skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's nice to know that the Sage of Omaha is/was just as prone to irrational behavior as every other CEO.
Yes, they are compatible but you end up writing a lot of

let Write f buffer start len = f.Write(buffer,start,len)

so that you can pass functions independently of the object.
Cool, I didn't know readtables were in Maclisp, or about LM syntaxes.

"It is old and could be easier to use."

Aside from something like named-readtables, how would you design the lowest-level interface to readtables? Or you wouldn't do that, and just specify something like named-readtables to be the interface? I'm curious because this could be something for http://www.cliki.net/Proposed%20Extensions%20To%20ANSI
Pain on both sides under rib cage
yeah this is useful
It's higher than one percent, but we don't publicize those numbers. It's hard to compute the difference in ratio internationally vs. domestically because we only have the optional user specified location field to go off of.
Foto Julia Perez Foto Prewedding Julia Perez Juve
http://pgalih.blogspot.com/2010/10/foto-julia-perez-foto-prewedding-julia.html
Foto Julia Perez Foto Prewedding Julia Perez Juve
Setelah lama menjalin hubungan yang lumayan lama akhirnya Julia Perez dan Gaston Castano
Foto Julia Perez,Foto Prewedding Julia Perez,Foto Juve
Your Memories Will Be Rewritten
I was just curious. From my experience writing weather apps, I know there are very few sources that will allow you to sell their data without some kind of written agreement.
You do it by building a company so compelling that those people would rather join your company than start their own. You do this by optimizing for happiness and creating a culture that can't be ignored.
How awesome are your book recommendations?

http://astore.amazon.com/mojombo-20
Spammers Use The Human Touch To Avoid CAPTCHA
What's the status of BERT-RPC and its usage at GitHub? Have you noticed any drawbacks to it since you first created it?
AT&T and Verizon to begin selling iPads, Verizon throwing in a MiFi
Yes, but any given function is usually extremely easy to understand, because it's only, say one level of abstraction, then a macro is a few levels higher than that. And as you go up in your levels of abstraction, it gets harder and harder to really understand what's going on. Sure, some macros are intuitive and easy to follow, but those are usually easily replicated with other things, especially in a dynamic language like Python.

I also don't mean to imply that Lisp is lesser for using macros. I love Lisp and any implementation clearly requires macros. But Lisp is also, undeniably, harder to read for this and other reasons.
Just out of speculation, "Doogie Howser" is a very unambiguous string (other TV shows often have more ambiguous titles, like "Cheers" or "Highlander") that's close to the edge of public recognition--most everyone knows about Doogie Howser, but it's not extremely popular.

Also, the Doogie Howser trendline is pretty flat, aside from various spikes.
"Lists, sets, etc. are more fundamental to computer scientists than relational database tables, columns, and rows."

That does not ring true to me. I'm curious what his data source for that claim is.
thank you. Someone else pointed that out too. Going to stop being lazy and fix now.
I appreciate your work on this (in the past I've just used google with the site option). As a nitpick, one thing I'd do is remove the fluff from the bottom of the page and give an indicator that the large box is for a search term (as opposed to several lines of text which is what it looks like). In fact, a normal sized box would work just fine.

I realize that there is a line that instructs you to enter text in the box, but to me in got lost in the noise of the page (another reason for getting rid of the extra details at the bottom). On the results page, it'd be nice if you showed the results foremost and the related topics as a sidebar. I want my results, and only if I don't find what I'm looking for do I want to know the code's opinion of where I should try to go next.

Anyways, like I said those are just nitpicks. Nice job.
The index is out of date. Minecraft wasn't around in October 2009.
LOOP is not from Interlisp. It comes straight from Maclisp.

'LOOPS' from Interlisp is something entirely different: an object-oriented extension to Interlisp.
There are objects that persist and are reusable, although often you might not think of them that way.

In python, for example, there are a number of useful and reusable objects. The 'function' object, the 'module' object, the 'str' object, etc..
I'm turned off by the aggressive self-promotion style, to the point where I'd suggest that you seriously consider whether you want to be associated with such a company.

