skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A great example of a site focusing on the content is http://quora.com. I hope this trend continues, I know I've been trying to follow it in my own designs lately.
This happened to the Windows NT microkernel too - they just kept shoving more and more stuff back into kernelspace for performance reasons, starting with Graphics drivers in NT4, and going from there. I think they may have yo-yo'd on Graphics Drivers later for stability reasons, but I've taken my eye off Windows since I stopped using it.
The App Store is for Suckers
The problem with this notion - as mentioned by a few people in the article's comments - is that it is difficult to find developers with a high level of expertise for both sides of the fence. Is it worth the extra expenditure of time in the hiring process to look for two people who are good in both realms? Or is it better to spend less time looking for one front-end expert (with passable server skills) and one server-side expert (with passable client skills)? My experience interviewing/hiring suggests the latter.

I will concede the obvious: if you find someone who is great on both sides, HIRE THEM. If you are lucky enough to hire that person, don't pigeon hole them.
Usage is not waste. Simply because you don't agree with his usage of a tub of water to cool his room doesn't make it waste. He chooses on what to spend his money. As for the ad-hominem attack on my handle, I'll simply say it's unwarranted.
No, my comment is a bit like complaining that Wordpress' default theme is a clone of the default Blogger theme.

I had not heard of OSQA. I'm about to apologize to the person who started this particular site (other thread), as it's not his fault. But being open source doesn't make it OK to copy someone else's hard work.
What I've found works well for me, and is gettable, is a designer who can do HTML/CSS/light Javascript. Then I do the rest.
No more than conventional air conditioning is a waste of electricity. Use whichever is cheaper, ie less scarce.
"Now try the question again, in what function or macro is the highlighted line located in? Was it easier to answer this time?"

No, not really, no. I didn't find it any easier either way.

I also don't buy this fellow's argument that lisp is the only language in which people rely on the editor to help them figure the the scope of expressions. I know that I use the editor when coding in C like languages as well. So I don't think that this argument for trailing parenthesis bears any weight.

The only argument that does make sense to me is that inserting a new expression at the end of a form can be annoying with editors that expect to operate on lines.

Personally, I find "parenthesis stacking" to look nicer, and it certainly has the advantage of being standardized and widely accepted in the Lisp community. One of the advantages of Lisp's syntax is that indentation and formating is so well standardized you can rely on an editor to do it right every time.
> Now try the question again, in what function or macro is the highlighted line located in? Was it easier to answer this time?

No? In either case, if it were me I'd highlight the previous close-paren (whether it's on its own line or not) to see what form it associates with. I'd do the same thing with a close-brace in C++ or an end token in Ruby. Long code blocks are a problem of every language, not just Lisp.
>And no matter how much good work they may do in other cases, it provides no excuse for the conduct described in this case.

That's just not true. It completely disregards reality. In a fantasy world where life is totally fair you are correct. Back in the real world, failure rate is a VERY relevant stat, and is never expected to be 0. The system and processes in the company have been optimized to handle certain types of cases extremely well. They will fail on other cases (like this one).

My argument is that they should change their policy to simply not support the cases for which their system isn't perfected, but you are using a volvo and expecting a porsche. But just because this one case was a failure does not mean the system is failing in general. It's not, there is a reason PayPal is so successful.
Don't understand why you can't imagine someone wanting these jobs. Are you suggesting that this is most menial form of labor on the planet? There are far worse jobs to have. There are far worse jobs that are performed in abundance everyday (e.g. fast food).

Anyway, regardless of where the work is in the pecking order, it's still work, it's still opportunity, it's still income. People who take pride in their work will take pride in their work in any context.

I know people personally right now who would be happy to have the job. When you can't find other work and your savings have been depleted by healthcare bills, I don't know what would stop you.
I remember implementing an n-queens solver in Prolog for a programming languages course. Prolog does backtracking on its own. The style of programming is very different from anything else I've ever programmed in--it's a really interesting language. It doesn't get used much in production, but I've seen isolated instances where it has been. Initial implementations of Erlang were written in it, for example.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Prolog
> Most small startups (by which I mean fewer than 20 people) don’t have enough work to justify splitting the team into frontend and backend components

I disagree. Most startups have a ton of work, but they often don't have the money or the structure to support a large engineering team. Those switch hitters that traverse the stack are really important for these situations.

There's an added benefit, too. Since one gets to that level by having done a lot of different jobs in a lot of depth, that "macro" view tends to be extremely valuable in sustaining the technology through growth.
Huffington Post buys Pollster
Have you been paying attention to the sorts of people at the top of our capitalistic society? There are precious few who are notable for not being charlatans and con men.

