skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is the tight coupling of the terms that is doing the disservice.

It is a modern language. -> T.

It is a lisp. -> T.

However,
I only hear, 'It is a modern dialect of lisp,' when I am being told why I should switch from Scheme or CL to Clojure.

This is a non-argument (there is no spec for what a 'modern' language includes). It also has the implication that whatever I am using is in some way non-modern. (Which is an odd attribution for something which is actively developed and I do my daily coding in). Is Java modern? How about Python? Scala? Ruby? It seems like a weird non-category. When I boot up sbcl, it isn't like i'm programming in lisp 1.5.

New would be cool, or saying it has modern features, also good.

Gonna make a new spec for Common Lisp, Common Lisp the Ancient Language.
If you are interested in this, you should try this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Computing-Jane-Mar...

They did a survey of CS students to find out their first experiences. They provide specific quotes in the book, but the gist of it was that men usually were given a computer (or everyone felt that the family computer was "theirs") and they began to tinker around immediately, whether that be with programming or taking it apart. The women's first experiences tended to involve watching a male family member work on the computer.

byoung2's comments follows the typical male answer and mine follows the typical female answer. I watched my 2 uncles and uncle-in-law in the computer since they had jobs in tech. Then my grandfather gave my mom and me a computer and showed us how to use it. I mostly just played on it and used programs until high school were I was "formally introduced" to programming.
Internet Brands Acquired For $640 Million
>>Boyd realized the key advantage of the F-86 was that it’s flight controls were mechanically assisted.

I am guesssing what that means is it's the tools and not the process. The process is subconscious. The tools that we use, determine how fast we can iterate. Take RoR for example, or Visual Basic(F5 anyone?), developers could iterate rapidly and after a while the process faded away, but the tools remained. Maybe, developers need to play with new toys instead of following new processes.
Since forcing me to sign up and give my credit card info to download free apps, Apple has been regularly sending me spam. The opt-out link is a 404.
There often can be advantages with client-side Javascript templates when building gadgets, such as those in OpenSocial containers.

Not sure I value this templating system over others yet.
Middle School Writing Prompts Will Assistance You to Submit an Excellent Paper
There are a few basic prompts which help students with the writing of any type of academic paper. These prompts, if understood, will enable students to submit well written papers. Hence, it is advised, to have a good knowledge of these requirements.
Does the Internet Need an International Treaty to Save It?
A sane developer is as rare as a sufficiently smart compiler.
What's going to happen if I'm asked to fill out a CAPTCHA like one of these while I am browsing with Adblock on?
Bendmorris, Great response. Kudos!!
IBM In Deal To Acquire Netezza For $1.7 Billion
I liked this:

$ ln -s Dropbox/dotfiles/.vim ~/
Great work! I love the spartan interface.
Btw, any chance of getting a prefetching option?
I'd even go further and say that when a beautiful celebrity voices an opinion that we strongly disagree with, we stop liking him/her.
I'm in Houston and know about the pay here (as both a programmer and a hiring manager). I'd say you're comfortably paid but on the low end. It depends on what industry you are in as well. For example, in the medical industry that would be about right, but finances and energy can do better. Walk in and ask for a 15K raise. If they don't give it to you, you can get at least 10K more on the market right now.
reminds me to this: http://xkcd.com/137/
Your app icon still can beat up gluegadget's ;-). Anyway, thanks both for your works!
This demo says Flash animation runs faster and more efficiently than HTML5 canvas. What everyone cares about, though, is how fast/efficient video is.
Number three is one of those odd things I noticed while "doing Atkins" (ie. significantly-reduced carbohydrate intake, increased fat and protein). It's really an astoundingly obvious change, too; after a day or two, your teeth feel like a coating has been cleaned off of them.

(Similarly, after eating anything in a bun now, I immediately notice how every tight spot in my teeth is suddenly caked with residue.)
A Freakonomics Contest: The Friendly Skies
Can anybody point to a good discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of PostgreSQL relative to MySQL? Or can you weigh in briefly about the tradeoffs between the two?