I also like succinct and colloquial: "Hi, I'm Tyler. I'm a co-founder of SpeakerText, and am in charge of the all the Tech. [Explanation of SpeakerText as appropriate]."

Of course, this depends on your audience. But all the examples you give seem to concentrate too much on you, and not enough on the product or the customer.
5 Reasons to Attend PG West 2010 (PostgreSQL community conference)
Along these lines, thanks for pushing Unicorn (I know you didn't develop it in house, but it was obscure until you used it).
I used to use vi/vim but one day I stumbled upon Common Lisp and started learning/using emacs because it seemed to be the best ide available for CL.
Now I can't imagine living without org-mode, mew, jabber-el, w3m and many other emacs applications.

Isn't emacs more popular among programmers and vi/vim among sysadmins/unix guys?
There is a way to word that without keeping open a for-profit loophole.
Just a data point: here in Norway, tax information (including income and assets) are published in the newspapers every year, and are freely available via web search. It's trivial to find out what anybody is earning.
That was a great little app - I am sorry it never worked out.
I tried to convince my boss of this a few years back... no dice yet.. ;)

In fact, we have a sign in the coffee lounge (diagrammed in art deco style with an idealized picture of a lady holding a coffee cup) that says,
"Coffee! You can sleep when you're dead!"
When are we going to see an API for pulls, organizations, and commit comments?
Coming from a guy with weenie in his name :)
IANAL, but as far as I understand it, in the US it is against the law to fire someone for discussing pay as this is protected speech. The is part of the National Labor Relations Act, http://www.nlrb.gov/Workplace_Rights/i_am_new_to_this_websit...
Bulls eye. What are they working on?

'They' means visible competition and, probably more important, startups.

This is the source of my own worries.
I'm not sure, I'm both but I never found a good tutorial on emacs...
This is a client project, and the client has professed a strong desire to build additional applications working with the domain data, and possibly even to migrate the UI portion of whatever we build to a different web application platform that plays nicely with their existing management tool chain.

This suggested building a simple RESTful domain logic server that will support the development of independent applications, and a separate application server that can be deprecated if need be. The client's IT team are comfortable with Javascript, so we decided to build the application side in Javascript. One choice was node.js, another was to push the UI down into the browser.

As it happens, there is no requirement for more UX than a web application would deliver, so we are essentially delivering the "application server" inside the browser. We can obviously do a lot in the browser that can't be done with an application server, but we want to be 100% sure that they can port the application interface to a web platform if they wish.

Thus, the cargo cult mentality of making a JS app that works just like a web app. We're building it specifically to be understood by a programmer with web development experience.

Our genuine hope is that making it easy to port back to an application server will also make it easy for the client to extend and modify just the way it is. If integration with something like backbone is easy, they might just find themselves adding the kind of functionality you espouse on their own.
Lessons from PostgreSQL's Git transition
DO you see Github as an "open web" player? What would you think if someone built tools to federate Github and Gitorious, or unfuddle? Would you help them?
How essential to your success do you feel the freemium model was?
We look for features that we want to use ourselves. It's usually quite apparent what areas of the site need some love or where entire features are missing. The things that get implemented are the things that are important enough for someone on the team to actually sit down and start working on. If you want a feature badly enough, you'll go build it. It turns out that this is a great filter for what is worthwhile.

Some features (like Pull Requests 2.0) spend many months in development before they're launched. PRs took about 8 months of off and on work before they were ready. Pressure from other team members will often serve as a catalyst for the implementors to finish what they started.

More strategic decisions often bubble up to the founders and we'll make a final decision on whether we need to hire additional people to make things happen faster.
Soon, I hope. =)
I remember a blog entry that I most likely found here.
It was from a company owner who makes the rules which determine how he pays employees public to everybody.
It seemed pretty fair and according to him he hasn't had any complaints so far.
I will keep looking for it as it was a good read, maybe somebody has it bookmarked though.
Err the Blog had about 10,000 readers when GitHub launched and Chris and PJ already had a ton of users of their popular Rails plugins.

