jest)? because i bet Tesla has more room for growth than Apple in the future. my bet on Apple is that in the short-term it's going to continue to get better but in the longer term it will decline, if only because of Jobs age and health issues. I admire the guy but I think he's closer to the end of his career than the beginning, and Apple stocks are currently very very expensive whereas Tesla is stilly relative cheap in comparison. If Jobs leaves, and especially if just a few more people near the top leave, and the top of the company becomes more mediocre/tasteless/corporate-crapitude like Microsoft then I think it will flow downhill from there and they'll lose their "premium"/talent edge over Microsoft.

Of course, none of us can predict the future, but that's how I'm betting.
Client is the most important – are you sure about that?
Mario Live Wallpaper for Android
Paul Graham, exactly one year ago: "What a startup (bootstrapped or not) takes is 100% of your performance, not 100% of your time."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679278

He was talking about exercise, but I think the same is true with having kids.

In my case, I spend 4 hours with my kids every workday: 6am - 10am. During that time, I get:

- Ridiculous, insane amounts of joy.

- A chance to see the way that little minds think, which usually triggers a good software idea at least once per week.

- The same kind of chemical response that I would get from volunteering. Before kids, I tried to volunteer about 20 hours per week because it released some kind of neuro-chemical that made me really happy. Helping - and in particular, TEACHING - my kids triggers a similar response.

- An opportunity to process the day's coming challenges (subconsciously)

- Lots of laughs, enough that I don't feel compelled to watch as many TV shows or movies as I did previously.

For me, it works out to a huge net positive on both personal fulfillment and professional performance.
If you can do pull it off, do so. I might even try it myself.

But saving "only" 50% of your raises is something everybody can do without too much discipline, and still feel rewarded with a higher standard of living for whatever they did to get the raise. (Unless it's an automatic raise, and not something you got for some achievement.)
You just made my day :)
* a page of curated pithy/insightful/fun comments from hacker news

This is on pages 28-29 of this issue.
Can iP(ad/hone) not open PDF's?
This is very interesting; isn't it the second $50 or so development system TI's offering as of late?
Yes, but I'm following the same pattern that everyone does when they start getting in their own way: there's a laundry list of stuff I want to get in order before I start shopping on sites like HN.

However, skmurphy contacted me privately yesterday as a result of the comment, which was awesome. :-)
But why did the share price then go up on the first day after the IPO? (And why does it tend to do this for a lot of companies?)
Ask HN: Does a patent from a big company make a startup idea untenable?
Oh mighty and wise wizards of hackernews, I have a question I cannot answer. I seek a wizard of intellectual property strategy, for I have a question. (IP strategy is concerned w/ what actually happens, as opposed to the law, which is simply the law.)

I have a startup idea - I want to make an ad network for eBooks, and sign up publishers. I also want to make software to enable publishers to package special editions of their eBooks more easily, get metrics, etc. For the whole concept think Feedburner for eBooks.

Now, there are many eBook applications out there, and things have not consolidated yet, there are several large obvious companies with major interests in this space.

It seems that Amazon actually has a patent on advertising in eBooks or ereaders. You can see it here: http://gizmodo.com/5309001/amazon-patent-details-ad+supported-kindle-books

Does this make the startup not worth pursuing?

(It may be a bad idea for other reasons too. I guess we can workshop it a little bit on HN.)
Journalist finally gets that eyecam working
How do you open the PDF in ibooks from safari?
Clue is a renewable resource
I work for Microsoft in Ireland. We get 25 vacation days (5 weeks) as soon as we are hired! Getting an extra week of unpaid leave is common enough with very little hassle.

