skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Also, don't do all the exercises in SICP unless you feel like doing so. Some require domain knowledge that you frankly just don't need if your desire to learn these languages is web dev."

I disagree quite a bit... I think the exercises in SICP are really valuable and provide a lot of depth that just reading the text doesn't.

"Someone needs to do a SICP: The Web Dev Edition"

Why? If someone is really interested only in web development in a Lisp, they probably shouldn't go looking in SICP.

On the other hand, I believe that SICP has material that will make any programmer a better programmer, even if there are some examples that require "domain knowledge" (mostly math at the level of calculus). It's about the structure (building abstractions with procedures and data) and interpretation (how Lisp programs are actually executed by a machine) of computer programs, not "Web development with Lisp 101"

This is all from someone who recently finished reading SICP and lovingly doing as many exercises as possible, and is definitely of the same persuasion as the author of the OP, when he writes:

"That's where all the smuggest lisp weenies come from, or go eventually."

So take it with a grain of salt, I guess.
Why do we take what Shervin has to say seriously at all? One thing I do not understand is this community's (not just HN) tendency to give instant validity and credibility to those like Shervin who are running successful companies. The guy runs a successful startup in one specific niche market -- how does that lend any credibility to his opinion on the workings of genocide? It doesn't.

This became really evident whilst watching the Launch conference. Companies were getting hammered left-and-right by entrepreneurs who have never ventured into said companies' markets. Being successful =/= insight to all of the world's issues. Kevin Pollak knocked one of the startup founders for the shoes he was wearing, and a major blog picked up the pitch calling it a complete meltdown.

Stop and think for just a second. Shervin runs a gaming company, not a government.
Call to end paper exams for digital generation
As someone who's deployed a Sinatra app to shared web hosting a few days ago, no, that totally sucks.

But here's the thing: VPSes are so cheap now, I don't know why you'd ever go with shared hosting in this day and age. I don't have a job right now and I still haven't bothered to turn off my VPS, even though I don't use it... come to think of that, I should probably go log into the Rackspace console...
YouTube really can be beautiful - epic video mashup
try this out. at first, you'll probably think it's stupid/ugly/a waste of time. but after a while, you realize it really works.

beautiful.
If you're designing a programming language, and you're planning to include monads solely for the sake of IO, the author has a point: Monads are a very complex way to perform IO, and you're better off with a simpler abstraction.

But monads are good for dozens of other things, including Bayesian inference[1], computation with optional values, list comprehensions, software transactional memory, quantum mechanics[2] and (to geek out a bit) anything that involves defining a lambda-calculus analog over a topos. Any time your problem domain includes a bunch of hairy matrix math, there may be a lovely, intuitive formulation using monads.

Now, if you're never programmed in Haskell, or if you've stuck to the IO monad, you may not understand why monads are a powerful way to tackle certain kinds of problems. But if you've never used monads in anger, how do you whether or not they're a useful tool?

If you want a relatively programmer-friendly language that supports monads, check out Scala's 'for' loop. It looks like a list comprehension, but it gives you about 90% of what you want from monads in practice.

[1] Here's an article I wrote on probabilistic programming with monads: http://www.randomhacks.net/articles/2007/02/22/bayes-rule-an...

[2] Here's a much cooler article on quantum mechanics with monads: http://blog.sigfpe.com/2007/03/monads-vector-spaces-and-quan...
So it offers unlimited free food, but only in the US. You can't choose specifically what you want to eat, but it does a great job of guessing foodstuffs that you might like. And you can't eat the same thing twice due to licensing restrictions.
It's been archived to http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2011/02/25/498596/markets-li...
How will this impact sites like Rotten Tomatoes?

They have little original content, but are still a useful source.
I would say about one out fifty (2%) of bread and butter programmers can actually figure out how to pass an anonymous function as a parameter to another function. Granted, those 2% are probably a lot more important than the other 48%, but I don't think lambdas are actually common...

Also, if one of those 2% have to write code understood by the other 48%, they probably shouldn't use a ton of anonymous functions (or generics, whatever they are).
My memory of 1998 is still pretty fuzzy, but I thought MySQL was still pretty new at the time. (And of course it wasn't free software, but you didn't have to pay for it.)
Ask HN: I released my project. Where do I go from here?
I've just released my latest project, http://5factsabout.me and I submitted a story here and it got 3 comments, I've submitted to reddit and it didn't get much attention.

I've emailed Mashable and Techcrunch to try and get some coverage, so I'm waiting for a response.

I want to try and get it out to a wider audience (my target market is generally the sort of people who use, tumblr, twitter and facebook very actively) I'm not sure where to go from here to get it some attention. though. It's the first web project I've ever really made. I think it's got potential so far it's been live just over a day and I've got 60 users.

tl;dr Released project, how do I market it to social users.
The power of anonymous is that you can become part of anonymous at any point.
It's uncommon in much of America, as well, except in metro areas -- and not all of us want to live in a metro.
Thanks for clarifying it from the script POV. I guess there can never be one true english spelling for some of these words because the sounds don't transliterate perfectly.

