skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It wasn't possible to broadcast to all of your friends in a matter of seconds if you were okay in 2001.

I think you're vastly overestimating the true popularity of twitter. If I where to tweet #imokay very few would see it, and those who did would have no idea how to contact my family to let them know that I was in fact OK. If I told many of my friends to "tweet the hashtag #imokay" they'd just look at me and only be vaguely aware of what I was talking about. Even in 2010 the best and quickest way for most people to let people know that they are OK is to make a phone call.
Presumably he meant 'lines' of code but in lisp the concept of a single line of code is a little vague so he modified it to 'things'
APL isn't all that weird once you spend a little time with it. It's "just" a dynamically typed collection-oriented language. I think people look at some screenshots, make a stupid joke since they aren't familiar with the notation, and move on rather than digging in. I highly recommend Dyalog's dialect for a comfortable IDE, OO support, .NET support for GUIs on Windows etc.

For MS' APL dialect, you can get the whole thing from: http://www.aplusdev.org/

My understanding is that they still have many many lines of code written in this language running. They also use a commercial intellectual successor of this language called q from kx systems. Many other firms do as well, but I won't name them since I don't know which ones are public about it.

I'm pretty sure that the firms I know creating new languages are not public about it, but there are at least 3 very very large ones doing so. Aiming for a functional flavor, large-scale parallelism, streaming, low-latency processing of large data sets, high-quality compilation and leveraging new hardware are common themes.
Polll vs Epoll (2), measuring the ATR on a very high volume site
Interesting article. I must admit that I was really disappointed when I read the news that Wave was going to be killed.

We have been used to Google's fast paced innovation. They do push the limit on what the browser can do (for instance in Wave) but as far as they are concerned that technology would not help their business model which like any other business is to make money.

As the article states, I would not be surprised if Wave technology is introduced in other Google products.

I am however disappointed that Wave was killed. I really loved that product :/
Can someone explain what a liquidation preference is?
I don't get why they don't build private schools, with accommodation, like a student halls and then allow people to go there and learn the skills the government needs. It would create jobs and would allow the government to keep a much closer overview of how the money is spent. It would also allow you to fast track their learning as they would be surrounded by it 24/7.

Or make it so you can pay a fee to go there for a year or so if you want, without prior qualifications.
I'm suggesting that a strict HTML5 parser that doesn't have complex recovery code is radically simpler than one that does.
Funding being one of the terrors I'm trying to avoid I have little knowledge in the field, good to hear you're doing so well!

Sounds like you're right and more people should be following this model, and will lose out if they don't!
I am building one right now ~ its a system to track piece pay for factory employees...

it takes all parts, processes and prices for those processes and generates reports.

Its enterprise to me because it could be valuable to many other companies.
That I can't hide friends from other friends.
An interactive version:

http://teczno.com/faumaxion-II/
who says im talking about twitter only? I actually think it's not as vastly popular as people estimate too. In the instance of 9/11 the best way to let a large number of people know you are okay would certainly be Facebook/Twitter/etc. Phone calls would take way too long. You should obviously save that for close friends.
Agreed. I wouldn't overthink this one. The larger video sites have pretty great performance worldwide.
So, yes, lisp does not HAVE a lot of libraries. But what people miss is that lisp doesn't NEED libraries. Why have a graph library when you can just embed the graph naturally in the data? When I wear my Java hat I search for libraries to do what I want. When I wear my lisp hat I simply do what I need. I can't remember when I needed a "library". So, to a lisper, libraries have the flavor of crutches. Having a large
set of libraries (crutches) is not a feature.

I suppose this makes sense for a guy with his resume: lots of AI and mathematical programming. However, this attitude makes no sense when you're trying to write a rich application with iteration after iteration of adding trivial but laborious features. When you want to add user preferences to a GUI app, you need a dialog box, a backing store, plus all kinds of bells and whistles like an easy way to add validation and tooltips to the preference values, some kind of encryption for passwords, etc. Of course the ideal case is for all this stuff to be written in Lisp and for your application to be written in Lisp, but if the Lisp ethic continues to be "we don't need no stinking libraries," then frameworks written in brain-dead languages like Java will continue to predominate, and we will just have to be happy if there's a Lispy language that integrates well enough to use the framework. (In particular, in Java that means being able to create classes that implement interfaces, and making sure those classes get loaded through the right classloader.)
Yes, precisely. What about this do you not get?
A Countercultural Conversation With Noam Chomsky
Flagging is not downvoting, but it is the sanctioned way to register your opinion that some content does not belong on the site. If your efforts to combat off-topic posts are limited to ranting in the comments after they're posted, it's too late.
Unrelated to the story (looking at the stock price) Why would GS be worth $154 a share when they're paying dividends of $.35 a share?