Instead of gambling your job, move to Europe.
Hmmm, the intelligence community was playing with reasonably up to date web technology as of early 2004. And they strongly favored Linux over anything Microsoft....
Microsoft Announces IIS Express – A New Built-In Web Server for Visual Studio
Dunno about you, but I know it because I did those things and now I'm fat. >_>
In iOS4, just browse to it. A button will pop up that says "Open in iBooks" assuming iBooks 1.1 is installed.
Native Restore From SQL Litespeed Backup
I actually find that style considerably less readable, though admittedly I'm quite familiar with C code. It's just less common for one (not the idiomatic way of writing code in the language), but it also emphasizes this tedious loop-iteration-at-a-time interpretation, while the original is easy to read as a sort of Matlab-style single vector operation, once you're used to it ("copy all the srcs to all the dsts").

Plus, once you start piling on a bunch of such code-explosions, you end up with functions that are much harder to scan, because what could've been an easy to scan 8-line function is pedantically written out as this super-explicit 30-line thing.
How is bad code not the original developers' fault?
Data at Rest vs. Data in Motion
I thought it was the two free downloads... I guess I'm just no good at this corporate mumbo-jumbo.
"Consumers paid as much as $599 for the first iPhones three years ago. They're paying a third as much for superior devices now."

Investment advisers who can't do the simple maths required for deciphering mobile pricing schemes? Next...
It's simply deceptive to use the words "C++" and "basic" in the same sentence.
Thank you for your informative post!

I do mean a return to a concentrated effort to build the kind of user space originally envisioned.

Can you describe more about what you see as this originally-envisioned user space?
I have one answer to this question: google keyword suggest tool/adwords.

it depends what sort of market you're in and what you're doing. Because you're in this forum, I assume you're building an internet app and intend on receiving traffic from search engines and social sites.

You can use google keyword suggest or wordtracker to see how many people are searching for what you're making, and if anyone else makes it.

Yes this works for ISV products too.
The Scheme version is not worthy of a blog post:

(define-syntax until
(syntax-rules ()
((until pred expr ...)
(let loop ()
(if (not pred)
(begin
(begin expr ...)
(loop)))))))

In dialects with WHEN syntax (mzcheme, Kawa, probably many others) it's even more concise:

(define-syntax until
(syntax-rules ()
((until pred expr ...)
(let loop ()
(when (not pred)
(begin expr ...)
(loop))))))
Its been interesting watching Amazon's acquisition strategy.

The deal-sealer for me was the video of the monkey rapping about it: http://www.woot.com/Blog/ViewEntry.aspx?Id=13391
Of course raising children requires time and money, just like any other activity.

I have a friend who competes in Iron Man. It takes a huge commitment of time and energy, and every time I talk to him he has just spent $1000 for some new attachment to his super-bike. Iron Man negatively impacts his "available time and money". Oh, and he has a startup. And it's very successful.

I suspect that most of you have hobbies that consume 3-4 hours of your weekday and several hundred dollars of your monthly budget.

Now, in my case, my family is my hobby. Spending time with my kids is how I relax and unwind. I don't go out, or watch TV, or play a musical instrument, or compete in Iron Man, or participate in Renaissance Festivals. My life might seem empty and boring to you, if your idea of relaxing and unwinding is different than mine.

Having a family is one choice -- amongst many -- for how to spend your free time and disposable income. I'm not claiming that you can have it all -- for example, I don't think anyone could do startup + family + Iron Man -- but I do think that startup + family is eminently doable.
Lepl: a recursive descent parser in python (with a great demo)
The only problem is, once you do desire to hire an accountant, they often want you to use Quickbooks. And, this can often be good because it'll save on how much time they spend on your file since they can easily open the file in their own Quickbooks, and thus reduces their fees. However, the front load to learn and understand Quickbooks costs you a lot of your own time.
Foursquare makes a lot of sense from a business perspective-the data they are collecting is very valuable.

