skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's only a problem if you think the terminology matters. It doesn't. What matters are the concepts. It's much easier to map the terminology onto the concepts than to try to go the other way around.

For example, it's much easier to go from a concept like "I can use the SAME NAME for DIFFERENT FUNCTIONS in the SAME PROGRAM, and there are various ways to map useful semantics onto the resulting code" to "If I resolve the ambiguity at run-time then it's POLYMORPHISM and if I do it at compile time then it's OPERATOR OVERLOADING" than it is to start with the terms POLYMORPHISM and OPERATOR OVERLOADING and try to learn what they mean and what they are good for.
I am. I expect to post the first version of my startup within a few months here.

It's indeed a very exciting area to be in.
I don't get it. Why does Joel Spolsky spend so much time on the look and beauty of his office, but allow his websites and products to be so horribly ugly?

It appears he treats his programmers like royalty, but where are the UI designers? This is painfully evident in the look of FogBugz and other software from Fog Creek.
My wife and I had a daughter, and while my wife is certainly beautiful, I'm not sure I'd qualify:-)

Your use of "Black Swan" isn't correct though, IMO, because black swan refers to things that are decidedly un bell curve like, and while most hackers probably aren't lookers, it's easy to reason that a few will be.
C#/ASP.NET specialists are pretty well paid. Microsoft has a lot of architectural pieces you can plug together for extremely scalable solutions. Remoting servers for your application tier give you a TON of cheap scaling. Clustered and federated SQL Servers give you a beefy backend when you eventually need it. Decent amount of freelance/independent work here, if you're patient and know where to look. Also Windows Mobile still stands a fighting chance as a leading mobile platform, at least in the enterprise world.

Java is kind of like .NET, only, at least in markets I'm familiar with, it's fading. Sure, it can scale to no end, but it has a pretty high TCO. Unless you're going into financial programming, I'd leave Java aside. Knowing C# gives you an entree into Java should you ever need it.

Ruby, RoR is up and coming, but not, from what I've seen, highly well paid.

PHP is often underpaid, but has potential. Being pretty mature, there are a lot of roles out there. It _can_ scale -- Yahoo! proves this -- but not exactly out-of-the-box. Lots of freelance work available here.

Erlang has a lot of value, and I suspect will continue to grow in this world of multi cores and multi processors. Concurrency is soon to be king.

Python is a good utility language, but unless you're a Python guru, you probably aren't getting paid squat to know it.

It's always good to know C/C++. Heck, it's good to know Assembler insert platform here to boot. Excellent fundamentals, if not a lot of LOB work around these days. C++ is good for mobile work. I bet Android increases the amount of mobile work here as well.

Knowing Obj-C/Cocoa is growing in value as well. Even with low market penetration, your potential audience is pretty upmarket. Room for high margins here.

Lisp, Perl, eh, not bad to know, especially Lisp for fundamentals. For that matter, Smalltalk has value as well. Smalltalk even has a web framework these days ...

If you want to be highly employable, I'd suggest some combination of C#, Ruby, PHP, Python.
What are these semantic arguments you're so worried about, exactly? The ones ones that use words?
read Three Knights!!
It's still wrong

Really? For the majority of human history, it hasn't been.

it's still harmful

It is? To whom? Surely not to people enjoying music - infringing copyright has made more people listen to more music.

it's still totally within the purview of a reasonable government to regulate or outlaw

In a government based on the US Constitution, only if such regulation and law "promotes the progress of useful arts".
I was getting 502 errors trying to access code.google.com earlier tonight.
Yes: Tarsnap (http://www.tarsnap.com/) is a combination of client software (which generates and encrypts backups) and online service (which stores the backups).

Ok, there's a very small web component -- users will be able to sign up and view their bills online. But that makes tarsnap about as "web related" as my bank account, my credit card, or an airline company.
A Profitable Business Doesn’t Have to Be Based on A Brilliant Technical Idea
Both cookies and milk are very unhealthy. What I really miss is a venue where I can get healthy food. There are coffee shops everywhere, selling cookies, doughnuts, muffins and so on, but there are hardly any healthy choices (Edit: there are NO healthy choices).

I can only speak for Munich, Germany, but I suspect the situation in the US is far worse. But from my local perspective here, I think the coffee shop thing is a bit over (and you are in my eyes just a coffee shop without the coffee). Something new needs to take over and make a killing.

