skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A simpler explanation seems to be that morning people are more in line with the regular 9-5 schedule of businesses and schools, and that 9-5 schedule was set from the days when natural light was an important factor in when work could be conducted. Thus, biology may be less of a factor than social structures.

These days, I'm noticing a shift toward later schedules--college professors are realizing they get better attendance if they hold classes in the afternoons, for example. So perhaps a gradual cultural shift will come to better accommodate evening people.
come to think of it, how would (could?) a real intergalactic computer network work?
If I recall correctly, Hofstatder uses the same principal for developing a formal language for classifying primes in Goedel Escher Bach.
> to pursue worthwhile activities or fritter away their time/money on drugs and alcohol

no, that's genetically predetermined.
While Rhodes is now under the MIT license, I don't think this includes the RhoSync server, which runs (http://rhomobile.com/products/rhosync/) $10,000 for 100 users.

I'd love to hear from someone more in the know to understand whether a RhoSync-less Rhodes app is capable of being full-featured, and what you sacrifice by not purchasing RhoSync.
How?

Remember, the radiation changes from this stuff is lost in the background noise you get from materials released when burning coal, or from the minute amounts of radioactive material in bananas, or the radioactive materials in smoke alarms.
Bezos mentioned this idea elsewhere, but I think he's using it as a framework to evaluate present decisions in absence of external pressures that typically cloud judgement. When you think with a long enough time horizon, some of the external 'trappings' of success (money, prestige, status, pride, security, etc) seem to fall away.

Before Amazon, he was a VP at DE Shaw. You can argue that if he stayed at his hedge fund job, he'd have enough money to buy all the material possessions he has now. I doubt he'd drive a different car, live in a different house, etc.

Its easy to risk it all, when you have nothing to lose. But he had pretty much everything to lose. I think most people at that point would look around, realize they're richer than most of their friends, and stay at their jobs.

If you think ahead to when you're on your deathbed, you're back at a point in your life where you have nothing to lose. You won't care about external pressures. You will have wished to have invested your time on matters that improved your quality of life with compounding interest. I'd like to believe that Jeff Bezos isn't just happier today for choosing to start Amazon- as he gets older, it will only make him that much more content.
Who are you with? I'd be interested if they are cheaper! :D
Currently, packets have to be converted from optical to electrical to be routed, and then converted back to optical to be transmitted to the next router. This article is talking about pure optical networking (which is hardly new, but I assume the researchers in question have made some improvement in the field).
Couldn't agree more.

They key point which I think people need to realise is that document databases / key-value stores are essentially lower-level tools than relational databases.

Don't expect a free lunch from choosing lower-level tools. Choose them when you need the extra flexibility / performance / scalability, but be prepared for an increased risk of shooting yourself in the foot, and prepared to implement lots of lower-level pieces of the puzzle, which a high-level tool will handle correctly (if not as speedily) for you.

Rather like choosing C over (say) Python. Although I wouldn't push the analogy tooo far.
They weren't operating on the current scale.
Incorrect. The SPL is entirely implemented in C.
When you talk about your “ethical perspective as a libertarian”, what you apparently mean is that you don’t believe in the concept of copyright (or other “intellectual property”, or perhaps even that society’s laws should be binding on citizens). This is not the usual libertarian “ethical perspective”, and you should be careful about implying that libertarians necessarily feel the same way you do.

You are living under a rock. My ethical perspective is not uncommon amongst libertarians. However, it was new and it took for a while for libertarians to accept the arguments.(At least a decade) Right now, some of the major organizations in libertarianism are already using creative common attribution license.
third element in the list containing the data about a person

Most people don't do that, except in throwaway code. In CL you can use an alist, a plist, a struct, or CLOS.

I've gotten used to thinking in terms of symbols so much that I find it hard to go back

Given that Lisp's history with symbolic computing goes back to the beginning, something about that doesn't sound right.

