skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been working on a Tetris Attack clone in Clojure using Penumbra (a Clojure opengl wrapper in functional style). I've had quite a rough time with code organization, primarily because the physics of the game has a lot of frame-to-frame dependencies and I've been adamant about avoiding mutable state (because what is the point otherwise?). The Penumbra stuff provides frame callbacks, and you can return a state object which will be passed to you on the next frame. But even with that, I've still had some difficulty. I'm trying to implement a little macro language for animations, so that you could write, e.g.,:

(anim
(frames 3 :moving-to [x y])
(set-position [x y]))

and have a block spend 3 frames in the "moving-to" animation, followed by an actual position update on a grid.

We have a state shuffling problem: this 'anim' macro has to maintain frame-to-frame state, and each animation frame also has to accept the gameboard and possibly return a new gameboard, in order to be able to update the position of the block in question. And I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around it. I really don't want to have to explicitly name a 'state' variable everywhere, although a state variable obviously needs to be passed.

This is the first time I've attempted to do something game-like in a Lisp. I've done a small amount of programming language implementations, garbage collectors and so on, in Scheme. I've also done a decent amount of Haskell. A monad would be exactly what I want, and I am capable of designing them in Haskell, but I was sort of disappointed and frustrated when I tried to figure out how to design one in Clojure.
Are there actually any Android phones with a separate app store?

It sounds like your thinking has been seeded with plenty of Android FUD. The differences between models are not as substantial as that.

(If you're talking about fragmentation from the developer's point of view, don't forget that the iOS ecosystem is not immune to it either. Some iOS devices have an advanced GPU with shader support, others don't. Some devices have a camera and microphone, others don't. Many iPod touches have not been upgraded beyond the original OS release that they shipped with, because the newer version costs $20. And so on...)
a few thoughts:

- don't be intimidated by people who are a few years older and a lot cockier.

- don't worry about having a job / making money. Just get by and build the skills you want. Take risks. Money is easy enough to earn and should not be the primary concern at first.

- Avoid financial over-extension. No credit cards, avoid loans, etc.

- 30 is the new 20. Seriously.

- This sounds cliche, but "ship lots of stuff". Iterate.

- When you meet cool/talented people, collaborate on a small project to get an idea of how strong they are. The real stars will jump out at you.

- Find an obsession and seriously try to live it for at least 2 years. Doing that gets harder and harder the older you get.
This OP suffers from the same delusion as a lot of financial professionals.

The "Investment capital" that he talks about mostly goes to buy and sell stocks and bonds. These are not real capital investments, but wagers on future prices. I bought $5000 of Google stock last year. To say that the $5000 did anything to help Google is foolish. I bought someone's bet and now he has $5000 more while I have $5000 less. He may have invested it in something useful (buying goods or services) but more likely he used it to make another wager. No true value was created, though the brokers and money managers (like the OP) take their cut. On the other hand, if I had purchased government bonds, the bond money would have been injected much more broadly into the economy via capital spending or entitlements. Don't pretend that money that doesn't go to government bonds would go to building bridges.

Should or national savings rate be higher? Yes. Should we move toward a balanced budget? Yes. Should we try to fix these things while on the edge of a double-dip recession? Most certainly not.
"What we need is kids that can think outside of the box, not get 3000 points on science tests."

What you're doing is comparing risk-taking to fundamentals. I would argue...why can't we have both? Isn't a better-educated population always better for the society?

"There's no markets in other countries too."

Except there is. In Belgium, government funds education -- at many different kinds of schools -- but if a school can't attract students, it goes out of business.
I think the no warming comes from this

"Two days later, ticket in hand, I strolled into the office of my department head."

Got a ticket and then sounds like you leave on Friday for three months.
One explanation for a high stock price is that various mutual funds focused on investing in "green" tech, have more money than they have green companies to invest in. Thus money is going into TSLA.
Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook. So, you do need to worry about who you disclose your ideas to.
First of all, let me say I think your site is exceptionally attractive. I am immediately presented with the logos of scores of exciting startups. This engages me right away. Although, at the moment the front page is a bunch of Airbnb listings. I think the variety of logos does a lot for the site's first impression, so you might want to make sure there aren't too many listings of a single company on the front page. Also remember to add a favicon.

Featured links seems like a good way to go. Do you actually have companies paying for featured links at the moment?