This was a huge audience to launch to. What advice would you give to people who want to dive in to their own company without trying to build up such a huge following before hand?

Is it madness to try to bootstrap without establishing an audience beforehand?
How is that related to the SO question? The post is asking about how to tell if one distribution is "more random" than another, which is what entropy is all about.
when Richard Branson started Virgin Atlantic there were other formidable competitors already in the game. His market research consisted of a phone call to book a trans atlantic flight with British Airways. After holding the line for half an hour without getting through he concluded that either their customer service sucked in which case he could do better, or there were so many people wanting to fly across the atlantic that they clogged up the phones in which case there would be plenty of customers for him.

The point is that businessplans, market research and information gathering on competitors is not as good a use of your time as simply trying it out. You don't need to be first, or even best. You just need to put something out there and work with the feedback you get.

Note that successful entreprensurs don't have better ideas than anyone else, they just have more of them and they do something about it. Which is why many of them have several failed ventures behind them. See Gabriel Weinberg's post that's on the frontpage right now for an example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803809

so just do it. Get something out there and show it to us.
Do you have any idea what you would have done after your project went live?

Because you can still beat them to that.
Do you think Haystack will ever be released to the public? If not, could you guys post a blog post on the GitHub blog or one of your personal blogs with more details? It sounds very interesting.
I don't think the problem is as much that end-users don't care enough to want alternatives, but that it's near impossible for an alternative to exist. During the dot-com era when PayPal came about, there were many other 3rd party processors doing the same thing, and they went out of business primarily because they were losing more to fraud than they were making on fees. PayPal was losing tens of millions of dollars a month at one point, but they managed to create good enough screening systems and policies in place to stay in business.

These days even if another company were to manage the fraud as well (which will almost automatically make them as bad as PayPal with freezing funds and accounts... you know real merchant accounts underwritten by banks do this too), but the regulatory climate around finance is so different that they'd be unlikely to get off the ground. Visa/MC/Amex/Discover would never agree to allow such large scale factoring (accepting payments on behalf of another business, forbidden in every standard merchant account agreement) again.
Here's some intuition about why rand() * rand() is different than rand().

Let's say you are doing rand(2) which produces either 0 or 1, each equally often, then rand(2) * rand(2) will produce 0 much more often than 1.

0 * 0 = 0
0 * 1 = 0
1 * 0 = 0
1 * 1 = 1

Addition has a similar problem.

0 + 0 = 0
0 + 1 = 1
1 + 0 = 1
1 + 1 = 2

If you use the right range and wrap the result. e.g. if you do mod(rand(2^n) + rand(2^n), 2^n) then addition will not affect the distribution of your numbers.
Stop the Internet blacklist
Does anyone know how to unlink PayPal from your bank account? I can't find anything online other than "talk to your bank".
I wonder if the lesson from this is perhaps narrow but deep rather than wide but shallow?
That's all 'taboo' means.

Sure. My point was mocking how it can't be the "last" conversational taboo since there are other, far more private things we don't tend to discuss in public either. Indeed, discussing salary isn't a "taboo" at all from my POV since so many people do it in public nowadays anyway.
Basically three stages, with a few strategies per stage. I'll try to use well known to hn tech examples to illustrate.

Early years (during the hedge fund):
1) The "cigar butt" value-investor -- looking for companies which held more book value (assets like cash on hand, factories, etc.) than capitalization (stock price times shares outstanding). Arguably Sun Microsystems (right before Oracle bought them) and Yahoo now are pretty close to this in big tech companies, but back in early/mid 20th century, there were LOTS of these.

2) Value investing -- looking for brands which have growth potential but are undervalued by the market. Apple right after Steve Jobs returned would be a tech example.