Edit: also I would not like making my riches by destroying my customers health. It worked for Warren Buffet, though (Coca Cola, Snickers...).
NASA Scientists Make Magnetic Fields Visible, Beautiful
Hello, next home server! :-D
Internet Will Not Be Free by 2012
From email subscribers to online marketing and even search engines, all are going to be packaged. Thats what the future of internet holds. Cannot decide whether to call it a good news or a bad on now, but as the buzz says, internet will soon transform into television like medium.
There's a place near UPenn that only serves bowls of cereal. Anything is possible! As a college student myself, one place really popular at school is an interesting non-chain yogurt shop that just started up this year, and it's not exactly cheap. So college kids appreciate something unique, and if you can provide that, you have a shot.
"As much as I like web programming, I didn't think SaaS would work well for consumer products."

I'm curious why you think that. Is there something inherent about SaaS, or is the technology lacking, or something else?
I think that like any programming technique OO has it's place, and certainly not useful in many circumstances.

Absolutely correct.

and certainly not useful in many circumstances

This is what, infuriatingly, well over 90% of CS graduates are missing.
It's not quite so simple online. (See also vlad's comment).

The set of people who will make an online transaction and pay, say $30, has a very large overlap with the set of people who will make an online transaction and pay $1, because the online transaction itself is the biggest barrier.
Researchers Simplify Quantum Cryptography
PG talked about blocking all non-Google crawlers in an attempt to cut down on traffic ... not sure if he ever did or not
I think the problem is more along the lines of thinking that OOP means one specific subset of a long list of features. I agree that it doesn't matter much what the feature is called in any given implementation. PG has published such a list by Jonathan Rees here: http://paulgraham.com/reesoo.html
Review of NIA - a brain wave directed mouse
Railsconf 2008 Videos
Just Say No to Manual CRUD
http://isohunt.com/torrent_details/44151373/ebooks?tab=summa...

28 gigabytes of ebooks. Why would publishers even want to encourage digital formats? Obviously, ANY tactic that will slow the inevitable is good for them.
I think it's generally a mistake to use list structures with position-based accessors when what you really want is a struct or a dictionary of some sort. Aside from sane getters and setters, what object features are you missing? SRFI-1 gives you alists. It's pretty trivial to write a macro that lets you make constructors with generated accessors. It's not much harder to add inheritance to that. Generic functions and multiple dispatch can be implemented using a globle table of closures. Hey... this is starting to sound a bit like CLOS, isn't it?
Same here.

I guess it should be no surprise since the most surprising thing I've noticed since I've moved out here is how little devs and designers interact. It saddens me to no end (though it does help keep me a scarce resource).
I'm excited to see small low power pc's become commodity. I think there will be a lot of cool open source software coming out to help nerds turn them into various digital appliances.

I know I can already do this with existing hardware (and software) given enough effort - but I think prepackaged units spur existing technologies to be made more friendly. See what happened with OSS router firmware for an example of alpha geeks polishing and packaging software for the beta geeks to run on low power commodity hardware.
Yo Matt, there's something I wanted to mention to you: I don't like your internet personality. I'm sure you're a very nice guy in person, but the way you brand yourself on the internet may not be giving quite the right impression you want to give. When I go on your site, your picture already gives an arrogant impression. Then your long articles are always perfect, not personal and discussing some issues in detail. Your internet personality comes across as very cold and somewhat arrogant, very little emotion, but without really conveying a strong sense of competence (which is what cold blogs are supposed to do).

So unless the effect I described is actually part of your personal branding strategy, you may want to rethink it. Because your brand has so many strong factors (name, picture, writings), that people who meet you will already be influenced by your projection of yourself, and this will color their perception of you.

All I'm saying is this: brand yourself a little bit warmer. People will like the impression better.
The Mega RailsConf 2008 Round Up
Actually SUSE announced "your idea" last week at LinuxTag.
It would be interesting to see an attempt at a meaty economic defence that demonstrates that more innovation happens in a world with IP in spite of the harm that has on network effects.

I've been interested in this field for a while and never seen sign of such a thing. "IP" has grown out of the lobby groups, not out of academic integrity.
Is Lua fast?
I heard it has double as its only numeric data dype. How can that ever be fast?

Here, look at the benchmarks:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all...
it's noscript
Inheritance is not important, but the organisation of data. What if you have a GUI with say a tree view element, a list view element, and a text element. How would you create that in an non-OO way? I suppose you could write

var tableData = ...
var listData = ...
var textData = ...

and then add callback methods (all in the same source file?). But that runs out of hand real quick. It seems much nicer and cleaner to have a treeView object that knows it's own data and callback methods.

What if you have nested elements, like a window with those three elements, or something else. How would you hand that data around?

I have seen the make-struct macro of MzScheme, but once you start using inheritance with that, it starts getting really ugly, imo.
Great job ignoring the substance. I thought it'd be better to come up with an unrealistic but simple example rather than to paste in the source for Pylons...