Your person->name comment reminds me of something, by the way. Portions of our app run in both CL and JS (via the Parenscript library). This is relatively easy, although there are a few disagreements between the two that you have to watch out for (such as how they handle null). Anyway, there are lots of CL features we've "ported" to JS via macros, but there is also one JS feature I found myself envying so much that I finally wrote a partial implementation of it in CL. That is JS's willingness to allow you to stick any property on any object just by setting it. It's a rather Lispy feature since it's maximally dynamic and maximally flexible. I find it handy for incremental development. When you have some data about a thing that you want to associate with it, but only some of the time, it's a real pain to have to make a separate data structure to hold it and then make sure it gets passed alongside the original thing to all the appropriate places. Our CL implementation of this is pretty crude but it allows the important thing, which is that you can write (@ something :some-data) and (setf (@ something :some-data) "blah") pretty much wherever you want. So we can be said to have Greenspunned a bit of JS in Lisp!
To be an accredited investor and make angel investments legally, you need an annual income of $200k or a net worth of $1M. (ref: http://www.sec.gov/answers/accred.htm )

I dare say, if you have the means to become an accredited investor, you might not need an MBA to teach you how to make money.
Farsi needs a similar thing, at least on Wikipedia. There is absolutely no effort in translating words to Farsi, so they cheat and transliterate the English version. I have a habit of hovering the mouse over the "فارسي" links and always see the English title with Farsi conjugation, transliterated into Arabic script :-(

It's sad because it's such a beautiful and rich language; the young folks doing the translation are doing it a great disservice diluting it in their rush for volume.

For Arabic; almost every Arab is a gray-beard language nazi! All traces of foreign influence are removed with urgent and great prejudice. Which is good.
Ask HN: Moving to London, Looking for Job Offers
Hi everyone.
After one year in Scotland I definitely decided to move to London this autumn (October).
I know there have been many "Who is Hiring" threads already but I am interested to see how many startups are currently hiring in London (and are willing to wait until October when i would be available to move) and would help with relocation?
Ideally I would like to work with Python/Django. I have a passion of learning languages (currently i am learning Haskell) so I am not afraid of taking on a job that requires to learn a new one :)
If the position is a entry level position, then there are two options I see for hiring the person:
1) Based it on his/her education and courses. If they went to the same school as I did, then I am able to ask about certain courses/instructors.
2) Based on any projects they have completed on their own (open source/freelance/personal)

You have to have one or the other. If you don't have either, then I'm going to choose someone else.

For anything over entry level, I'm looking for work experience.

To answer your question (which is why do companies ask for the a degree) is that it is used as a filter for them. If you have ever done any hiring, you will know that you can be flooded by unqualified candidates and its a major time sink.
I think PHP suffers from some of the same issues that VB6 suffered from in terms of inexperienced programmers. With VB6, someone who was not as much of a programmer as we all are could write themselves into a massive mess. I have found when writing PHP code if you are careful, you can build things with decent design patterns and consistency. Sure, its not as clean as a lot of languages, but it sure is easier for me to figure out what is going on with PHP code someone else wrote compared to Perl or Ruby code.
How to win every single argument at work
Internet Relay Programming
Even if memory usage weren't a problem you still have O(n) time for cdr. This may not be a problem if you implement the higher level functions (map, filter, etc.) efficiently.
RDF is based on a highly-normalised data model though--everything is broken down into binary relations.

This is essentially just a rephrasing of the relational model (modulo a relatively simple translation which adds surrogate keys in order to split up >2-ary relations which aren't normalisable any further, into binary relations)
I imagine similar light shows would be seen when a really big spaceship leaves orbit, firing its engines to propel it into deep space.

It's definitely something I would love to see.
Automating the Path to a Better User Experience
Uncomfortable, how? I'm not a German speaker, but my idiolect contains a fair amount of Yiddish, and "mensch" is a word I use often enough.

As much as I am surprised to say it, the Wikipedia article is actually pretty good.