Edit: Oh, and your Adap.tv logo is broken.
Implementing FORTH in Lisp
You're trying to make it seem like the time he invested in it wasn't worth it or that he was too slow.

You can do this in 30 minutes? Really? Prove it to us. You have 30 minutes, replicate this by "script/generate a few scaffolds, throw in a has_many or two and maybe a belongs_to here or there, code some simple erb layouts and BOOM!" then give us a link.

Everyone can look at someone else's work and be a critic. And, that's fine. But blatant criticism and ripping apart work that took time for no apparent reason is, at least in my book, terrible.
Others I have seen
- using too many fonts
- using too many colors or weird combinations of colors
- not using a grid to align elements
Yes. Painfully, I read the whole thing. Which is why I could summarize the rambling non-arguments of the article.
Concisely: you are more likely to succeed if you try to build a mousetrap better than if you try to build a better mousetrap.
WTH's a soy template? And is it yet another proper name that insists on being lowercased?

(I know I can google it. It just doesn't make sense to me for there not to be an explanation in the article.)
> "It actually seems like the quality of applicants has gone down since the last time I was interviewing people."

Makes sense. As another poster brought up, the market has more laid off people right now than voluntary job seekers. Not only that, keep in mind people (even highly employable ones) are playing things more conservatively given the economic climate - many of the good engineers don't even hit the open market before they're snapped up through their own network.
White Oak Technologies in the Washington DC area has more than 2 dozen job openings offers 5 weeks Vacation after one year.

http://woti.com/benefits.cfm
http://woti.com/jobs.cfm
Must be a US citizen
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Why limit yourself to shelling shoes online?
To sort of tie back to the original post, with a vacation culture that is completely different from the US, situations like in the blog post never really happens here. Everyone gets several weeks off every year, so businesses adjust for it. Everyone knows that June-July-August are "slow" months. No manager will ever be surprised by people asking to take several weeks off whenever. If you work at a larger company, there are always routines in place for covering for people during the summer months, and you usually make sure that there's always someone around that can handle things.

If you work in the manufacturing industry, there's nationwide coordination so all of it shuts down at the same time, usually four weeks in July.

It's a completely different culture, and definitely worth knowing if you ever do business with companies in Europe during the summer.
Instead Emacs is a very specific thing to a small crowd, and adding things like a FFI to it have been veto-ed by Stallman in the past. That's one of the reasons I think that we still don't have Lisp as a first-class systems programming language on GNU as the initial announcement promised: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/initial-announcement.html

So RMS failed in one execution for a still extremely excellent toolkit that would have make the GNU project even more well known for its excellent technical quality.

If anything, the GNU project is a great tremendous success, even if it is sometime dogged by its own short-term political interests. If he didn't listen to his political interest and instead focus on technical quality of his work, he would have achieved something much greater for the GNU project and his movement.
They certainly have innovated, both in a battery technology and processes. For example, in Charlie Rose's interview, Elon explained that difficulty is not in a single battery cell tech, but how to assembly them together so that maximum efficiency is gained.
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10550
Xcode is already (and has always been) a wrapper around gcc/gdb. Clang provides a cleaner interface for integrating with an IDE (among a lot of other things).
Knowing the basics of operator precedence should be expected. If you don't know it, you don't really know the language.

I don't see any validity in a comparison to knowledge of the standard library, or of variable scoping. Ignorance of those aspects of the language has very real, measurable costs. Using unnecessary parentheses incurs no cost at all unless taken to an extreme like some of the examples posted above.
Book Review: PHP: The Good Parts by Peter B. MacIntyre
Yes, all things being equal, the idea itself could impose an upper limit on success.
I understand exactly where you're coming from.

But you have to define further what you mean by "programming from the ground up".

Do you want to learn computer science?
Do you want to learn machine/systems architecture?
Do you want to learn how to write cleaner more logical code?

All three?

The world of computer science/programming is absolutely huge.

There are so many ways to go about it depending on what you're looking for or the type of learner/person you are. Do you have the patience to sit down and study theory or do you want to intermix theory with coding?

It's a long road but clearly you're interested. If you want to chat further I'd be really happy and interested in helping you. If you have Skype or something we can exchange contact information. My email is in my profile.

(Also, interestingly there is a free book called "Programming From the Ground Up" which teaches you assembly http://nongnu.askapache.com/pgubook/ProgrammingGroundUp-1-0-... )
This is an odd post by Fred, a lot of The Company and the service, the users, the team, and the shareholders (in that order) quite unlike his usual free-flowing writing style.
Yahoo at some point has made money for its investors.