One the reasons books may be a better way to verify the consensus on spelling (instead of say, checking how many results you get for a certain spelling on the entire web) is because books are more likely to be well-researched. (In my second example, the misspelling 'Ghandi' returns millions of results on Google, while it's almost non-existent in books)
I've been hoping to see more projects using mongrel2.

As ugly and inconsistent as the PHP language is, this project is really cool.
It's a very good piece of advice, it has a "gaming" feeling in it.

It reminds me of the automated test suites you have in IDEs such as Netbeans, which display a huge green bar when 100% of your tests pass. It's such a goog feeling to see this green bar that you work harder to make tests pass again.
I'm not color blind, yet that is what I see, too. Makes me wonder about the brain's color-processing. My guess is small variations are ignored by the brain because slightly changing light conditions can cause all colors to vary slightly over time. Your brain filters them out so you can only tell when something really is changing.
Related:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2261389 <- Lots of comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2261459

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2261467

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2261613 <- A few comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2261617
It's generally accepted that the singular of "anecdote" is "proof".
I just want to quickly point out that making $100K puts you into the top 6% with $150K putting you into the top 2%. The 15% figure is for household income, not personal income.

The income distribution tables from the last US census can be found at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/cpstables/032010/perinc/new11...
see the iphone app streaks

and a new site

tasksmash.com
If you find this interesting, you might also be interested in DripDrop( https://github.com/andrewvc/dripdrop ), which is an alternate approach to the fusion of ZeroMQ, HTTP, and WebSockets.

It's not a general purpose web server, but targets message passing applications that must move between transports. For instance Browser <-> Web Socket <-> ZMQ is easily possible in it.

It's based on ruby eventmachine (no external daemons needed), and lets you seamlessly pass messages between all three protocols, leveraging the differences of each in interesting ways.

Additionally, it's got tools to help you build isolated components that communicate via messaging only (preferably ZMQ). If you keep this in mind from the start, it can substantially help when it comes to scaling out.

Lastly, we're working on Mongrel2 support as a front end.
I'm not sure about that. The testing problems are different, but not harder.

An exchange has to deal with massive scale, but isn't hugely complex (relative to a spacecraft, which deals with fault tolerance and integrating many different inputs; or the mathematical complexity of medical imaging).

It seems to me that most aspects of scale aren't too difficult to emulate, given sufficient computing resources to generate the load.
Looks like they released Q4 results yesterday. I suspect investors will react far more strongly to hard data like the Q4 then the FUD created by Google.
Interesting corollary: If you see someone covered in slime, do not point it out, and especially do not offer to help; you might be mistaken for a thief.
I'm starting to think that maybe why my family enjoys it so much is because we're all constantly dealing, or putting out feelers about deals from the second the first property is purchased, and that when the game is obviously won, people just concede and the game starts up again. Also, a lot of our deals involve more than two people - like person A threatening to sell property X, that person B wants, to person C for a dollar, unless person B sells property Y to A. Or selling somebody a property that completes a monopoly for an amount of money determined purely based on that person not being able to afford to put houses in it quickly. Mortgaging properties before selling them for the same effect. Or two players trading each other into monopolies so they can either eliminate another weak player, or have a chance to compete with a player who got the first monopoly. Spending thousands on a $200 property. Making and breaking gentleman's agreements.

Really a great time. When the trading stops with us, it usually means the game is about 20 minutes from being over while the last two battle it out with dice rolling. If that period was 4 hours long, I'd hate the game too.
The reason I love Ruby is because I do consider it to be 'an acceptable Lisp.'

For extra fun, you can write really nice sexps in Ruby by just using arrays with a symbol as the first element...

[:puts, [:+, 2, 3]]

I wrote a tiny compiler with an IR that did that. Stole the idea from http://www.hokstad.com/compiler
so because you can't measure performance to fairly give raises, you just don't measure performance and give people raises that may or may not deserve it? This leads to bad teachers staying in the system and getting raises. It's an inefficiency in the system that needs to be fixed. If teachers really cared about their students, they would want to have the best education for them.
You can access Facebook fine with Chrome, fwiw.
This is what http://calendaraboutnothing.com/ is about. Which reminds me, I haven't committed anything in a while...
Thanks for the taskmash link - looks neat. But my gut reaction is that seeing something physical, stuck on a wall by my desk, is more likely to be effective (at least in my case) as it's IMPOSSIBLE to ignore. An app/webapp solution is nice, yes, but there's no replacement for a huge oblong of paper with ink on it.