Here's an example from real life, of someone calling Roger Federer a mensch: http://www.sporttaco.com/rec.sport.tennis/Federer_still_one_...

Here's a reference to Tom Valenti as a mensch:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2008/09/tom-valenti-is-a-mensch-s...

And here's one about Bill Murray:
http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ1204-DEC_MURRAY_rev_

This latter one is instructive, as it contrasts Bill Murray with Mickey Rourke, who the author refers to as a douchebag.

And, perhaps this is as good a way as any to understand the usage of "mensch": consider it the antonym to douchebag.

You know how there are some people that make you almost instinctively say to yourself, "Man, he's a real douche!"? On the flip side, there are people of whom you'll say "What a mensch!"

Does that help?

EDIT: fixed language
No, because as the example shows I can put regular html in the id tag. Once you do nesting, it's not regular anymore.
It would be nice if the article actually talked about some new development. Like you said, this is hardly new, I worked on OOO crossconnects 10 years ago. The problem then was cost, plus the telco overbuild in the late '90s stalled anyone seriously deploying the technology.
He seems just a little too full of himself. One of those people who gets too much pleasure from hearing words come out of his own mouth.
Planck satellite unveils the Universe - now and then
Instead we all just use associative arrays.

But there is a danger in overusing structs and classes, too. You end up with these hugely complex ontologies for every little program, and frequently when you try to reuse code you end up with conflicts.
Looks like I have asked an unpopular question.
The 7 Variables Needed To Figure Out How To Apply Startup Advice To Your Startup
There is A LOT of stuff going on that page. I find it too busy and distracting.

Also, the first tweets there are about justin beiber, so I'm not sure of how well you're picking out just football related tweets.
Are nuclear weapons good?
pyre, your 2 points are good. i agree that those are bad things. i agree that the patent system is being abused, and I agree that it's shady for corporations to push to keep extending copyright well past the point where the original creator is benefiting from it. very good points. however, I don't think the validity of those points somehow overwhelms or justifies what Eleanor and those other people were doing. i don't think it nullifies the thought process I outlined above. One is not justified in doing some unethical act just because other groups of people elsewhere are engaging in what you consider unethical acts. If someone shoots a gun at you it is probably reasonable to think you are justified in shooting back -- both parties are interacting directly, and you're shooting back at the exact person who wronged you. That's not what's happening in the OA, I think.
What’s New in Python 2.7
The Future of Self-service Banking
Maybe a bit off topic, but every time I read a thread like this, it leaves me wondering why people in the US are so reticent to discuss actual solid numbers regarding how much money they make, but do everything to dance around real figures, even if posting anonymously. When it comes to discussing salaries, suddenly everyone becomes a politician.

I lived in Bulgaria for two years, and it was pretty common there for people to ask, straight up, "How much money do you make?" They'd seem genuinely perplexed if I didn't want to answer. Granted, Bulgaria's economic situation is pretty different than the US's, but there was something about those frank exchanges that made me wonder why we do what we do.

Any thoughts?
I disagree. You are talking about the relational model conceptually. The author is talking about the relational model as it is implemented in today's RDBMS solutions.

You elude to this in the last paragraph of your comment. Having a horrible experience horizontally scaling, for example, is ample reason enough to look into document databases. Largely because the current implementations of document databases allow for ease of partitioning in a way that the current implementations of RDBMS' don't.

The author doesn't imply that document datastores are free lunches. They're simply alternatives and he goes on to say that document datastores are better for some problem domains than others.

Also, you oversimplify the difficulties in implementing a highly-performant document datastore by implying that data should be normalized and that storing the data on disk is an optimization layer. This comment comes off as being written by someone who is ignorant of how document disk storage is implemented and why it is so fast. Doing what you suggest would very likely result in a datastore that was drastically slower than the currently implemented document datastores or even key/value datastores for that matter (MongoDB, CouchDB, Cassandra, etc).