FourSquare has not done that yet.
The truth is that libraries provide a means to rent FREE or almost free books. Without a requirement to have an ipad or ebook reader, or anything. Don't close them, in fact open more in poor neighborhoods.

If you want to reduce number of libraries, get iphone/android/ebook reader/pc/mac/etc apps that work like a regular library would work: The library has a license to rent out x number of books, you "rent" the book digitally, use it, "return" it which allows someone else to rent it. Would be nice if google did that since google already scanned all them books.
Cautiously Optimistic About Cisco's New Android-based Tablet
A feature of meditation is that it is portable--you can do it virtually anywhere, anytime. Awareness and equanimity are the only ingredients required.
> but someone (wonder who?) is there to meet them.

Galileo? "I'm sorry kids, but your breathable atmosphere is in a another castle."
I think most of the big successes that came out of the dotcom era were the ones that applied internet technologies to enhance markets that already existed.

Amazon worked; bookstores are a very viable market.
Ebay worked; flea markets are common in every town.
PayPal worked; everyone has a checking account.

There are also plenty of pet stores. Pets.com could have easily been a success if they had built their company properly.

What you're saying seems to validate the article's point: execute a proven "commodity" idea well, and you can succeed. Bet the company on an experimental vision, and you risk failure.
So, in essence, you want to learn everything there is to know about computers and computing :-) . I have a similar impulse -- whenever I see some program, protocol, or even hardware device, I want to learn enough about how it operates to form a good, thorough mental model.

Some immediate, relatively practical steps:
- If you're not running one of the free Unixes, start now. I learned an enormous amount from first trying to get coLinux to work on my windows box and then actually installing various distros. That was four years ago, and things have gotten much easier (hardware support, guided installation, etc.), so you won't learn as much as I did, just as I didn't learn as much as the people who did it in, say, the mid-90's, but it's still worthwhile.

Distro: I currently run Debian, but I think for the purpose of learning, it (like a whole class of similar distros, like Ubuntu, RedHat derivatives, and even OpenSolaris) is too easy: it doesn't force you to keep learning past the basics in order to get it running and keep it running. Slackware (http://slackware.com/) and the BSD's (http://www.freebsd.org/ , http://netbsd.org/ , http://openbsd.org/ ) are probably good; I don't have any personal experience with (Gentoo http://www.gentoo.org/ ), but my impression is that it would work.

- Learn the Unix ecosystem: the command line and associated tools, the init system, daemons, etc. The "do one thing, and do it well" philosophy makes for programs that are easy to understand; once you understand that kind of program, it becomes much easier to look at, say, a browser and think about the components required to make it work.

Books/articles:
- ESR's "How to Become a Hacker" (http://catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html) tries to answer a question not unlike yours.
- ESR's /The Art of Unix Programming/ (http://catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ ) explains the philosophy of Unix: why things are the way they are.
- /Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming/ (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ ) is a fantastic book on how to think about programming. One of my favorites.

On my to-read list:
- John Lions' commentary on Unix (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions_Commentary_on_UNIX_6th_Ed...) for a deep understanding of Unix circa 1976
- Donald Knuth's /The Art of Computer Programming/ for a similarly deep, low-level understanding of a whole bunch of really important algorithms and data structures.
"Artistically, they're perfect."

Curious turn of phrase, considering that one of the most enduring legacies of the Nazis is their sense of taste. The Nazis had a very Platonic idea of the purpose of art and everything that they touched was imbued with their aesthetic. From the parades, to the propaganda leaflets, there was a uniform sense of purpose and higher meaning.

Hitler himself began as a starving artist and when he took over he made everything his. He was, arguably, the most successful art-critic of the 20th century.