EDIT: Okay, must've touched a few nerves there. Sorry. Question was asked in earnest.
Interview with JP Werlin, Co-Founder of PipelineDeals
Cocomment?
I think fauigerzigerk might be referring to "value types" in C# (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/s1ax56ch.aspx), so structs basically.
> Microsoft has been heavily involved in the IronPython/IronRuby and Mono efforts. They do see the power in .Net cross system.

Mono is kind of behind ... I have high hopes for version 2.8/3.0 with the new garbage-collector, but the prelease crashed with a segfault which kind of turned me off for now, I'll retry it when the final version is released.

What bothers me about it is that currently memory-management sucks, some bugs remain unfixed (tail calls don't work properly, hence F# is unusable, and AFAIK fixing that bug requires some major changes), and there are not many Linux-specific APIs for server-side stuff ... like the async I/O apis are there only for compatibility, but don't work properly.

I also kind of expected Mono to be more than a .NET clone, and yet there is no alternative to the ASP.NET, which is heavy and is made with .NET's constraints in mind. On Mono it leaks memory for instance.

They could do more for Mono than they already did ... like have 1 or 2 experienced engineers help them with the garbage-collector / or grant them the IP to learn from / use the garbage collector from .NET.

Also, the C# ECMA standard is 2 versions behind, what's up with that?
When I saw the title of this article I thought it was going to be about removing CAPTCHAs in favor of higher conversion rates . . . even if it means more SPAM.
As we discovered from Matts piece, the subject does not have very much control over the final article - they talk with inc, then an article happens.

So, while I bet that was a dish on Mike, its a shot at Inc.
Stevie Wonder to UN: Ease copyrights for the blind
Nexus One!
Signing bonuses are basically non-existant in Houston. Annual bonuses are common but that depends highly on the industry. Both the financial and energy industries have taken a big hit in the past few years and they are the lifeblood of the Houston economy, so while layoffs are not that common, bonuses are way down. Not painting a gloom and doom scenario, just saying if you're here, expect all your payment to be in salary/benefits.
What a disappointing conclusion to an interesting historial blurb. American shot down lots of Russians because we had fly by wire planes. So Pair programming and stand up meetings are the obvious conclusion.

What a joke.
> But the fact is that despite its lack of mature tools, Clojure is more newbie-friendly than CL. That should give CL advocates pause.

This is very fuzzy terminology. What defines newbie-friendly? I can get an "enterprise-quality" Common Lisp environment and language for free. Likewise, the CL standard is also freely available and meticulously cross-indexed. As an added bonus there are countless Common Lisp books available on every imaginable topic. There are also numerous package managers (including the exciting http://quicklisp.org) at my disposal. And for the cherry on top there are luminaries like Ranier Joswig and Xach Beane willing to take their free time to answer my idiotic questions.

This, to me, is the very definition of newbie-friendly.
"I had a bloody Amiga. Man, I miss those days."

Amen to that
I'm a big fan of Mac + bash + Textmate + Transmit (FTP) + Dropbox (this is my work setup). At home, I have three monitors right now and run Windows 7. Instead of Textmate, I use e-text editor. Instead of Transmit, I use Filezilla. Center monitor is 25.5" widescreen 1080p, then 19" 4:3 on each side. The center I have my editor open, explorer, with a few other little things going on (im windows), the right monitor I keep console2 open with a few tabs (cmd prompt, server, console), and left window is a full screen browser for testing.
Ian Poulter, Social Media, and the changing customer service dynamic
If that is how many OS wannabes think, no wonder that I have heard that most new projects just sit there taking up server space. "Release early, release often" is for after the initial release; as ESR has noted several places, if you actually want other people to contribute to your project, you have to get it into reasonable shape first, then release it.
The SUN keynotes were more interesting, I guess he expected that the merger would have some effect on Oracle's culture.
Yup. Which is even more frustrating. Many times you got everybody to agree it would be better the way you are trying to do, but for whatever reasons that seem to be out of control of every person involved in the process, it can't be done. It's sad actually. A company full of people with the right ideas and skills that can't put those ideas in practice because the operation and processes are getting in their way.
That's it!
Huh... they've changed it so it doesn't really do that anymore, does it?

Thanks, though :)
I like Scala, but I'm still surprised a simpler "better Java" alternative hasn't taken off like:

http://code.google.com/p/stab-language/ (C# syntax compiled directly to the JVM)

http://boo.codehaus.org/ (Python syntax, normally for .NET, but there is a pure JVM fork in there somewhere)

The barrier to adoption these days is a robust Eclipse IDE--if either of these projects had one, I think they'd see a lot of adoption.
I have something I'd like your feedback on. It'll only take about 5 minutes of your time. If it's not too much to ask, could you shoot me an e-mail?
About Sydney
This only works on OS X because of the dependency on applescript. It would presumably not be impossible to port this to Linux or Windows, and of course patches and suggestions are welcome.

Seems like a project someone hacked one afternoon. Reminds me of how I started TracShell. Even now I'm not sure it even works on anything else except *nix (although theoretically it should).

Nice idea though. Hopefully they've clearly separated the platform dependent bits so that back-ends for other desktop environments can be written (ie: Gnome, KDE, Explorer, etc).
An obscure kernel feature to get more info about dying processes
Why the hype?

For me: it's not the hype, it's the hope. I have serious doubts that there will be much left of the middle class in a few years. We're seeing salaried jobs disappear, replaced by contract gigs that can be terminated at any moment without prejudice (and therefore with no need for severance pkgs), and that come with no benefits. As you age it's going to be much more difficult to get health insurance (even if you're rich, actually).

That leaves you needing to completely fend for yourself. You get rich or you may well be in sheer poverty.

That's my reasoning.

9 in 10 of us are doomed

I don't know that the odds are that bad, but even if they were, I'd say that there are equal odds of being impoverished before I'm 60 -- someone in my family will get sick, or the economy will tumble even harder, and I'll lose everything I have. I have no choice but to try and fight that.
I know the professor who created CAPTCHAs fairly well (did research with him) and I can say that these captcha's are missing the point of captcha's.

The hard to read word is there to prevent spammers. With easy to read words, you have a limited number of words per a page. In the end, the probability that a program randomly guessing the assortment of words (O(n^2) combinations if we assume order) is actually quite high.
Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist
Wow, that's quite a story.

I remember once driving home 10 miles just to make sure I really did turn off the stove but this is on a different scale altogether.

What could HN do for you other than to tell you to continue that therapy and to take it serious ? This is already quite something and it could end up interfering with your ability to lead a normal life.

Why the fascination with killing someone?
Harris' blog is entertaining to read, in my mind, because he's one of the few folks writing about this stuff that doesn't have a book and/or methodology he's trying to sell you. His "getting started" page is a refreshingly pragmatic list of ideas sorted by payoff potential for the reader, rather than for him or anything he has a vested interest in.

http://www.paleonu.com/get-started/
Wow, misread that title at first, thought it said Whoreoscope, for finding women of the night. Similar to SCVNGR, I keep thinking it's some sort of Subversion too.
I know the founders of reCaptcha. This is easier to prevent than you think. Its also quite rare.
You can enable side-loading in case you were wondering. Here are a few methods how, I personally used Method 4:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=738376

It's very well worth it---it's very convenient to just scan the QR code to the download link and install from the downloads folder, all from my phone. (Edit: be careful obviously, as others have mentioned.)

-- Non-helpless AT&T Customer
and also on the front page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1708751 (but this one seems to be slightly older)
Given Larry Ellison's famous temper, I'm not sure I'd want to be the one telling him no, either!
The BBC Micro!
I don't get it. Before reading this article, did you really think he could have achieved success with TechCrunch without being passionate about his work? Do you know any successful people in this world who are not passionate about their work?
I'm living that life right now :(
Of all the flamewar subjects, I think that one is just about the most tried and true one.
Yeah, releasing a project like this without the source seems really silly. Why turn down free help?
An update on Heroku Node.js support
Not allowed! Computers are serious business.
> PS: A 90k/per year developer can easily have a family and 1/2 mill in the bank by their late 30’s.

I'm not sure that's true, but maybe your definition of "easily" is different than mine. Certainly that doesn't seem to be the case if you're working from salary alone.

Let's assume our developer enters the workforce at 24 and we're considering 38 to be "late 30s". Then she's worked 14 years, we'll assume at an average of $90K/yr, yielding 1.26 million in total income if you ignore interest, inflation, etc.

Various forms of tax will eat about 40% of that [1], so you're left with $756K out of the gate.

Suppose by shrewd living you're spending no more than 15% of your income on housing (which is half of the typical assumption), that's $189K over 14 years, leaving $567,000.

In 2005, the average cost of food at home for a family of 2 on a "moderate" plan was ~$475 (for a family of 4 that jumps to $675 to $810 depending upon the age of the children) [2]. Let's use $475 as an average. So that's another $79,000 for the 14 years (168 months), leaving you with $488,000 for a family of 2, or $453,600 for a family of 4.

So working from salary alone, you're under half a million just by taking into account quite frugal budgets for housing and food, and that's without accounting for costs of transportation, insurance, medical, entertainment, etc. let alone the costs of raising children.

I'm certain with the right decisions or investments it can be done, but I think if this were "easy" to do you'd see a lot more people with a lot more money in the bank.

[1] http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Taxes/Advice/YourRealTa...
[2] http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/Publications/FoodPlans/2005/CostofF...
> or a stunningly epic troll to get traffic by enraging Clojure folks.

You'll be forever wanting if your goal for website traffic revolves around enraging Clojurians. First of all, there are not enough of us (yet), and second we tend not to get drawn into these types of arguments. I guess we're too busy trying to build a great programming language. ;-)
You're quite lucky then. I don't think I've been in an interview where the interviewer had bothered to read any of my code despite it being offered and out in the open. They don't even skim a few headlines from my blog first. I'm lucky if they know my name without reading my resume in front of me.
Interesting spam techniques from the Mollom archives
No offense if this is real, but I have a hard time believing this is not a troll. It reads like one of Philip K. Dick's rejected short stories. Even if it is real, I don't believe that HN is an appropriate forum. You should see a therapist but maybe also send your story to Malcolm Gladwell or one of those other essayists who write New Yorker articles about people with interesting neuroses.
I agree. In addition to skills, this can be expressed in terms of interests, as Larry Wall did in this interview:

http://www.techgnosis.com/wall1.html

WALL: I not only want Perl to be a good 'glue' language, I want Perl people to be good 'glue' people.

FEED: What makes a good 'glue' person?

WALL: Let me distinguish two different kinds of joiners. You have people who will join a movement and be totally gung-ho about it. That's great. We need the cheerleaders.

But that's merely a form of tribalism. What we also try to encourage are the kind of joiners who join many things. These people are like the intersection in a Venn diagram, who like to be at the intersection of two different tribes. In an actual tribal situation, these are the merchants, who go back and forth between tribes and actually produce an economy. In theological terms we call them peacemakers.

In terms of Perl language, these are the people who will not just sit there and write everything in Perl, but the people who will say: Perl is good for this part of the problem, and this other tool is good for that part of the problem, so let's hook 'em together. They see Perl both from the inside and from the outside, just like a missionary. That takes a kind of humility, not only on the part of the person, but on the language. Perl does not want to make more of itself than it is. It's willing to be the servant of other things.
Why was he downvotted? I too mis-read it as such, and this might be a valid concern to bring up to the developers, imo.

I thought it was a play on words: Horoscope/Whereoscope, some sort of horoscope website that guesses your sex life?
Interesting... although this requires that I install something before I start commenting, when it should be able to be automatic, since I use the same name/URL everywhere.
> I know the only thing that will help is finding some logical proof or reason why this couldn't happen

No, it won't - You thought the only thing that would put your mind at rest was going back to check. It didn't work, and you then thought the only thing would be to check again, and that didn't work either.

