skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lisp Isn’t Really a Programming Language
It got the best note, not the last one. Unless the best possible note is 0... At least that's what I understand from the pages you're pointing to.
Here is a video of the talk you refer to: http://jsconfeu.blip.tv/file/4308069/
========= http://www.findsoso.com ======
free shipping
competitive price
any size available
The website wholesale for many kinds of fashion shoes, like the nike,jordan,prada,
also including the jeans,shirts,bags,hat and the decorations. All the products are free shipping,
and the the price is competitive, and also can accept the paypal payment.,after the payment, can ship within short time.

BEST QUALITY GUARANTEE!!
SAFTY & HONESTY GUARANTEE!!
FAST & PROMPT DELIVERY GUARANTEE
I haven't mentioned Grails / Groovy, because it always seemed to me like some kind of a "hack" to improve Java with some nice syntactical sugar / DSLs / dynamic programming. Scala / Clojure seemed more interesting, and I focused on them.

I've only tried a small "create-your-blog-in-15-minutes" Grails tutorial, and it was actually quite effective. I haven't revisited it since then. Thinking about it, my Groovy avoidance is absurd, and I WILL look at it again with an open mind. I remember "dismissing" Groovy a while ago, after reading a few articles raving about Scala being the next JVM language. I think it was quite dumb of me actually.

A colleague of mine used Grails to build a small issue tracker for a client, and he loved it. The only drawback, according to him, were some of the plugins: when the default plugin configuration wasn't what he needed, it was sometimes hard to change it. Since they were open source, he simply forked them / hacked at the code / submitted patches to improve them. These drawbacks are expected, though, since the language is still young, and plugins will mature.

Spring Roo also looks interesting, for those who want to keep using Java. It's inspired by Rails / Grails, and uses code generation to speed up development: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/roo-ben-alex
For reference, Data.List.sort in GHC:
http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.0.2/html/libraries/base-4....

It's still short and sweet ;).
ItsNat: A Silver Bullet Java Web Application Framework?
also, past performance is not guarantee for future success- otherwise there would be much fewer banks bankrupting.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2419815
What's the insight? It may make sense from the economic rational-actor perspective, but the real world is a lot more complex than that.

We're not (all) rational robots performing relatively complex math to determine our tolerable enjoyment-utility per hour thresholds.
This was one of this posts that start out saying something reasonable and then makes some sleigh-of-hand to a claim that's entirely unsupported by those statements:

"But Baumol’s Disease doesn’t explain ... how Medicare has leaped from $52 billion a year to $600 billion a year in a decade. ... What does explain these gigantic increases is monopoly powers granted to cartels by unaccountable State fiefdoms."

If this was true, Medicare spending per capita should have risen faster than health care costs in general. I was of the impression that was not the case. Surely the "unaccountable state fiefdoms" can not be responsible for the skyrocketing cost of non-government health care?

"Our national government is incapable of simplifying, improving public service efficiency"

I'm not sure what "public service efficiency" is but, again, I was of the impression that Medicare administrative costs were lower than that of the average private health plan.
Weird, loaded and put me at the bottom of the page. HTML5 Technique? ;)
GE Achieves Highest Publicly Reported Efficiency for Thin Film Solar
There's no paradox in expecting cost savings to be reflected in retail pricing.

The idea that an ebook has more utility than a real book is hardly uncontroversial. You can't read it without the appropriate technology and a power source, it can't be easily lent to another person, can't be resold, and lacks all of the physical qualities that make a well-designed book readable, such as paper quality and typography.

The advantages of ebooks are that they are easier to carry, can be purchased instantly without a trip to the store, and are never out of stock.

It's the convenience of ordering that has made them popular, but customers aren't idiots. They know that printing, binding, shipping and storing books is expensive, and that those costs are reflected in the price. When you remove all of those elements, they expect the price to go down as well.

How is that so hard to understand?
> If I were to launch a startup, should I go with the "cool shiny powerful" language, or should I stay with the boring verbose language that I know well?

I think the danger with this decision is that we tend to get a "grass is always greener across the street" mentality. I have yet to find a programming language that has no serious warts.