Ethics are for the poor, and laws can be circumvented, re-written, or present only minor speedbumps (profit for law-breaking = $100; fine = $10 => BREAKIN' THE LAW!)
And it still counts as a hit, when your best friend or brother had the near-drowning experience instead. Also lots of other things can happen with water. My sister made the unpleasant acquaintance of boiling water once.
The real reason that parenthesis-stacking is the norm is twofold:

a) Trailing parentheses just look ugly. I can't really explain why - perhaps it's merely a cultural thing, come about only because lispers are so used to looking at stacked-parenthesis code.

b) Lisp code tends to get very nested. In C or Java code, you rarely get more than 3 trailing braces in a row. In Lisp, if you trail parentheses, you regularly end up with 5 or more lines of nothing but trailing parentheses. This contributes to the ugly factor and makes for a lot of "wasted" whitespace. It's also one of the reasons 2-space indentation is the norm for lisp instead of 4-space.

Honestly, I don't think trailing parentheses makes lisp code particularly easier to read. I agree with noahlt that it's mostly the 2-space versus 4-space indentation issue.
Exactly. The saying is "make something people want," not "make something you think is cool."
I believe apache is capable of handling 5000 requests per year with very little human intervention.

The CRU folks actively avoided going that route. They avoided putting data on a public ftp site because they didn't want people they disliked to download it.

http://junkscience.com/FOIA/mail/1107454306.txt
Any recommended links for reading about that?
Russia Creates Nature Reserves the Size of Switzerland
By the way, the second player we see is MooN.. many says he's the best player of war3 of all time since he's been at the top scene for so much time.

And it's true that in warcraft3, APM is less important than starcraft since you have less "things" to do, but the thing you actually focus on are way more important.

And by the way, 300 apm is an exageration.. usually it's around 250+ and again, this is not always necessary. For instance, in the first 30-45 seconds of the game, you could actually use only 30 apm or so.. however, spamming (mass clicking) helps some players to focus and be ready for when the game "really" start.
I'm kinda curious if his definition of "frontend" developers is the same as mine. To me, the frontend includes everything up to the purely-computational algorithms and storage of the website. That's the HTML/CSS/JS, but also the webserver/webframework, RPC system, or database API (but not the database itself). Rails is a frontend technology.

I consider backend work to the computationally-intensive part. Data mining, machine learning, information retrieval, any domain-specific algorithms. High performance storage systems. Managing server clusters.

It's very, very difficult to find both skillsets in the same person, because both skillsets have incredible depth, particularly if you also want the breadth that a pivoting startup will require.

I'm wondering if his idea of a startup is the typical web 2.0 startup, where you slap a web framework on top of a database. Those startups are essentially all frontend - in that case, it doesn't really make sense to hire "frontend" or "backend" devs, just pretend that the whole world is frontend. There's nothing wrong with a startup like that - mine was, as are most gaming, social network, or social news sites (many iPhone/Android apps too, where frontend in that case is the mobile SDK). But that space is getting increasingly crowded; I suspect that many more successful startups will start needing people who can do the algorithmic heavy lifting.
Assuming you are not the proprietor of OSQA: I apologize for implying that you acted distastefully. I was not aware of the existence of OSQA, which is what I find distasteful.

Digging deeper, I can see that OSQA is based on the same tech as CNProg, which has been discussed on HN before. If I recall correctly, most people shared my displeasure with the clone. But now because OSQA is open sourced, people think it is OK?

When people spend a lot of time and money to design something through blood, sweat, and tears, like I'm sure the StackOverflow team did, it is not cool for someone else to come by and just clone it blindly. This also applies to free and open source software. Derivative, inspired work is one thing. But this is a step away from copy-paste.
I have a five person team and the fifth person, a front end developer, is a frickin' godsend. He has a design sense. He knocks out new designs and design changes in minutes whereas the rest of us take days to come up with crummy looking updates. My lesson in this: as you grow you'll find your team has holes that need patching. Go and patch them.
Hoover signed into law drastic tax increases, e.g. Revenue Act of 1932.

He did attempt some spending programs near the end of his presidency which was also at a point where the depression was already around the point of its most extreme GDP contraction.

You could argue that was FDR did in terms of spending and bank reforms was similar to what Hoover started near the end of his presidency but orders of magnitude larger. In contrast debt/GDP actually remained neutral during the New Deal due to concurrent GDP expansion.
So how does PG invest his money?

I was kinda surprised because I thought the article was going there, with some basic advice about how not to lose it in investments. But it took a turn in focus.
Or how about those guys who ask a question, then follow up with another question without really listening to the answer. They're up at the microphone not because they really want an answer, they simply want to ask 'gotcha' questions.
Different strokes, I guess. I take 34 minutes out of my day to watch a Knuth video every chance I get.
I did find it vaguely easier on the second one but (aside from already knowing) I'd chalk it up to two reasons:

1) 4 space indents instead of 2 making it more visually obvious.