Of course I guess the last time Apple paid a dividend was 1995, and they're trading at $259 a share.
How Mafia Wars can fix the media: Zynga, Farmville and Micropayments
Do you have a cite for that? I couldn't find anything googling quickly and it sounds awfully suspicious.

In any event, I'm not sure it means much: most news organizations operate out of major cities, and major cities tend to have more liberal populations. If it was economically feasible to start a world-class news organization in a rural part of the Bible-belt, things might be different, but apparently it is not.
I assume the recruiter will take a percentage of the salary as their fee, so it's in their interest to do this.
Even if you don't wish to play the game (often), the soundtrack is pretty awesome to have as background coding music. $5 is a steal.
Researchers find metabolic pathway in malaria parasites; possible drug targets
Don't worry, that custom is already so dead that I forgot to even mention it. I don't think any YC-funded startup has ever paid to pitch one of these groups.
Interesting. So 90% of the people pirate the game (which has no serial number or protection). I thought the reason people pirated apps was because of draconian protection systems like DRM?!
Any idea if this book will be in mobi format? Manning support for kindle has been pretty poor so far.
Interesting interview, especially the comment about any industrial success of a functional language helps other functional languages.

I spent a year trying to decide whether Clojure or Scala would be my "new, better Java or JVM language." Clojure won, for me, because I sometimes get hired to do Lisp development, so some Clojure work has also come my way. Unfortunately, I have never had any consulting offers to work with Scala so the consulting market made the decision for me on which language to put more effort in learning.
It's not as much as the language makes it "hard" as much as it is that it makes it tedious. The language can get in your way as far as wanting to express your thoughts or algorithm.

It's the same in natural languages. In English we have the word love, in Greek you have: agápe, éros, philía, and storgē. One could thus argue that Greek is more expressive than English, as Lisp is more expressive than Java, for example.
Good point, and I've definitely been there before (sort of the problem I'm trying to solve at the moment, actually).

...that said I fear that most code-sync'd documentation is too low-level to use for communication between programmers and non-programmers so the documentation I'm creating may be necessarily decoupled; unless you've seen something I've overlooked (please? :).
> It's also harder to get financing for non-standard projects.

That's the market speaking.
I'm not so sure about that.

For starters, technical ability probably isn't a problem.

The tablet didn't fail for technical reasons, it failed for business reasons -- mostly driven my Microsoft's insistence on not supporting it intelligently. After all, for years the Tablet PC platform carried a large price premium AND performance deficit... which ruled it out of pretty much every market that it would otherwise have appealed to -- a big one being CG artists.

I expect that there are quite a few people at Microsoft that DO get it, but I'm pretty sure that Ballmer isn't one of them.

Part of my evidence for this is based on the fact that the more Ballmer leaves things alone (games) the more successful they are. Microsoft produces a lot of great games -- and I am fairly certain that if Ballmer exerted more control over those games, they'd be quite a bit less successful.
When you buy a share you are buying a piece of a business and the future cash flows that it generates.

Looking at a figure like dividends is kind of meaningless. You specifically want to look at the cash flow that is available to owners. That cash flow can be used for different things (buybacks, reinvesting in the business, dividends, etc).
What you want to do is make something that people want so much that they'll use it even early. So e.g. writing a Basic interpreter was the right thing in 1975, because microcomputer users were programmers, and the alternative was programming in machine language. Whereoscope is roughly the equivalent thing for this market. Parents really want to know where their kids are, so even though there may only be a few families that have the right hardware already, there will be enough users to keep Whereoscope afloat till more do.
The value of wasting your time
I completely agree with you, I also started to fear for my future as I'm entering in my 30ties, collecting experience and getting better and better every day.

Yes, probably I loose some of my concentration and speed, multitasking capability etc as I get older but I feel to be able to see things better, have a better intuition, solve big problems quicker than before, by far (while taking longer to solve smaller problems, like algorithmic tests etc which require more concentration, but it could be also caused by the fact that I work too much and I'm simply too tired).

I don't think that performance and idea degradation seen in some older people is about physical age, but because perhaps of their particular personality, for example if they are prisoners of they experience at the point that they are unwilling to challenge them.

I'm not going to say here that there is a misunderstanding, that it's a social problem, that younger people also play their role into cutting off older people from their ideas and are part of this descending spiral. Because they are older professionals (I work with software engineers, but I guess it's similar in other tech fields) whose ideas are fossilized, which don't want to learn anything new, which don't have any stimula left, which work by inertia.