Certainly different languages have different warts, and thus suit different jobs better. However, just because we haven't used a language enough to appreciate its warts, that does not mean we will not discover them to our cost at exactly the wrong moment in our new project.

Moreover, with newer or more recently popularised languages, there is sometimes a tendency for the community to bury its head in the sand. Some defenders might claim that we "just don't understand" if we identify a serious shortcoming. Sometimes the individual or group that defines/specifies a language will have a blind spot and make seemingly arbitrary decisions that we don't agree with. In contrast, with longer-established languages, the shortcomings tend to be well-known and acknowledged, and the emphasis in the community is often on sharing the most effective workarounds or alternative techniques.

Obviously these generalisations aren't necessarily universal. We find helpful people in otherwise intransigent communities and awkward people in otherwise helpful communities. Still, I have seen the pattern repeat over the years for many different languages as they evolve from the Newer And Better Thing to a mainstream tool and ultimately to an older tool that is superceded by the next newer and better thing.

When I'm choosing the tools for a project, I usually favour the middle of that spectrum over either extreme. Out-of-date and underpowered is bad, but tried-and-tested is good. YMMV.
In my experience Code Igniter does a very good job at being flexible, simple and fast.

Perhaps they should have a page explaining how Fuel is different from Cake, Zend and Code igniter.
Ask HN: What do you think about Plug and Play Tech Center?
The Chilean government has launched a contest to send 10 startups for 3 months to Plug and Play.

What do you think about P&P?
The most annoying thing is that Kindle books often have mistakes because of misses in the conversion (OCR). I don't think I have a single Kindle book that doesn't have at least a 3-4 typos (1's for I)...and there's always one that tends to really throw me off for a second.

It really annoys me to pay more and have additional mistakes in my book.
> 30 years experience doesn't mean much if it's the same year 30 times.

Your quote is apt, but it cuts both ways. Using the same old tool indefinitely, even when newer tools can do the job better and much faster, might be foolish. On the other hand, learning to do the same task over and over again using different tools, each only a modest improvement on the last, might also be foolish.

In the case of your C+CGI example, I would agree that it makes sense to prefer any of the more modern "scripting" languages, which typically have both good library support for networking protocols and much more powerful integrated string handling than C.

On the other hand, there is little offered by any mainstream language ecosystem today that can't be achieved at least reasonably proficiently using tools from the .Net world as well (ignoring the obvious limitation of having to run on a .Net platform).
Ten golden rules for tour and activity travel startups
I run pentadactyl, and vimperator before pentadactyl was around.

What does that have to do with the keyboard shortcuts on github's home page?
Is this not yet a Well-Known Fact that astronomers say "we observed it two weeks ago" and We The Laymen know that Great Distances are involved and the event itself happened "long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away?"
please flag this pseudo-economic-analysis fluff.
Personally I would say do not make your first big project in a new language your startup, it'll take a lot longer. It's hard enough just getting the thing out the door without having to also deal with the pain of learning new paradigms, new dev tools, constantly having to look stuff up and wondering if you're doing something fundamentally wrong.

Force yourself to start writing other things with the language you want to use TODAY. I would start writing utility stuff in something else until you're comfortable with it.

It's also a little funny to see Python and Ruby described as more powerful that Java! I guess powerful is a mutable word, but personally I'd consider them less powerful but faster to develop in (for a dev at the same skill level in both languages).
> try going to Red Rock or the Dojo with an Acer laptop. You can just feel people judging you.

I have gone to equivalent places/events with my Acer laptop, without anyone judging me. (It is running Ubuntu, mind).
I liked all the various configurations of Trek; some more than others.

It's interesting to see in this thread the split between TOS trekkers and a STTNG trekkers. I was always more of a TOS person myself: I think the creative tension that the networks put on Gene by making him "dumb it down" actually made for better, sharper analysis of the sci-fi involved. TNG seemed to meander a bit. But that's me.