Let's see how I do. Will be printing or ordering a calendar this weekend
The airplane, the machine gun, dynamite, radio, lasers, the telephone and cable television have all had similar claims made about them. I would copy and paste it if I could, but the beginning of this chapter of What Technology Wants has a lot of similar sounding quotations: http://books.google.com/books?id=_ToftPd4R8UC&lpg=PP1...
I'd probably be using Chrome if a) you could open external links in new windows and b) the "loading" indicator wasn't some kind of horrible practical joke.
Usually a fervent supporter of technology over anything, but I think I'd rather have that "huge calendar on the wall with a big red marker" than an iPhone (or web) app.

It's big. You wake up every day looking at it. And it brings us back in a connecting way to the real life.

Semi-unrelated: Same reason I'd still rather use a Moleskin to gather and write out my thoughts and ideas over TextMate, Photoshop, etc.
Here's an interesting comparison of Software Developer salaries, according to Indeed.com. I kept trying to find a city with a lower average than Kansas City, where I live, but of the ones I tried we still get paid the least (on average).

http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=software+developer&l1=Ka...
When I'd heard about this, I found http://dontbreakthechain.com/. Once I get a streak going, it's a pretty powerful motivator.
I suspect malicious activity or automated trading systems could be the source of problems, in addition to engineering. Don't assume it's automatically Linux vs .NET.
Read Stephen King's "On Writing". It'll change your game, even if you don't write.

http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Stephen-King/dp/0743455967
The interesting phenomenon is that these days you need a lot more "venture labor" in proportion to your "venture capital", so the labor — the founders and early employees — can extract a better deal relative to the capitalists.

It's true that eventually a growing business will take on people who demand nothing more than market-priced salaries, but the people you need to get off the ground won't be satisfied with that.
A friendly reminder:

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
No announcements, but according to this screen shot it looks like it's there. http://www.macstories.net/news/os-x-lion-adds-trim-support-f...
Recycling Generational Stereotypes: Does This End with Gen Y?
Same for me, the entire page is videolan.org plus wikipedia and one cnet page. And I have no ad blocker.
Seconded. Great insights from one of the most prolific authors ever.
The problem is that oil allows the dictators to fund their governments' without the people's consent. This is in stark contrast to the Western world, where our political leaders must pay at least a modicum of respect to the common man, because he's the one paying the taxes.
Any time you are dealing with a system with that many users, you are going to introduce a lot of chaos (in its mathematical sense). Chaos is nearly impossible to test for because there are just too many permutations.

You are (probably) right that any particular piece of a trading system would be easier to build and test than the examples you gave, but in aggregate, I think it would be much more difficult.
Absolutely. I love Linode! But when I was starting out with Rails my sysadmin skills wouldn't have been up to that, even if the VPS landscape had been the way it now is.
do notation (in Haskell) is syntactic sugar, monads themselves are not.
Depends on the subject. Yeah, a History final on a keyboard vs. bluebook is easier on the fingers (perhaps harder on the plagiarism?). Hard to do a math/science final, though, unless you've got a pretty fancy sketch input system - such as deriving thermodynamic relations, etc. Test's where the final answer isn't "4" as much as an application of math.

Where it might get interesting is through the use of e-tests that allow for customization for each student. If each test is different (different question order, different numbers), certain kinds of cheating become harder. Grading becomes harder as well but I assume the software would facilitate that.
You would have thought it was in Google's interests to do this. If the organic search tended to be full of the reviews (and if I am searching for a product I am generally going to want to find out about it, especially user reviews, not where to buy it), then that incentivizes the online shops to buy paid ads.

Everyone seems a winner if they do this, so it seems strange they may have gone in the other direction.
Are you saying that you think only 2% of programmers are capable of programming in Ruby? Blocks are pervasive in Ruby, and although technically slightly different than anonymous functions, conceptually very similar.

(Also, you mean "the other 98%".)
Coincidentally, fellow HNers rguzman, peng and I recently built a simple web app which was inspired by this article.

It's called http://idonethis.com.

We email you on a daily basis asking you what you got done today. We put your email response into a calendar and check off the day. Look at your calendar to see your streak from yesterday to motivate you today.

We posted the site on HN back in January and got some great feedback which we incorporated (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2064038) along with some nice press coverage (http://thenextweb.com/lifehacks/2011/01/03/idonethis-have-yo...). We're at a few hundred users, a good proportion of whom email us on a daily basis and tell us that that the site is helping their productivity, helping them quit smoking, reminding them to exercise & diet, etc.
The concepts are orthogonal. Which means you can apply both at the same time. If you have a stream of SIMD instructions - which is data parallelism - and you can determine that you can execute some of them in parallel, then you are able to extract instruction level parallelism out of a stream of data parallel instructions.