Why users would continually want to publish their location information is beyond me, but if 4Sq has figured out a way to game them to do so, more power to them.
After you did this on an iPhone or iPod touch, did it then sync over to your iPad? Obviously, you can't do this on an iPad directly.
I agree with you on everything else, but there are tons of spectacularly successful forks of BSD-licensed software -- NetApp, Cisco, Juniper, and most of their competitors have proprietary operating systems that are forked from FreeBSD.
Clear and cogent. A little to trusting of the DOJ's getting it right, now or at some point in the future. As memory serves, when they took on Microsoft, Andrew Schulman had three 'Undocumented' books on the shelves, any one of which would have done the job for them.
Loop Patterns
There are several problems with that approach:

As Chris Manning (Stanford NLP professor) says, Area 51 hasn't gotten any buy-in from the academic community. I have focused on getting academia to be the immediate core of the community, so that the quality of Q+A is high. I am able to do this because of my academic connections.

They are fragmenting the Q+A sites into four:
http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/33/statistical-ana...
http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6607/artificial-in...
http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/2761/natural-langu...
http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/7607/machine-learn...

The last thing we need is NLP and ML people communicating less. That's why my site encompasses all of these proposals, as well as adjacent fields. As we've learned from StackOverflow, having one site for a broad topic leads to cross-polination of ideas between groups who don't normally communicate.

Most importantly, OSQA (which powers my site) is an open platform, built on Django+Python. That comes with all the benefits of open software. In particular, because the site is open-source, I can experiment with adding NLP to it. I can improve the Related Questions, I can automatically infer tags, and I can implement techniques for helping you organize and navigate information.
Flying Car [video]
If one of your projects becomes dormant, you always have the option to move it off the site. If it becomes active again, it's easy to push the repository back up to github.
working only half-time (1000 hrs/year) at $80/hour would yield $80k/year. that would be a very decent lifestyle in the US.
"through a management team with superior execution intelligence"

Isn't that just a more fancy way of saying "a management team with ideas"?
Ask HN: Pay tax on donations?
I have an LLC, just me - considering accepting donations on my website. Will talk to a CPA at some point, but in general will I need to report and pay taxes on donations to a web app?
Developer Preview of MeeGo running on a handset (Aava)
RIP Microsoft Kin
I opt for a P around both the label and the field, gives greater CSS hooks and encapsulates each form area nicely.
I admit I didn't read past the first paragraph when you asked for proofreading.
There was a big emphasis in the post about making sure your projects are tied up before you leave. I don't think anybody is advocating leaving your coworkers high and dry by skipping out on your deadlines at the drop of a hat.
It's also annoying to have open bugs that can't get any traction... I'm more than willing to do almost any test (short of destroying my data) to help them along, because an easy way to get multiple boxes with block access to a volume is pretty awesome...
For the last part about noting purchases amounts and detail, wouldn't expensify.com be helpful for this?
Now I finally know how to refer to a “Loop and a Half”:

http://www.cs.duke.edu/~ola/patterns/plopd/loops.html#loop-a...

(Link seen at http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2010/06/30/python-internals-add... .)
It's idomatic C. It's difficult for unexperienced C coders to read, but easy for experienced C coders who have read lots of other people's code.
Sure anyone can build a device with Android... what this tells us is that people are buying them. And that's news.
Most negotiating techniques will work better when you're negotiating directly with the CEO, instead of HR or the hiring manager... :)
The best vacation ever: Research on vacations and happiness
But not at all as a general computing environment. It makes sense once you have your application finished that you could move it to a kernel that has just what you need. However, it makes no sense when you start development to try to guess what calls you might end up using.
> No one can tell what would of happened if this was the case

You can look at the market and see if you could form a Red Hat around BSD. Call me back when you get funded.

> Developers know what they're getting into

And that's precisely why stuff like BtrFS is not BSD-licensed. Because the following week, Microsoft would launch their new and improved next-generation NTFS. There may be no successful BSD-branded ("ClosedBSD"? "ArrestedBSD"?) fork (BTW, is JUNOS open? I couldn't download the source) but certainly many pieces of BSD software end up inside proprietary software, and nobody knows exactly how those wheels were modified.
Or, if you'd prefer to get your business news from the less-conventional rapping monkey puppet, see their video press release:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnCHCcveteA