skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems to work for me.

CL-USER> (defvar *arch-enemy* nil)
(defun pudding-eater (person)
(cond ((eq person 'henry)(setf *arch-enemy* 'stupid-lisp-alien)'(curse you lisp alien - you ate my pudding))
((eq person 'johnny)(setf *arch-enemy* 'useless-old-johnny)'(i hope you choked on my pudding johnny))
(t'(why you ate my pudding stranger?))))

PUDDING-EATER
CL-USER> *arch-enemy*
NIL
CL-USER> (pudding-eater 'johnny)
(I HOPE YOU CHOKED ON MY PUDDING JOHNNY)
CL-USER> *arch-enemy*
USELESS-OLD-JOHNNY
CL-USER>
English is not dominant because it is a 'good enough' language - its dominant because the 2 successive superpowers in the last 2 centuries speak English. There are nearly 200 countries in the UN and about 70 of them are former British colonies. Are you seriously arguing that in, say Nigeria, there was a 'fair' or 'utilitarian' trial of languages and English 'just happened' to be better than the dozens of languages there (repeat this argument 70 times).

> It's spoken by the most influential and powerful countries on earth. This is not accidental, but perhaps an important underlying cause for their success.

This statement is demonstrable nonsense - you are confusing correlation with causation.

With the appropriate infrastructure ANY LANGUAGE can be made to support all the intellectual pursuits of the modern world. Anything from Nuclear Physics to Psychology can be appropriately represented in ANY human language - including ones that don't yet exist - with the application of sufficient resources.

The example that demonstrates that is Gallaudet University n the US - the Deaf University http://www.gallaudet.edu/

All the courses are taught through the medium of Sign Language (the written language is English because Sign doesn't have a written form). Interesting enough fact fans, Deaf Americans speak French, not English (or more accurately British Sign Language).
I have to agree with this. Could someone explain why Google puts so little effort in to this? It would seem that if they open-sourced it it would be drastically improved within a week. The basic functionality is relatively smooth and convenient, but almost everything beyond this feels like it was written as a late-night student project and never looked at again:

* No way to change to an alternate send address without extreme measures.
* Quoting is extremely primitive: top posting only with automatic truncation.
* Often starts by showing me a seeming random recent message rather than the inbox.
* Delete-and-move-to-next often skips messages requiring multiple passes.
* No discernible pattern whether return key goes back to inbox or previous message.
* Autocomplete prefers strangers to the addresses of the people I mail daily.
* Sent messages frequently don't show up immediately and appear to be incomplete.
* Sometimes hangs on large attachments requiring force-stops and cache-clearing.

Is there a good business reason that this would be such a low priority for Google? I can't think that it's just a simple oversight. Is it incompetence? A cunning scheme to force people to use the web site rather than the app?
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Got mine a couple months ago!
I think you may be confusing libertarianism and anarchy.
kick him out! do not pay!
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When I'm working in a static language such as Haskell I very rarely write traditional unit tests, instead preferring to use QuickCheck (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickCheck). I like the adversarial nature - I specify invariants and I challenge the computer to prove me wrong! This seems more likely to find bugs than me writing my own tests.

Wanting to find bugs seems to be an important factor in writing quality tests. It's easy to write soft tests when the same person writes the code and does the test. Maybe that's why pair programming and TDD seem to go well together, as the other person is more motivated to try and break your code?
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"It will make our work so much more efficient"

The common complaints he lists at the start and acknowledge actually all boil down to the fact that unit tests do not always make work more efficient. It's a tool in the toolbox. Sometimes they are great for your project. Sometimes they are a waste of time. It's still not magic pixie dust.

In my current project we have a test suite for our public webservice APIs and various clients that interface against those. Those tests are invaluable. For other parts of the project unittests don't make sense, so we don't have them, since making them would be a colossal waste of time.

So yes, you still need to defend unit tests, just like you need to defend every other choice you make during development. No specific tech gets carte blanche.
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Ask HN: Help me with my technical Interview.
I had my first round of interview today[phone interview] with a <reputed silicon firm>and i think it went well. So I'm sure the face-to-face interview is going to be more rigorous than this. Can you guys shoot a lot of <simple but hard> problems pertaining to C++ and Data Structures?

For example, i didn't know what a virtual function was, but I've used it before. So any tips on what to read up on is appreciated too.
On the phone interview:
Interviewer: How do you find if a linked list has a cycle?
Me:(feeling very confident) Use a set and every time a new element is traversed, write its pointer part into the set. Keep track of the number of nodes visited and size of the set. If/When they get unequal, you have found a loop!
Him: Er... use two pointers, one for the first element and the second for the next element. When both of their next elements are the same, its a loop.
Me: Oh...yeah. :|

So, you guys get the idea i hope. And yeah, wish me luck. :)
Thanks in advance.
... which in turn reminded me of the Vanish project http://vanish.cs.washington.edu/research.html which leveraged both OpenDHT and Vuze's (aka Azureus) DHT to store data (specifically: redundantly stored encryption keys, with the intent of letting them expire).
I also can not believe how hard it is to convince people of the advantages of testing.

It's about as hard as convincing people of the advantages of static typing. Not to pick on Ruby particularly, but those guys go crazy for writing their own tests for things a compiler could tell them "for free".
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The IPCC 4th assessment report states that greater than 40% of species are likely to be extinct given a temperature increase of ~3.8C, with 30% of species at increasing risk of extinction given a temperature increase of only ~1.5C.

A rise of 1.5C is certain to happen by 2100, even in the best case scenario where emissions peak soon; and a rise of 4.0C is depressingly likely given the current continuous rise in emissions.

See pages 22, 23 and 29 of the synthesis report: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr.pdf

I would recommend everyone reads this report; it's not too long, and I found it very readable and succinct.

Given that we're all going to be affected, isn't it worth knowing the facts about this stuff?
The Fallacy Of Bimodal Returns
I'm the director of my own company in the UK (freelance Web development). When I tried to get a mortgage recently they took the average of the last three years of my company accounts (net profit) as my salary equivalent. They didn't take into account the fact that the company profits have substantially increased year-on-year, and the project profits for the coming year are much higher than the average of the last three years.

So yeah, it's a lot harder to deal with banks if you're self-employed, especially as loans seem harder get these days.
I'm a movie junkie and a Cameron fan -- at least until Avatar. Plus I love startups and business issues.

James is part of this interesting movement by performers to insult and preach to audiences. At some level, we all want to be challenged by art -- art should take us places and make us look at ourselves in ways we haven't before.

But, in my opinion, what's happened is that art has ran out of ways to easily challenge us. This has led to the development of sort of a religion -- people are selfish and harmful, the planet is in danger, we must wake them up in order to save our children.

Not getting into whether that's a good worldview to have -- there are many pros and cons -- the problem here is that this particular religion, like all religions before it, has become rigid and predictable. That hurts the art, and it hurts the business.

Avatar was a wonderfully visual film -- and an example of a movie I don't want to see again. It was preachy and trite. The plot was about as dumb as possible. But damn, it was gorgeous. I bought the first disc I could when it came out. And it's still sitting unwatched on the shelf.

When you cross the line from art to preaching, from sharing experiences to moralizing, the art suffers.

I am also fascinated by this propensity for famous entertainers -- basically our version of a high-paid circus clown -- to insult the people that are buying tickets to their attractions. James isn't as direct about it, but underneath all of this the message is clear: you are a mindless consumer and your lack of concern and selfishness is destroying the planet. You're a selfish asshole. Give me some more money and I will say it in a different way. That's got to be the weirdest business model I've ever seen.
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Paper Toss dev makes $500k per month with ads
Two things killed the Nexus One for me:
1. Two versions of the device. I travel to the UK a lot and I wanted to pick up a Nexus One so I wouldn't have to unlock my iPhone. Being forced to choose between 3G in the US (on AT&T) or 3G in the UK made me choose neither.
2. Skype is a Verizon exclusive. Yay artificial fragmentation!

#1 can hopefully be fixed by the Nexus Two. Not so sure about #2.
If you see no added value in unit tests you're already doing something to ensure that your programs run as expected when you refactor, try on different platforms, try different input data etc. It would be interesting to hear more about how you test your software. Either we can learn from you, or you can learn from us (we/us being people who use formalized tests).

Cheers!
It's obviously an embarassing oversight. Apple the company is extremely LG(.+)T friendly. The company that would rather turn down tax breaks than revoke benefits from its Queer employees wouldn't countenance this app. Some employee has made a mistake, Apple has been informed, the app will be pulled.

There's zero need to shame, picket, or boycott them, there's no evidence that they have a policy of allowing this kind of thing.

Nothing wrong with polite contact, of course. As mentioned, the app is in clear violation of the terms of use. I suspect that there's an App Store reviewer headed for reëducation in an open boxcar even as I write these words.
There's a reason they say that though. Unless you happen to have a board stretcher in the truck, cutting something too short ranges from "expensive" to "irrecoverably fails the entire project."

Compare that to writing code. Fixing something you did wrong is so trivial that I'll often find myself writing 3 variants of a bit of code and testing rather than pulling out a sheet of paper and doing a bit of math to make sure I code it correctly.

"Should this be cos(theta) or -cos(theta)?"... code, compile, check, whoops, delete, compile, check, done.

That's waaay better than "134 inches, I think", cut, fit, whoops, phone Jerry: Hey, could you pick me up a new piece of #4 crown moulding on the way in?
China's supercomputer details - Is China a supercomputer threat?
There is no distinction between you and an "actual" attacker. You seem to have labored within a nimbus of self-righteous nerd egotism that someone more criminally minded might not have but you are not in any way more entitled to violate a person's expectation of privacy.

You are not a hero. You have not done anybody a favor. You did this for the same perennial excuse of "spreading awareness" trotted out by any number of noxious social irritants and did so not by the means most efficient or effective, but the means readily available and most likely to satisfy your urge to feel superior to your fellow man.

You may actually care about the problem and take it seriously in other circumstances, but that is not reflected here. There is no security problem for which "exploit the problem to harass strangers in coffee shops" is the solution.
Congratulations on the release! Music video and the comic (Continuation guild reminds me of Arilou ships from StarControl II) are AWESOME and made my day. I'm currently trying to get money for paper version of the book.

By the way, I've shown the music video and the comic to friends of mine, and two of them actually got interested and started to ask questions about Lisp. Their positive reaction makes me think that those materials could be good to show to people to get them seriously interested in parenthesis-oriented-programming ;).
I loved Avatar, but I've noticed a strong theme from Hollywood for over a decade now of environmentalism. It's either the subtext, subplot in the 90's movies, and now it's become the main context and plot of major movies in the 00's and I'm getting the strong feeling I'm going to be beaten to death with it in the 10's.

I think one of the reasons I've gone from liking the Harry Potter film series to outright loving it is because environmentalism isn't even a sub-subtext in the story. The plot is that humans are doing incredible damage to humans, not that humanities inactions are inevitably going to hurt us by some bullshit catastrophe like 2012 or the day after tomorrow.

This bullshit enviro-paganism has driven me to the point of not giving the slightest damn anymore. If you tell me we've got a program error from monday to friday, but you offer no solution to fix it except to spell check the code (recycling) then I'll tell you to fuck off by the next monday. If you offered a major rewrite I'd buy in. Double-down on Fusion research, go all nuclear with new power plants (it's the only practical and realistic way, if you deny it you're ignorant of the massive wastes inherent in solar and wind systems and the fact that many of these systems rely on the existing coal and gas infrastructure to support it in low-wind or cloudy periods).

We're being told we've changed the world disastrously through our inactions, then we should be showing the world we can change it through our actions. Sequester carbon, go nucelar, build a frigging IR reflector in space, build cloud machines.

I find it more disturbing that environmentalists are flat out ignoring the disastrous effects caused by wind turbines, killing bird and especially bat populations and promoting demineralization of farm land (note this is the preliminary step in desertification). Not to mention that there's already been noticeable wind-speed decreases in areas of heavy wind turbine usage. I think interfering with the wind patterns is going to fuck up the planet far more than a little CO2 as you'll actually be creating high and low pressure regions permanently.
The only problem is that, for the vast majority of companies, CPU time isn't the major bottleneck. I don't think there are many companies who do so advanced algorithmic stuff that it takes hours to complete them, unless you're doing some ML (or other) processing in the background.

In that case, however, you should very definitely (as in, I'm not even considering an alternative) go with Python/Cython, as you will develop many times faster and your program will have near-C speed.

My current favorite is ShedSkin, which compiles your (unmodified) program written in a subset of Python (not a particularly limiting subset, mind you) into C++ which you can then compile (and link as a module, if you like).

My experiences with both:

http://www.korokithakis.net/node/117

http://www.korokithakis.net/node/109
Pre-Qing dynasty China was a major source of innovations btw.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_inventions

It's interesting to note that almost all the inventions came before the Qing dynasty. Qing's Qianlong Emperor (1711-1799) is considered a "Confucian fundamentalist", who paved the way for the subsequent isolationist policies.

Confucianism is just one school of philosophy among many in China btw. Its influence tends to fluctuate from period to period.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinegar_tasters
Not that it's relevant to his point, but he's only showing the current portfolio, which presumes only the companies that haven't failed.

I wonder what it would look like if he included their failed investments from the past as well, the companies no longer in existence.
Also readable online at http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/main.htm...

I would assume this is where the 70% came from: "[...] As global average temperature increase exceeds about 3.5°C, model projections suggest significant extinctions (40 to 70% of species assessed) around the globe."
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/mains3-4...
As far as I know, ShedSkin executables can be compiled as modules and imported in CPython painlessly, so the above is not accurate.
Seems mobile is a good space to be in...
What, more tests are always the best way to improve my product?
He probably made a slip because of the "fear" down the line. I think he meant to type "hope".
More time spent writing unit tests does not imply the product will be better for it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1846841
Excellent post, reminds me of http://log.ometer.com/2009-09.html .
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I can't agree with this more. The best courses I have taken didn't have a textbook. If I don't struggle at least through some of a course, I'm probably not learning anything. Part of this seems to be that (in my experience) few people are allowed to fail a course. People who both don't understand the material and slack off are just pushed through with the minimum passing grade, dumbing down more advanced courses down the road.
That's good to point out, but China is consciously adopting a Western legal and economic system (with some notable modifications) on which to run its society. If they do it successfully, the larger amount of people should give the country a greater amount of productivity than the US.
I had a thought about it, ideally it would be a pin board (like these http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikkjT7ACJME ) with solenoids or similar motors on each pin... somewhat similar to core memory too, with a different geometry.
checkgateway.com is who I went with finally.

But it was actually when I was talking to some other company that I asked if he had 'room' because I was going to talk to a bunch of people and I thought I could do better on the setup fee. He said definitely.

So when I called around and some lady asked if I had talked to anyone else, I said yes. When she asked what they quoted I laughed at her (very jovially) and told her of course not but she could tell me her prices. She was totally into it in the sense she was ready for / expecting to be haggled with.
but dude, it mentions lisp and paul graham!!!
Dude, it's not worth his time to sue you for anything less than $5k. Lawyers are very expensive here.

I would just incorporate on your own, in India. Run your business as if he didn't exist. He won't do anything.
I appreciate Fred's candor in this post and I find his position reasonable.

This seems to be a response to PG's essay about superangels, including this section of it:

"So I think VC funds are seriously threatened by the super-angels. But one thing that may save them to some extent is the uneven distribution of startup outcomes: practically all the returns are concentrated in a few big successes. The expected value of a startup is the percentage chance it's Google. So to the extent that winning is a matter of absolute returns, the super-angels could win practically all the battles for individual startups and yet lose the war, if they merely failed to get those few big winners."

Recent blogs have taken issue with this claim, but I would like to see more throw their hats into the ring and specifically address the shifting dynamics among VCs, superangels, and founders.
Ask HN: How do ad network startups make money?
How do ad network startups make money ? I would like understand more about these startups. Can someone point me any resources ? Thanks!
OpenSUSE 11.3 Samba Standalone Server With tdbsam Backend
This is exactly what I do (but with OpenSSH) its even the same port :P
Which means you probably could have gotten more :)
At least here, in Sweden, it was covered by "mainstream media" but now its yesterdays news which means that any point that was actually conveyed about the risks to personal security is now long forgotten.
Look into what ZFS can do with a spot of flash.

ZIL: http://blogs.sun.com/rdm/entry/zil_ssd_and_other_fun

L2ARC: http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/test

I believe this is the "right way" the article is advocating. You can use it now.
Ask/Show HN: HNdex, lists to replace spreadsheets on HN
http://hndex.imnotpete.com

Hacker News needs a secure way to create directories of our users and their ideas - "These spreadsheets are always vandalized, abandoned and then forgotten." [1] HNdex is that secure way: all lists and list items are identified by the HN user who submitted them. If pg or patio11 or jacquesm is listed as available to mentor a startup, you can be sure that user put himself there.

I plan to unveil HNdex early next week; I've worked on it for a couple of evenings and it's nearly done. I wanted to gauge interest in particular features for my MVP. Here is a list of features I am currently planning to have when I unveil it:

* Each user is tied to their HN login

* Any user can create a list

* Lists are marked as "people" and "not-people" (IE, offers or unused business ideas)

* Users can add their own profiles, once, to a "people" list

* Users can add to "not-people" N times

* Users can remove their submissions from any list

* Some form of flagging what vandalism does get through (manual review? auto-delete after N flags? not sure yet)

* A "submit to HN" link for each list

* Allow users to store more bio information if their HN profile is sparse.

I plan to continue improving this after I release, but are there any other features you think are needed for the app to be useful?

---

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1794416

edit: also, I am unable to post here from work, so I will be responding to feedback this evening.