2) I wasn't told "pop quiz" and so I didn't assume it was some sort of trick and so I trust the the indentation.
It was the "let", right?
The Pedagogical Patterns Project
Phys Ed: Your Brain on Exercise
Ask HN: How does PG invest his money?
His recent article was about how easy it is to lose money in bad investments. I was expecting it to go into some general rules for avoiding those or making good investments. But it took a turn in focus. I'm still curious.
You just compared a one unit game to an entire army.
This is not someone I could be friends with (the guns, etc.) but I loved his story, maybe because of the fact that I entertain the phantasy to leave everything and go cross country.
The main advantage of the app store is a quick and painless payment method for the end users. Your web app does not offer that.
I think the nesting in lisp code is ultimately what makes lisp difficult. Deep nesting is hard to read!

Haskell is also deeply nested, but the where statement makes it very easy to read. A where macro would be easy to write in lisp, the real trick would be making it part of the standard lisp style.
"If you feel that parenthesis stacking actually improves the readability of your code, by all means, feel free to do so! However, "everyone else is doing it" is not a good reason to sacrifice the readability of your code."

I think it is a good reason. The community benefits when everyone uses a consistent style. Readability isn't just about being able to read your own code, it's about helping other people read your code.

The accepted style of the community will make sense up to a point; no one wants to make things really hard on themselves, and people gravitate toward things that are comfortable. But it'll also be partly arbitrary and probably not optimal in every way. Part of learning a programming language is learning the idioms and dialects of other programmers.

Using a style no one else in the community uses is like making up your own words in spoken language. People will be able to understand you given some effort, but are they going to bother? If they do bother, they're probably going to be annoyed. Even if your new words are "better".

If you're the only one reading your code, knock yourself out. Otherwise you should probably suck it up and adapt, in my opinion.

"No other language that I'm aware of stacks scope delimiters or has a community where the standard indentation width is two spaces wide, and where sometimes even a single space is considered acceptable."

Idiomatic Ruby uses two space indentation. Maybe because Ruby is often so deeply nested, like Lisp.
Your downvoters must not get the joke. What's funny, I did originally quote "the city" but figured not everyone would get it :)
Why isn't it obvious that you don't really want to let someone drown almost to death? In any case I really didn't want to put too big a warning against #3 because I don't want to scare people away from that option if it is a choice between that and #4. Seriously, I don't.

As for you understanding the risks of #4 when explained, if you had understand it when it was first explained you shouldn't have responded as you did. Go back and re-read my original post. I said not once, but twice, that this was for trained people only. I further gave as two reasons the inability of untrained people to properly support a struggling person in the water, and the speed with which a mistake gets you killed. Yet your reaction was that #4 didn't look so bad.

I described #4 in the amount of detail I did because I thought people would be curious about it. But if people are going to misread my attempt to satisfy curiosity as a howto, it would have been much better for me to say no more than that going after a person drowning in water over your head is a recipe for suicide unless you have specialized training.
Clickable links: http://www.mxtoolbox.com/services_servermonitoring.aspx
https://www.dnsstuff.com/products/mstc
According to Wikipedia, over 200MM people had 3G phones before the iPhone even launched[1]. It wasn't for another year that Apple introduced the iPhone 3G.

Whether or not Apple wins or loses on specs (cf. the "I don't care" bear), they're winning big on overall experience, mindshare and ecosystem. Arguments about who has the best GPU misses the point when you can only play the newest, hottest games (or whatever) on the iPhone.

It's sort of like the argument about the Wii vs. the X360 and PS3 or the DS vs. the PSP. Who cares what the specs? The apps are driving the platform.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G#History
The "tweet deserts" would be very useful to parties not wanting witnesses around.
Right, but what a lot of people don't realize is that what looks like "spam" is actually careful micro. In order to get the most effective unit control, it's actually necessary to order your units to hold position quite frequently while they're being positioned. It gives you some advantage, for example, if you just send your unit somewhere, it's possible for an enemy player to get close to your units and draw them to a disadvantageous place and kill them, where if you tell them to hold position this isn't possible.

So what you are seeing that looks like spam is actually individually grouping large amounts of units and positioning and holding position at just the proper point.
First Growth Venture Network Is An Example Of Why NYC Startups Are Here To Stay
Why don't you save me the capital outlay and just tell me what will happen?
Years ago, I booted this off a floppy drive and was impressed by how feature rich it was given that it was written from scratch in assembly language. Looks like it's prettier now.
In fact, it is cool, it is expected, it is flattering, and it is perfectly ethical. I'm guessing the StackOverflow team feels this way too.