Just play along and imagine a more complex world. If it makes you happier, pretend the getter is intended to return the string version of the numbers or some other operation that would make just using instance.a wrong.
There are actually two planet python's.

The official one: http://planet.python.org/
The unofficial one: http://planetpython.org/

both are great.
It may be simplistic, but I find people try to model the problem in oo terms, and when designing the code they keep the same model.
Something like if there are persons and cars you make two classes, Person and Car, and use them in code almost unchanged, but they are _problem_ entities, not necessarily code entities. In code it may be simpler to just use maps of some sort.
I recently thought about this: what if the whole internet worked more like Twitter? People are laughing about Twitter and think it is an easy problem, but not even Google manages instant updates! The equivalent to Twitter for Google would be to index all news on the internet immediately.

In that sense, I think we can cut Twitter some slack...
No, that is the RIAAs fault.
I guess Facebook apps will start nagging users to "really" install them now, so the problem might only get worse.
We do a compiler in C++. Probably as far from Web 2.0 as you can get (in this industry).
Halfway there: Soon half of the world's population will have a mobile phone
The "mind expansion experiment" reminded me of Mencius's "diversity experiment": http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/09/real-me...
I think this is not a startup...
I equated them only in the sense that they are both natural human behaviors. You could just as easily replace it with "piracy of a song", and the argument would have been the same.
There are two cookie stores within a block from one another in Bloomington, IN (home of IU). They have both lasted for at least a couple years if I'm not mistaken.

http://www.bakedofbloomington.com/

http://www.insomniacookies.com/index.php
I think the one we have now is doing a fantastic job. The record labels are failing miserably to adapt to the new reality, but that has nothing to do with the copyright system. It's with their own disincentives to adapt (a complex subject I will talk about tangentially soon).

I think the current copyright situation lets citizens do pretty much whatever they want and prevents corporations from infringing on creators and IP owners. That, to me, is perfect.

Corporations, for their part, went a little further than they had to with the DRM (which had nothing to do with our copyright system) and are finally starting to come to their senses.

I'd say the whole thing is working very well.
"Your internet personality comes across as very cold and somewhat arrogant, very little emotion, but without really conveying a strong sense of competence"

So does your's.

I've read four or five of your comments on this item only to find that you believe you respresent a vast majority of those reading this article. It's more likely that you don't, as is evidenced by the quite engaging discussions this site is historically known for; discussions being engaging precisely because people don't agree by default. Perhaps instead of steering the conversation you should take part in it. For instance, you could render your opinions about copyright law instead of your opinions about people that write about copyright law.
Do I detect a fellow amateur etymologist?
Well, I'm not really concerned about personal branding. I get that sort of thing a lot. I don't see myself ever seeking political office or even employment again, and I don't have any hopes of making money from my personal blog. I just write what interests me.

I'll take the always perfect as a compliment though. Also, do you only read the entries posted here?
I'm just not interested in closed source low-level infrastructure (like programming languages) if I can possibly help it. Look at how much trouble that caused with Java... no thanks.
Why? What's wrong with that business model. I would thinking giving away your recorded music would make it easier to cross that chasm.

And what do you play?
Wow, do I wish I could write about some of the things I know about these guys.

Sigh.
Doctors Notes
A cool site on doctors notes. Check it out.
"I'm mighty tighty-whitey, and I'm smuggling plums!"
I've been curious about this... do cafe/restaurants play a type of commercial satellite or digital radio intended to be played in stores? Or do they license the music themselves?
Precisely! It's supposed to be a compromise between "no IP" (where IP is copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc...) and some sort of permanent and ironclad possession of works and ideas. I believe the balance has tilted too far in favor of the producers of IP, and that it should be shifted back the other way, but not eliminated.

In a more general sense, the problem is "provisioning of public goods":

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

Creating property where none naturally exists is one solution, but there are others (some good, some bad, depends on the type of good).
yes, I make things out of carbon fiber and epoxy.
The good ones use Muzak.
I know that mine does. It's part of my freedom to say what I want philosophy. You are right, I should probably have contributed to the actual article content or kept my mouth shut, but its the Author or his persona that makes me want to reply to this in a negative manner.
Yes, I only read the occasional piece that floats to the top of this site. But the few times I've been to your site, I looked over a few other entries, I believe.

You don't see yourself ever seeking employment again? That's a bit... arrogant, isn't it?
Sounds like Muzak has this particularly niche completely mastered.

http://music.muzak.com/delivery/
Exactly: unless it's set up as a chain, the potential upside is more or less limited.
I think you have a moral duty to hasten the death of corporations that use DRM.
OO may not be inherently hard, but it is often used in overly complex ways, which makes it seem hard.