Will we someday perhaps have the end-all-be-all of RDBMS's that merges the feature-set of current RDBMS's and the performance of document/key-value datastores? Maybe, but until then, they're alternatives to each other that generally succeed in providing solutions for the problems for which they were designed:

* RDBMS - consistency, transactions, predictable schema, etc.
* Document/Key-Value - horizontal scalability, raw performance, flexible schema, etc.

Different solutions for different problem domains.
about as easy as hiring scala programmers, i figure...

Hey, haskell's up to #14 in github league table:

http://github.com/languages/Haskell
> Most people who write a HLL interpreter in another HLL tend to cheat and implement a half-baked source to source translator.

Is this a jab at the Lisp tradition of compiled sublanguages?
Opera has the fastest JS engine now (Sunspider test)
Sunspider benchmark (Win XP, dual core machine):

Opera (v10.60): 279.6ms +/- 0.9%

Opera (v10.53): 299.8ms +/- 1.0%

Safari (v5): 314.2ms +/- 1.7%

Chrome (v5.0.375.55): 326.6ms +/- 7.9%

Firefox (v3.6.3): 716.4ms +/- 1.7%
>I believe I can 'buy' them myself for <$10,000 year

The simple convenience of having a lot of good food options onsite is of significant value. If you have to spend your life going to the dry cleaners, driving to lunch, driving to the gym, and on and on and on, it can really reduce your use and enjoyment of those facilities.
You have the right to exchange in voluntary exchanges for your work. You have the right to make the fruits of your work available for sale to others, and only under your terms. Others are free to choose to buy it, or not, under the sellers conditions. Neither side is compelled to setup the potential for this exchange, nor, to engage in this exchange.

If you dug a hole in front of my house's front door and then demanded to be paid for it that would be unethical. It is true I would not pay you, but it is not because I had not requested you to do that "work" for me. Instead, I would not pay you because you (1) trespassed, (2) damaged my property, (3) caused blockage to my front door, and (4) are now essentially blackmailing into paying you to undo the damage you have done -- ALL of which was against my wishes. Therefore, I would refuse for reasons which are very similar to why I think Jason was right and Eleanor was wrong.
I agree, sadly not enough people pay attention to this. Jacques, I wish you'd write a lot more. You have a ton to teach/smart things to say.
Beta test my BSD licensed JDBC driver for MySQL and Drizzle
Nuclear bombs are neither good nor bad, they're just a tool. Since they're so powerful you should carefully consider the consequences before you use them, but that applies to any powerful tool.
this references the "barometer problem" legend:

http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/barometer.asp
Be Inspired (By Everything) 03
This is the third edition of Be Inspired and I hope you’re enjoying these posts as much as I am finding all this great work. Each day I check my inspiration feeds for the latest and greatest design, illustration and much more.
You mentioned a list of potential verticals. Care to name a few?
cash can be copied. dollar bills can be counter-feited.

banks can be broken into

neighbors cars can be broken into and their stuff stolen from the seat

...ad infinitum...
You do not need to use RhoSync with your Rhodes apps to connect to backend apps. RhoSync makes it easier to provide synchronized offline data. Its very commonly needed in enterprise app scenarios. All that said, Rhodes works great without to connect to backend systems. Versus other frameworks (such as PhoneGap) Rhodes:
- is the only Model View Controller framework
- is the only Object Relational Manager for smartphones
- is the only framework with sync
- has the only hosted development service (RhoHub)
- features the first mobile Ruby implementations for all devices
It’s not that seed investors are smarter – it’s that entrepreneurs are
Portuguese and Castillian both had massive arabic influences in pronunciation and vocabulary, not only because of demographics, but also because the Muslims had a more advanced and refined culture at the time. Still,

- they both remained mostly latin languages, and

- that influence had already happened when American colonization began. In Spain, the Muslim and Jewish were banned the very year America was discovered.