Those people are there, for real, and even if I have no idea which is the ratio of bright/inert older professionals, I wouldn't expect it be drastically different from the ratio of bright/dumb younger guys.

So the whole thing appears to me as a perfect place to abuse in both directions, discriminating good people and unfair accusing of discrimination. No idea how to solve it.

On the other hand I heard that google is happy to hire not-so-young people, so I'm not sure that their corporate culture is really orbiting around the "20 years old bright people" standard I read about around the blogosphere.
I worked at a startup where the relentless focus on being able to scale to support millions of users from day one hurt the business very severely and was one of two reasons that the company failed. Spending almost 50% of the venture funding raised on hardware that was never used when 10 servers would've sufficed was not a smart idea.
So those who are honest pay the full price, and those who don't only have to pay 1/4?

Yeah that is going to cut down on piracy.
A web start-up needs a 'tech' co-founder because...?
Right. It is pretty difficult to run a web startup alone. Especially in the early days of excitement and terror. You need shoulders on your side to bear part of the pain. And the thrill.
But do your founders need to be hackers, or even 'tech'? Especially if your product is not new technology per-se, but solves users' problems using a combinatoric of available technology.
Does the skill to write this product necessarily need to be with a founder?
Gut and heart say that your CTO needs to be a founder. The mind does not find impeccable logic for it.
Luc, can you describe your wife's employers bicycle policy? I'm trying to set one up at my company as well, and haven't found the ideal plan yet. Suggestions welcome!
Even with Graph Mining, I have rarely seen anyone using lisp or FP language. Most of the practitioners and researchers use C++ , Java or Python with specific libraries such as Jung, Netowrkx, SNAP.
Here's a post I wrote a while ago on how liquidation preferences work. http://www.altgate.com/blog/2008/05/how-liquidation.html
Learning from Leaked Insider Threat Pentest Report for Major US Oil Company
At the recent Black Hat USA 2010 security conference, a well known Washington DC area security service provider accidentally leaked a sensitive penetration test report for a major US-based oil company containing enough sensitive information to gain Windows domain administrator access rights as well as the username and password for everyone in the target company's domain. According to the detailed report, these access rights included the ability to access servers containing SCADA system information. The report was not encrypted or password-protected in any way. Anyone with access to the leaked document and a copy of Microsoft Word could read the report in full.

The file was inadvertently distributed on USB keys provided to some attendees.

I guess the lesson here is that, as a service provider, you must take every absolutely every precaution to safeguard customer data.

As a purchaser of pentest services, you should make sure that you contractually require your pentest vendor to take any necessary precautions to safeguard whatever reports and data they might retain. If you need boilerplate terms and services contract language, please contact me via email or at @sharpesecurity on Twitter. If there is enough demand, I may post the sample contract language online.

A sanitized version of the steps used to compromise the target are available at http://sharpesecurity.blogspot.com/2010/07/major-oil-company-data-leaked-by.html.

blog: sharpesecurity.blogspot.com
website: www.sharpesecurity.com
Twitter: twitter.com/sharpesecurity
It would be sweet if this service (or any service, for that matter) was more widespread. A bit of a chicken and the egg problem here, though.
An environment that combines the most intractable features of the La Brea tar pits and an industrial-scale cash furnace, with attendant performance and maintenance issues, dependencies on custom kudzu code, and all of which is in aggregate entirely critical to on-going business operations.

If you can afford to rip it all out and replace it - without seriously risking blowing up your business, your entire revenue stream, or risking having to issue a mea culpa to a legal entity, or having to jack-hammer congealed product out of your mongo-million dollar manufacturing line - then it's not Enterprise code.

And yes, stuff that might not be traditionally thought of as an enterprise installation can fit this definition. The large-scale deployments of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Exchange and SitePoint can fit this definition, as can your own large-scale deployment of your own customized software platform, as can anything to do with financial verifications or controlled substances, too.
if there's no registration, DRM, popup messages, etc., then i wonder how they got the 90% number.

i didn't pirate it, but i'd probably buy this game at $5. for what it is, a shorter single player, point-and-click puzzle game, i don't know that i'd pay $20.
But it's an excellent alternative...

That's the key reason I think it's a Good Thing; portability for FreeBSD was never a big issue because of Linux Binary Compatibility, though...
A liquidation preference, expressed as a multiple like 1x or 2x, says that the investor gets that multiple of their money back, before anybody else gets paid, on an exit (sale of the company, IPO, etc). Normally the LP is paid separately from the proceeds of common stock, so the investor also gets paid for the common stock, as well as the liquidation preference.