ILP means something very specific. This is a discussion of semantics, but semantics are important so that we can communicate easily. If I stick a Hershey's bar in the oven, it is literally hot chocolate, but it is not what we normally mean when we say "hot chocolate." You are talking about parallelism at the instruction level. I'm trying to explain that that is note what people mean when they say "instruction level parallelism."
I don't see your email in your profile?
Apache SSI and perl were kings.

I think Matt's Script Archive was the face of that popularity. It still exists today http://www.scriptarchive.com/
True. It tests for completeness, not purity.
I hate to be "that guy" but seriously... this question (or some variant of it) seems to come up about once every 2 days or so. Have you searched for older threads on this topic?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Anews.ycombin...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Anews.ycombin...

There's also discussion of this on Quora:

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-way-to-find-a-cofounde...

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-ways-to-find-partners-...
I think they just spur adoption of the framework.

Ruby didn't really catch on because of Rails. Rails did. There are a frightening amount of professional programmers who think Ruby is "a web language" or don't know the difference between Ruby and Rails.
DEMAND MEDIA: Ha Google's Huge Algorithm Change Hasn't Hurt Our Business At All
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/02/21/death-match-e...

tl;dr - "price is in the same order of magnitude, but performance is two to three orders of magnitude different."
I honestly don't mean to attack but I think I'd read this simply on the basis of good photography. This is our generation's Fall of the Berlin Wall; I'd say that's an interesting new phenomenon.

Nothing too political about this, either. Libya's also connected to us on a closer level with the .ly TLD.

The keyword in the second sentence is probably, but I think that enough people (55 now) found this interesting and made it acceptable here.
I would like to point out ruby makes it very difficult not to pass around anonymous functions.

>2% have to write code understood by the other 48%

that would be the other 98% ;)
How do you find these contracts? Especially, before you broke into the industry and created a large network of contacts?
I think even in the ideal SSC case, you'd still want as much cache as you can get. Even if the compiler can insert perfect prefetching instructions, the prefetched data has to go somewhere. And the more somewhere you have, the more aggressively you can prefetch.

I think the main benefit would be much simpler instruction pipelines, which would include the points you mentioned (branch prediction, prefetch) but also all of the logic needed to keep track of dependencies in an out-of-order processor.
Really, so what should you use a ton of in hopes of making code easy to understand for a programmer that doesn't understand first-class functions? What makes you think they understand polymorphism? What about exceptions? Do you think they understand pass-by-value versus pass-by-reference? Do you think they understand any data structures? Pointers? Loops? Boolean logic?

It's ridiculous to complicate your code in an attempt to hit some moving target of "an ignorant person might be able to understand this." If a "bread-and-butter" programmer is using a modern language and doesn't understand functions, the correct response by everyone involved is for that programmer to spend some time understanding functions. I dare say the same is true for monads, although in many languages monads are hard to abstract out, and thus have less of an everyday value.
Ask HN: should tech journalists boycott tech conferences?
More specifically, how do you think techcrunch writers feel about having to boycott the Launch conference?
"knowing lots of people within the industry helps."

Yeah but that's Catch-22, of course :)
In the UK it seems like the government is quite happy to ignore the people aside from gesturing, and when the real decisions are made they listen more to their mates from Eton, who run banks and big business.
This has been on HN before. Keep reposting and don't break the chain.
I put in another vote for it. Considering the relatively close timing to the Egyptian protests and how the Egyptian government temporarily shut down the internet, I would say this is worth a look especially with the .ly TLD as you mentioned, too.
Nice article. I completely agree with the download bar comments as well as the extensions comment. However, I can easily remove the icons for extensions in the tool bar, on Windows at least. Just right click and choose "Hide Button" in the context menu.
Blackberry Dev Tip: Change the default focus highlight color of ListField
O/T but ARGH -- the 'hashbang' URLs are failing for me here every other time, and my wife (who I sent the link to) got the wrong page too. Anyone else suffering similarly?
your marketing model should not be "email techcrunch and get coverage".

i hope that you have features that make this social tool easy to socially spread. if thats the case and you have something people are interested in using, it should spread.

if i were you, i'd reverse the process. having people sign up first before knowing anything about your app is off-putting. switch it up, have them enter in their 5 facts first and then once they save it, let them do their account. people will be more willing to sign up to save their work than sign up just to see the product.

how do you spread it? make it interesting and easy to use. it'll spread from the ground up.
Exxon, Shell, BP outed as mystery hack attack victims
I've found monads in programming languages to be a lot easier to understand than the myriad "guides" that explain them in obtuse ways.
Close, you do need to stop the world every once in a while to GC some of the harder stuff.

But it's true, there's flavors of Java that are certified for hard realtime. If you stop the GC for 100ms every 2s regardless if you need it or not, that's pretty nice and predictable behavior for a realtime system.