So the only explanatory power of that fact may be that

- Portuguese colonies were repopulated mainly from the north of the country (as was the case at least for Brazil), and

- that the southern dialects of the language have been promoted as the standard and expanded throughout the country. This is true today, where mass media are washing away the northern phonetics (actually richer: they distinguish between x and ch and -om and -am), accents and vocabulary in new generations.
It's pass/fail, so you can still fail. Something like 70% or below is failing. You still get graded on work, but the classes themselves don't result in a GPA, just pass or fail.

I know the idea at Yale is that the students have proven they're hard-working, smart, and dedicated to being doctors, so they don't need to be run through that gauntlet again. Yale would rather them focus on really learning rather than gaming the grading system for a better class rank.
I've always thought that RSS would have had wider understanding and use if Outlook could discover, consume, and display RSS feeds -- formatted as email messages so as not to confuse the user of Outlook too much.
totally! I'm setting a cronjob now to remind me too. (has to look up crontab syntax for +20-30 years)
" you don't have a right to other people's work, automatically, by default, for free"

Much, if not all, of this seems cultural, and inconsistent. Suppose I spend some time dreaming up a fabulous hair style. I plan to earn a living giving people this hair style. I go out and about, people see me with my fabulous hair style, and many like it. So they copy it, giving themselves and their friends the same hair style.

Do I have a supportable claim to ask, and expect, that no one may copy my hair style without my permission, without paying me? I can't imagine too many people would consider this a plausible idea, nor would many people be sympathetic.

For one, most folks would simply say, "Hey, you go out in public and people can see and easily copy your hair style! What did you expect?" "But", you reply, "just because they can doesn't mean they should."

Suppose too that I'm wearing a shirt that clearly says "Do Not Copy My Fabulous Hair Style." Does it change anything? Do my wishes regarding what I've created supersede reasonable expectations of what people are going to do, and what people think they are entitled to do?

People are constantly coming up with new things of varying originality and difficulty of creation. A turn of phrase. Color combinations in their dress or on their Web site. And no one is allowed, by default, to copy these things without prior permission and/or renumeration? That's crazy. Might as well outlaw culture.

Are restrictions on copying to be applied based on some expected financial gain? That's getting pretty circular; the gain is usually based on the expected scarcity. Are restrictions to be based on how hard it was to create something? That's just bizarre.

The arguments for not freely copying things seem based on a) the one who thinks of something gets to make the rules, and b) work should be rewarded. But there are so many instances where these don't apply that I don't see any consistent rationale other than that's just how the culture evolved based on the current technology and expectations of scarcity, plus the dictates of government meant to achieve some particular social or economic ends (as opposed to protecting some natural right).
I don't see the point of attacking somebody that I have copied from.(Well, dropping the F bombs instead of having an actual debate) There is no need to economically support someone indirectly or directly that doesn't share what I believed. Therefore, I would look somewhere else.

I believe that I have every right to sell something, but I do not believe that I have right to control every single copies in the world. I have sold to them a copy of my software. Even if I put a contract that said you must "eat cereals everyday or you will forfeit the copy", it is still their. Good luck for me, trying to enforce what is essentially unenforceable.

Do I believe that people don't have the right to expect to profit? Sure.

Do I believe that people don't have the right to expect anything for free? Sure.

The difference between you and me is that we understand these things in different terms. For me, laws do not matter to me, ethics does. Even if the laws were repealed for murder, I would still believe that murders is wrong and that people should be punished for it.
> You're still in the pedagogy sandbox;

Don't worry, I realize that :)

> very real Lisp worth using has structures and objects:

That's a tricky and somewhat circular definition.

If it is worth using it is probably real and vv, but most lisp tutorials that teach 'pure' lisp do not have structures and / or objects, they rely on lists alone as their major data structure.

That also defines all lisps that do not have these items as somehow not real and there seem to be a lot of lisp people that somehow consider this 'impure'. Or is my reading material that dated ?