There is so much more to software than what your CSS layout is, and we should all look to our fellow designers and programmers and steal the best ideas and use them ourselves. That's how software evolves.

From a legal standpoint, didn't we settle the whole look and feel issue way back when with Apple vs. MS?
The problem is not the ()))))), it's the 200 lines function which does 20 different things all at once. Split that into smart and readable function.. You identified a problem (Hard to get where that println goes), however, you came with the wrong solution.

But I need to say that you are right about the fact that many lisp code are really ugly.. Maybe it's because when programmers are coding in lisp they considere themselves hackers and don't think about coding cleanly.

"With great powers come great responsibility." Since Lisp is the most powerful language, people should learn to separate abstraction into separate function. I mean, it's not because you have lambda and you don't have to name function that you absolutely need to do it.

Often, for small function, lisp coder tends to put that in a lambda and inline it directly in the bigger function.. which in my opinion is not the way to go.

A friend of mine once told me he really liked lambda because he had difficulties to find good game for function and variable.. by stacking all lambda together, it was way faster and easier for him. The problem with that, of course, is when other programmers will actually try to read that code and understand what it does.

Flame me if you want but when I need to work on someone else project written in lisp code, I always know it will be a pain to understand it. However, when I need to read java or C++ code, even thought the syntax is uglier and more verbose, I know I will have no problem reading it.

So here's a small trick for you hackers:

- Don't be afraid to separate your code into many functions, even if you are using lisp.

- Don't be afraid to use (let) syntax to give a name to portion of codes.. it might be harder to write (finding good variable name is sometime really hard and takes more time), however, it will make the code so much readable.
already working on php implementation http://pastebin.com/9Gn8XwQD to use it on one project
I remember back in the days when you could trade CC dumps on private irc channels. I think back then all you needed was name, pin, number and you were good to go.
File under: gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"
Looking at the source, there's no html, head or body tag in the document (but there are CSS styles referencing the body tag, hmm).

This could be some minimization trickery that assumes most browsers can deal with malformed html documents, but [slams fists on table] IT'S NOT RIGHT, I TELL YOU!
> I also don't spank my teen-aged son, but he has had to do his fair share of push-ups while listening to me explain to him the error of his ways.

He doesn't have to. It's not an requirement of life that he does. He's just submissive towards you.

I don't see why should it be a requirement. If he does, then why are they still a requirement? If he doesn't, why is it a good thing for him to comply? Why is he afraid? why is he submissive?

I understand you are not going to accept reality here. I know you have rationalizations to justify causing fear and pain in your "parenting". I understand it seem reasonable to you and that's not going to change. I quit.
The stacked C code requires much less jumping around with your eyes and it's easier to quickly get an overall idea of what the code is doing. The other version just looks too scattered, which is fine if you're working on a particular line, but most of the time I'm just glancing at major portions of code.
It also puts you in front of a crowd that is willing to buy your product because that's precisely why they are there.

A mobile web app with no built-in marketplace or buyers takes considerably more hustle to squirrel up a willing audience.
Your mention of Python made me wonder if anyone's experimented with an indentation-sensitive syntax for Lisp. It turns out they have.

In this Scheme RFI, "I-expressions" can be freely mixed with S-expressions in source:

http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-49/srfi-49.html

This argument for I-expressions touches on many of the same points as the OP; e.g., whether source needs to be readable independently of the editor:

http://www.dwheeler.com/readable/retort-lisp-can-be-readable...
Since 80's, operating systems are a commodity and in the commodities market any elegant or premium product will end in the marginal.

People want their operating systems to manage disks, processes, cpus, network, and peripheral hardware: unless the operating system totally fails at these basic tasks, nobody will pay any attention to how the kernel was implemented. There are some folks who are interested in performance, and there are some folks who are interested in stability, but there are virtuall nobody who is, as a user, interested in elegance.

If you just buy a car to get from point A to point B, do you care if the engine has a carburetor and a purely mechanical fuel ignition system or if it comes with an engine control unit computer that electronically controls that its high-pressure fuel injection system and its computer-controlled ignition system are in sync, keeping the engine at its optimal parameters at all time and avoiding ignition knocks?

Given the nature of operating systems as for the markets in general, it's really great that people like Linus Torvalds and his fellow gurus keep making their kernel better and better. For most people, it sounds like really gritty, mundane work to do.
Lambda: the ultimate syntax-semantics interface
Stack Overflow's new "Web Apps" site is in public beta
I don't see why this couldn't exist, though. Is this what Google is trying to do with their WebApp Store?