So, yeah, the Nazis are very distinct.
Am I the only one who really doesn't give a shit about FourSquare or any of these "checkin" services? The whole thing seems stupid and strikes me as a total waste of time. Is there anything actually to this? If I'm missing something, somebody please enlighten me...
Then I come out negative!
Apiary: Fast and Simple Application Fault Containment for Linux [pdf]
I would love to know break down by the actual phones . . . I bet there are radically different downloads per device eg that would be hugely useful for app devs to figure out where to target their efforts
This is good advice: "Practice attention fitness," especially if the kinds of brain changes that Nicholas Carr discusses in "The Shallows" are real—which they might not be: http://jseliger.com/2010/06/28/the-shallows-what-the-interne... .
I know that cost and cross platform capabilities are big issues but for someone using MS SQL server express (free if database size < 10 GB) in windows, are there any advantages that PostgreSQL has?
Thanks for the update, I was under the impression that each of the fascicles were a dot volume, instead of chapters within 4A.
The interface is glitzy/flashy, but the “methods of relatedness” provided are unfortunately pretty much arbitrary (with respect to human color perception). Alas. If one does the trick, go for it, but don’t feel bad if one looks awful: it’s not you, it’s the site’s model.
From Usenix 2010.

Abstract: Desktop computers are often compromised by the inter action of untrusted data and buggy software. To address this problem, we present Apiary, a system that transparently contains application faults while retaining the usage metaphors of a traditional desktop environment. Apiary accomplishes this with three key mechanisms. It isolates applications in containers that integrate in a controlled manner at the display and file system. It introduces ephemeral containers that are quickly instantiated for single application execution, to prevent any exploit that occurs from persisting and to protect user privacy. It introduces the Virtual Layered File System to make instantiating containers fast and space efficient, and to make managing many containers no more complex than a single traditional desktop. We have implemented Apiary on Linux without any application or operating system kernel changes. Our results with real applications, known exploits, and a 24-person user study show that Apiary has modest performance overhead, is effective in limiting the damage from real vulnerabilities, and is as easy for users to use as a traditional desktop.
great job1
How to make your web content look stunning on the iPhone 4’s new Retina display
Hurd's current status should be considered in the context of how the GNU project is run. In the early days GNU had some paid developers, but now their projects are run purely on a volunteer basis. Or in the case projects like GCC, developers that are paid by companies to work on GNU projects.

Hurd is late because there isn't any need for it anymore, we now have plenty of free kernels. And GNU isn't sponsoring it because of that, just like it isn't sponsoring a GNU MTA.

But work continues because a few people are still interested. There's a lot of neat ideas in Hurd. You get a lot of nice things once you move most of the kernel to user-space.

The best example of this is custom user-mounted filesystems (translators). You can e.g. mount a remote FTP site on Hurd in ~/ftp without being a superuser, this is something that GNOME and KDE implement on their own because users can't do it on other systems without special permissions.

Linux has been accumulating a lot of microkernel-like features over the years. E.g. dynamic loading of device drivers, FUSE etc. In time it'll probably usurp every useful Hurd feature worth having.
> What we need is kids that can think outside of the box

Sometimes you need to know where the box is first ..
I'm with you. I should have added "... but not actually wheeling a little suitcase behind me..." to that sentence.

The next sentence is also ambiguous. It should mentally read "...before heading out 2 months later...".

The funny thing is, this went to page one on Reddit back when it came out and nobody there misredd it.
It's a frustrating area for "techies" to get involved with because, like a lot of areas where there's an "establishment", decisions get made by political processes and "techies" don't have the right credentials.

For instance, to be taken seriously as an "educator" I'd need to get a Masters or PhD in education. This (1) would cost a lot of money, and (2) not raise my income (though it might get me a better benefits package), would (3) qualify me for a job I don't want to do, and (4) [most importantly] steal time from hacking on things that might have an impact on education.

Another half of it is that, from a systemantic viewpoint (what does the system do vs. what does the system say that it does?) the real thing that "the public" wants from education is a way to pass (i) values and (ii) social status onto their children. Overall, the purpose of the system is to sort people out in social status by something that corresponds somewhat to ability [broadly defined] but as much to the social status of the parents... and to do so in a way that people perceive that "I failed" rather than "I was failed." As Habermas says, this creates a feeling that the 'system' is legitimate which can somewhat compensate for the irrational and erroneous decisions that are made by governments and corporations.

(Questions of legitimacy don't come up so much when governments & corporations are successful at managing the economy, since people are busy working and spending...)

The other major stakeholders are all self-interested, and they've got pretty good rackets going. You can't entirely blame, say, textbook publishers or teacher's unions for all the problems of education, but they'll fight to the death any change that threatens them.

Personally I'm very interested in diffusing knowledge to people who want it -- be that free or for a fee. Some people may differ, but I'm not at all interested in selling products to governments... Because it's not about fun marketing and technology, it's about lobbying (that is, bribing politicians.)