3) Special case situations, like arbitrage -- for instance, right before a merger, buying one or the other stock, and if you have someone like Apple releasing a product which has a component from one vendor, buying that vendor's stock.

WB largely ended this strategy for two reasons: it was successful enough to use up most of the available opportunities (as well as attract copycats), and it was very labor/research intensive for the returns you could get -- good percentage returns, but it was difficult to employ large amounts of money. Sort of like angel investment vs. mezzanine IPO financing.

Mid years (70s and 80s): insurance

WB discovered the insurance industry (through GEICO), and basically had "free money" to invest (which is what an insurance company does with premiums). He went from value investing to buying entire companies (or large shares) which he thought would grow and remain good companies.

Late years: (1990s to now): top-quality
He basically has the problem of having too much money to invest, and thus can only go after the largest opportunities; a 10x return on $1m is not enough to move the needle. Thus, WB and BH buy entire top-quality companies, with a focus on sustained performance, vs. making a lot of speculative bets.

The old-school WB (and even better, Ben Graham, his early role model), is the only interesting one to me -- once he had established his track record doing something well, he was in a position to make reasonable investments no matter what. Getting to that point was the interesting part.
Change the layout:

[up arrow] 2 points [down arrow] by stevejohnson 1 hour ago...

Greatly reduces the chances of accidental downvotes due to misclicks.
The argument is that macros have non-local effects; they interact with the code in which they are applied. This means that the macro definition and the code surrounding the macro invocation can't necessarily be understood in isolation.

This is also essentially the argument against global variables.
Wait, isn't the uproar because keeping/transmitting this data is supposed to be against Facebook's ToS?
Ah, right, different problem. There's much to be said and disputed about what makes a 10K program Pythonic; my oversimplification would be something like:
- between half a dozen and two dozen files in 2-3 directory levels
- lots of small classes with short methods
- some short functions
- lots of dictionaries
- no God objects
- some comprehensions, generators, and decorators
- about 2-4 levels of abstraction between the problem statement and the core routines in inner loops
- pivot away from any of the above if the problem calls for it, but many problems don't

Even simpler: if you're writing short callables (functions/methods, mostly) and using them as the values in dictionaries, you're most of the way to writing intermediate Python.
Speak for yourself. That generalization fails hard for me.
Missouri hoarder surrenders 71 dogs following Animal Planet taping
I want all of the data on GitHub to be open. We recently made our wiki system Git-backed so that users could get their data. I want to do the same for Issues and comments and everything else. These things take time.

I'm not really sure what you mean by "federate Github and Gitorious, or unfuddle".
"Why not just type, say, www.bing.com into the URL field?"

Because four keystrokes and a click are often quicker than twelve keystrokes.
This thread is officially unwieldy. I think you know what I'm saying now (even if you don't agree with it). My contact info is pretty easy to find.
Animal Hoarding Project
Businesses should encourage developers to openly work on startups
Well, it did push me onto other things, though I wasn't (at least consciously) looking to get back at Google.
Python versus Lisp is not so much a dichotomy. Some bridges:

1.- Mathematica: you can use both infix and prefix form, Fullform[a+b] = [Plus,a,b]. Mathematica internally use prefix notation. Evaluation is more flexible than Lisp, you can define a function and decide whether it evaluates some, all or none of its arguments.
2.- Maxima: A layer over Lisp to define a infix language,in which you can define operators to resemble math notation, for example f(x):= x^2 similar to (defun f(x)(* x x))
3.- Dylan. A lisp with infix notation.
4.- Willem Broekema cl-python, python in Lisp.
5.- Clojure. Clojure brings some nice syntax for getters and setters, function arguments and much more.
6.- comp.lang.lisp versus clojure. Clojure has a great community, lisp has some problems with lords.
7.- abcl is here, that is Lisp in java. abcl can run maxima without errors and that is great.
7.- Ruby, jruby, ioke, duby, those are efforts to achieve a very expressible language.
8.- javascript, the good parts. javascript with some anotations can be the next lisp.
9.- quick-lisp for a better installer than asdf.
Or you could argue formally by pointing out that the maximum entropy distribution on the interval [0,1] is the uniform distribution, so modifying that distribution will only decrease its entropy, which means that it's "more predictable".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_entropy_probability_dis...
AppSumo User Love Bundle Giveaway (Zendesk, GetSatisfaction, SnapEngage)
We still use BERT-RPC for all communications between the Rails app and the backend file servers to transfer information about Git repos. It's been working great but there are some improvements I'd like to build into a BERT-RPC 2.0 spec (async messaging ids for one). Overall it's been really good for what we use it for.
I think Chris was the primary one behind that decision, but I agree. Unicorn kicks ass!
"Three of the top 10 apps, including FarmVille, also have been transmitting personal information about a user's friends to outside companies."
Circuit Simulator for iPad / iPhone
50% code by volume being macros sounds terrifying.