The OO patterns movement probably had something to do with it. It's easy sometimes to get the impression that with OO, you have to learn a bunch of weird patterns to produce good code, but with FP you don't have this conceptual overhead -- you just write the solution that feels the most compact and natural, almost in a mathematical sense.

Where OO does usually make life harder is in concurrent programming. Because objects have mutable state and hidden fields, it's difficult and often dangerous to send (and receive) them between processes. In Erlang, for example, all data is immutable and because it's made of simple (lists/tuples of) primitives, it's very easy to send it as messages (to processes on the local and/or remote VM) and to pattern match against it on the receiving end. This makes concurrent and distributed programming probably as easy as it can be.

I also find code written in function languages easier to read and debug because of data immutability. In code written in functional style, you know exactly where every variable is bound, so it's easy to track down bugs that cause it to have the wrong value. There's no mystery as to where a variable's data may be modified, which gives you confidence in the correctness of your solution.

I don't mean to suggest that FP is perfect and OO is broken. Sometimes when I write FP code I wish I could grab one or two concepts from OO. OO code can also be quite elegant as well.
"It is not acceptable if women are forced to choose between a family and a career in science."

Why not? Since family has a price, how else could it work than having to make choices?

I don't want to pay for other people's children, cute as the little things are.
What Winning TechCrunch40 Did For Mint.com
http://qurl.co.uk/ offers something for toolbar access
Perhaps more realistic would be terrestrial broadcast on illegal reserved frequencies. That really might bring military intervention, since the military owns a lot of those frequencies... but it sure would be nice for the people to take back our airwaves.
If you ever have billions of dollars it becomes extremely economical and even moral to stage a takeover of Equatorial Guinea (a real, wealthy country with an evil dictator that CIA/MI6 wants deposed). Just to keep in the back of your mind.
I'm a percussionist mostly. I've played basically every genre, though I'm tending towards jazz lately.

I've been chewing on a long response for you here, but I think I'll save it for my blog. Instead, the short one: Touring only works at the superstar end of the scale, while recorded music revenue scales with the popularity of the artist. If the price of recorded music falls to zero, the labels don't have so much incentive to sign groups that aren't already at the touring-huge scale, since they're guaranteed to lose money on them...

Also, if just giving away your music made you popular, MTV Cribs would feature a lot more unsigned artists than it does now (namely, zero). Since labels are the only ones in the music industry with the money to do the marketing that's essentially a prerequisite to getting huge, it's in the best interest of the artists for the labels to have the freedom to sign groups that are promising, but not yet big. That freedom comes from CD sales.
"we’ll use yosefk’s Mind Expansion"

What bullshit - how does it hurting prove that pain is not just information? Just because the brain is hardwired to react to it in a certain way does not mean it is not simply information. You could easily program a robot that is incapable of pushing a needle into it's hand (provided there is a sensor there).

Disclaimer: I stopped reading the article after the description of the "experiment".
If these guys had anything interesting to say, they didn't say it in the minute of my life that I dedicated to watching them. Pass.
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there's an even better technique called Chisenbop. It allows you to defer basic calculations to a mechanical process. It's described in "mind performance hacks" from o'reilly.

http://www.ludism.org/mentat/MindPerformanceHacks_2fTurnYour...
"Inheritance is not important, but the organisation of data"

Good point. I missed this when I first left Java, because in Java you get these nice classes. Over time I've found I use class structures a lot less, or in some situations I'll hack them. The other day I was writing a tree builder where in java I would have had a different class for "node", "attribute", etc, all extending from element. In my python impl I just had a class "element" with a string field "e_type" which was "attribute", "node", etc and then I stuck other stuff into a dictionary in that object as I needed it. Over time I've found that the extreme brevity improvements combined with blocks of documentation to describe the purpose of a grouping of code more than make up for the loss of code-based structure.

Again on the topic of organisation of data - in databases you get a lot of automatic documentation because the schema abstraction we're used to is so widespread and accepted. This is one of the reasons I love to stick with relational databases even though I know that there are good arguments, particularly in FP communities, advocating more practical forms of datastore.
check out sites such as

http://www.notely.net/ - lets you share notes with friends that are signed up, also provides org tools for students
http://stu.dicio.us/ - i believe does the same thing but is down atm
http://wwwnotesake.com/ - again same thing

there are others too
It is a Sad and Beautiful World
I am spending my life writing user manuals for products that don't exist. They might exist someday. But is this my fate?
yup. they pay ascap, bmi, and/or sesac performance royalties.