You are not in a position to judge what will work, and not realising that is allowing you to keep looking for a quick fix. See this through with your therapist - trust him/her completely. Whether you like it or not, the cold facts state clearly that you cannot just make yourself 'see sense' - you need the help the therapist offers.

Godd luck!
I wanted to make useful things inside a computer.

Our school ( a pretty good school) had a programming class but the teacher himself never bothered to show up (!), and classes were about databases and Logo rather than making anything we could use.

I was already hacking DOS - which was needed to make DOS do anything useful - from there, DOS to Unix, Unix to shell scripts, shell scripts to Perl, Perl to Python, some C, and some .net.
I don't often hope for entrepreneurs to fail, but I think this is a place where they are actually making the world worse. Not only do they completely fail at what they are trying to do (ie: prevent spam), but they do so in the most possibly annoying way.

I'll gladly contribute my time towards writing browser extensions to hide and automatically solve these things if they take off.
Sorry, I meant the IAM Management Console. Any chance this will be released soon?
We're talking about simplicity and clarity of language's syntax? Why memory management?

btw, to whom memory management is a PITA?
It's a common enough mix-up that someone actually registered the domain.
Extension: pets, vehicles, city bus, subway train
Well, that was anticlimactic. Can you change the ending to where you have a multi-million dollar exit?

Work on that, will you? :)
Or one can just use a tiling WM like dwm, xMonad, or stumpwm.

It seems that Terminator fills the void where a user wants to have tiling terminals, but can't because Mac OS X, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't allow one to fiddle with the windowing system to the same extreme that X does.
I wasn't trying to start a flamewar! I'm just coding up my first major project and needed help deciding, specifically which one plays better with django.
Some day you will be happy you helped out when she called.
I thought of micro-blogging before I knew twitter existed.

Oh, and I think twitter is a failed idea. It mostly has turned to another form of RSS feeds. The intended use-case has failed (small updates on your daily life, e.g. "I'm drinking tea with my wife").

This idea will also fail; you can't tell people how to use a service. If you allow people to post 30 second videos, they'll use it to send messages to each other instead of expressing opinions on public issues. Or, they might just post short funny videos ("epic fail" videos, etc).
I agree with the author that you will have more opportunities if your code is online.

After graduating, I spent some time putting my personal and class projects on my website. Later in the summer I got a call from a dev manager who found my website accidentally when searching for programming info. He flew me out for an interview and offered me a job.

The job offer gave me the courage to apply where I really wanted to work: Amazon Web Services. It also sped up the Amazon hiring process.
I suppose Craigslist has recently left a gap in that market.
It's time to rethink libraries.
That article is the motherlode of acronyms and jargon.

Really, check out this paragraph:

> The Exalogic Elastic Cloud is founded on Oracle's Exadata server and a version of Oracle's WebLogic Java application server with Oracle Coherence running on Oracle's virtualization, 30 compute servers with 360 cores, 960GB SSD and 40GB InfiniBand networking.
Frito for instance guarantees 100% shelf service - you will never run out of chips. Legendary stories of the extent they will go to keep mom & pop store stocked etc. Builds loyalty.
I am divided on this issue, on one hand it make it easier to live on the margin. On the other hand it removes the incentive to stay on unemployment vs. getting a job that pays the same amount. Aka. 500$ / week makes anything under 30k a pay cut after commuting expenses, and anything under 40k a minimal increase.
Why Don't We Have Rockstar Teachers?
Gates Foundation invests 10M in computational drug discovery
The "Divide by 2" Theory of Sports Performance
I'd say my point is before this article I never gave it much thought. Either way, it's one thing to have a vague guess about how someone gets things done. It's quite another to have all the meaty facts.

Arrington works hard, with abandon, in the way that only a man who truly loves his work can. I have to respect and admire that.
Your clients must love working with you.
good for you, and yes i agree totally. something about making it public forces you to take a tiny step forward. my first push to github here, for the record http://github/com/irv/tarsnap-backup