Macros are like 2nd-amendment rights. You hope you never have to use them, but when you do you'd be in a world of hurt without them.
Investors and potential partners often want to hear about the people behind the tech.
> how there could be no monitoring or reporting in place

No. off Developers: x
No. of Sysadmins: 0

It's a different job, often with a different career path, and a very differnt attitude.

Though some of us get to be be both Code Monkey and the Scary Monk.
I use cycle when talking to people who are thinking about applying, and I've heard others use it too. Sounds more glamorous than batch and less academic than class.
Hopefully this doesn't come off as being spammy (since it is a giveaway) - I know for a fact several HNers could really benefit from using these services on their websites. My site is still relatively small too, so the chances of getting one are pretty high.
Also, there's an applet available for free with (I assume) similar functionality, by the same author:
http://www.falstad.com/circuit/
If I were talking to someone, I'd give #1. If I were writing to someone, I'd write #3. If someone told me #2, I would hear "I am a loud person with no soul and I am going to try to sell you something. Please interpret everything I am about to say through that lens."
There is a reliable source of YC alumni list from outside of YC, but I hesitate to mention it as it includes founders of startups that are still in stealth. If anyone needs the list PM me.

Although with a bit of thinking I'm sure most people can figure out where to get it from.
Myspace is a sister company to the WSJ? In theory maybe, but I am sure many folks at the Journal consider Myspace like that strange step-sister you'd rather not talk about.

I really don't see Myspace as much if a competitor to FB anymore, either.
Well, basically, I could push to either of those and see my code pulled by others... with some kind of callback mechanism.

Have you considered implementing PubSubHubbub? It's a great way to make all feeds open. [In my case, it would allow me to make a status.net instance that publishes my GH activities, or the commits on the repos that I 'own']
I've had far, far more conversations that included all those other personal details than I've had that included compensation.
The Poetry of Function Naming
I think the domain name ( mint -vs- wesabe ) is responsible for more of the Mint victory than people want to admit. I know when I try and turn people on to new services, that seemingly petty little detail has been the primary reason whether they adopt it or not. That fact of life kills you inside when you put so much blood sweat and money into a company - only to have people talking about how to pronounce your name in blog comments rather than what cool stuff you can do.
Introduction to JavaScript Templating with jQuery tmpl
Steve Ballmer E-mail to Employees on Ray Ozzie Transition
I agree that Truyoo has potential. Similar ideas have come up in brainstorming with others and I think something like this will catch on. I'm not sure payment is necessary to do this. Facebook Connect solves this problem to some extent, as you have a much better identity check than just an email (although not as good as a credit card.)
I take some offense at the age comment. I agree that when you're younger you have fewer bills so it can be much easier to live on next to nothing.
But at 49, I'll match my burning desire to be on my own with anyone in their 20's and I'll win. I took jobs at larger companies to learn the mistakes they made and I won't make them, I'll make new ones, but they'll be mine.
Good companies build on the shoulders of others, and I'm ready.
To quote Ronald Regan, "A lot has been made about age in this campaign. But I don't think we need to spend time talking about my opponents youth and inexperience".