So if the company gets sold for a small amount, the founder gets little or nothing but the investors don't lose money. If the company is sold for a large amount, the investors get an extra chunk but the founder still does very well.
And if it was possible to be unbiased, what would be the point? We use our subjective reasoning to improve our subjective lives; our understanding and knowledge originates in and applies to our relationships with the world.

If we somehow manage remove our selves from the equation, and form a purely objective understanding of things in their own right, what have we actually gained? What's the value of thoughts that exclude the ones thinking them from their application?

Ideas are incredibly valuable tools, applied in their context and in pursuit of a valued goal. But I don't understand the value of regarding ideas as "truth" in some abstract and universal sense.
Thanks - I will give a try.
OK that's fine, but how about the other issues? :)

It's not my job to ask 12 year old kids, it's yours :) But I'm curious, what sorts of questions do you ask them? You say you are on the phone talking to them, do you actually show them how it works in practice? Have you used well-known HCI techniques and vulnerable persons focus groups, etc. (1)? Have you approached children's groups for advice on children's rights and parental responsibility?

These are just a few things off the top of my head, too, that a responsible company should go through before developing anything to do with children.

BTW if you've done all this, put it on your website! Reassure the people who might want to use (or critique) your application! :)

(1)http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=HCI+techniques+children&... is a great place to start if you're interested in doing this.
Inception discussion
I don't understand what you're getting riled up about. It's obvious that the old ideas in question are meant to have been superseded or flat-out debunked (for example, the idea that black men can't marry white women is old in this sense, as is COBOL in this sense). I don't get mad that "green" (comes from young plants) is used to mean "inexperienced and unskillful." As long as they realize that doesn't mean any particular young person is that way, I don't see a problem worth getting mad over.
i'm honest, didn't pirate it, and will likely pay the 1/4 price to buy it. i would likely not pay the full price for it.
Maybe (I prefer GNU userland). But it does provide far nicer (or if you will, very different) package management from stock FreeBSD.
Communication is not a one way street, sir! I was just saying what I feel. My friends prefer texting over phone calls while I am the other way. I have texting disabled on my phone so that I can actually talk more often, though at the expense of few lost communications.

regarding "get a new mother, father..."
it doesn't cost to have some respect for others, like seriously! I don't know why did I even bothered to respond
I would expect that the starting point would be that using copyrighted material in a patent application without permission would be that it would be an infringement. The question is whether any exceptions apply?
It's good that we have a lot of observed correlations between various activities (exercise, low-calorie diets, etc.) and longevity. That way we can figure out what's going on biologically, and try to find easier and more effective ways of living longer, healthier lives. Science!
This is interesting and has funny yet valuable military metaphore.
Ask HN: Are we getting screwed? (No options)
I work at a 100 man start-up.
Investors own 60% of the company.
Founders and Senior Execs own 30%.
8% is spent option pool on current employees.
2% unallocated.

They stopped issuing options to new employees over a year ago and will do so only "on merit".

With investor ownership so high, I just don't think there is any chance of increasing the option pool.

Salaries are average. We can see the value we are creating, but we are getting no upside for the hard work and long hours.

Is this typical in most start-ups that grow beyond a few dozen employees?
It means that when an exit happens, investors can have different rights to how the money is distributed.

Suppose you own a company and sell 50% of it to VC X for 1 Million Dollars (2M$ valuation). The VC gets a liquidation preference, which means they will get paid before you in an exit. If you sell for more than 2 million, that is no problem. But if you sell for less, the following happens:

Suppose someone wants to buy you for 1.2M$, which you agree to because you feel like the business is a dead end. According to the shares, you and the VC should get 600K$ each. But since VC x has a liquidation preference, they get their money back. So you get just 200K$ as the found. Even worse if you sell for less than 1M$, in that case you walk away empty-handed...
Indeed. And an additional advantage to the FreeBSD may be that it can raise the profile/popularity of FreeBSD. The same would apply to an official port to the OpenSolaris kernel.
Is the kFreeBSD version using the standard Debian installer yet?

For a while it was using a modified FreeBSD installer.
Electronics Designers Struggle With Form, Function and Obsolescence
ICANN opens up .jobs TLD for everyone
JS1k, 1k Javascript demo contest
Why is it so hard to eradicate confirmation bias? Well, for one, even if you're acutely aware of it, you'll just tend to believe that your beliefs are that much likely to be correct. "After all, I've taken confirmation bias into account!"
Oh, of course, unless you're racing it's nothing close to bicycles. It's just more than cars, and I feel like that makes a bit of a difference

If you're doing it right, you are stiff as a board from using the same muscles to hold proper posture constantly.
Gates vs. Jobs - Hilarious Flash Game