What I find interesting about looking at the shows from decades later is the way the topics were addressed. Things like the episode where Daystom's M-9 computer took over the Enterprise and basically was a smart machine with a weapon -- we seemed to have come down on the side of that being okay, at least for now. But back then there were a lot of very important questions raised -- questions that are still valid. Or the Darmok episode, where the culture spoke only in metaphor. That still twists my noodle because that's all any culture really does -- speak in various metaphors. When you're asking a bunch of users from a certain societal niche to tell you what they want, not only is their jargon going to be unique, but the way they compare things and discuss things are too. (Insert Wittgenstein discussion).

Taking a short dramatic format and making a bunch of pimply-faced teenagers start thinking about what's important in their lives is an awesomely good thing. Let's hope Trek keeps doing that for years to come.
I've been a bit annoyed at Roo - more precisely, Spring, because they seem to give Roo more love/attention than Grails.

Personally, yes, I think perhaps it was a bit 'dumb' of you to dismiss Groovy. ;) Yes, it's 'syntactical sugar', but having that in Java is great. You can say 'hack' or whatever, but it's still effective and bringing productivity and reduced boilerplate to otherwise plain-old Java.

Scala and Clojure - I've nothing against them, except that they do seem to split the attention on 'alternative JVM' languages. That dilution hurts the chances of any one platform taking hold as the 'next thing' in the Java world, and personally, right now, most of my eggs are in the GR8 world, for many reasons.

I do think Scala is different enough from traditional Java development that broad migration from existing Java developers won't happen, whereas Groovy is so potentially similar that there's little reason for an existing Java dev to have trouble adding Groovy as they learn it. It's not an 'all or nothing' proposition.

If you have any further interest in Groovy/Grails and have any questions, I'd be happy to help if I can - email me directly if you want.
The article makes two contradictory points. First that the standard view that the utility of a product should determine the price is confounded by real-world human factors and second that consumers should ignore real-world human factors and accept prices based on utility. Seems to me that since economics attempts to model the transactions and interactions of humans engaged in various types of commerce that trying to change the subject being studied so the models work better is a little misguided.
part of the argument hinges on how fungible you (and consumers in general) perceive informational goods.
I see 2 nice ideas in thinking about productivity - which are novel at least to me: managing energy instead of time and being able to disengage from your main project (it being a startup or s.th. else).

Does anybody has ideas on how to measure energy [what gets measured, gets managed -T.Ferris]?
By default it is published under copyright, though with the caveat that copyright of fanfiction might not legally exist.
I'm trying to wrap my head around "thinking like a language designer" when approaching software dev. It's the viewpoint in this article that I'm intrigued by these days - that building DSLs in Lisp is a source of great expressiveness in coding.
I was of the impression that was not the case.

You appear to be correct.

http://facts.kff.org/chart.aspx?ch=1804

..."public service efficiency"...administrative costs were lower than that of the average private health plan.

Measuring the ratio of medical costs to administrative costs is a ridiculous way to measure efficiency.

Consider one insurer which pays $75 in useful medical costs and $25 in administrative costs. In particular, this insurer spends $10 on fraud prevention and $15 on regular billing. This insurer has a medicine/admin ratio of 3 and spends 25% on administration.

Consider another insurer which pays $75 in useful medical costs, has no fraud prevention department and spends another $15 on fraudulent medicine, and a regular billing dept costing $15. This insurer has a medicine/admin ratio of 6 and spends 14% on administration.

By your metric, the second insurer appears more efficient in spite of spending 5% more money to deliver the same amount of useful medicine.
Something I have wondered before, if we lived in a universe in which an observation from essentially any distance was observable near instantaneously would this help or hinder astronomy?
"These electronic trading boats"

Wait... is this a joke?
Measuring costs with actual dollars rather than percentage signs is often the best way to judge the bottom line. Yes, relative infrastructure cost tend to go down at a larger scale - assuming that revenues increase in proportion to the infrastructure added, which may not necessarily be the case with Bing and advertising.

It is also important to acknowledge the opportunity costs for Microsoft that scaling Bing might entail, e.g. is infrastructure more profitably used for cloud services or search? Does an advertising revenue model interfere with the necessary trust which underpins Microsoft's business relationships with enterprise customers?

I am not saying it is unreasonable to compare Microsoft with Google at the corporate level - but using Bing and Google Search as the primary criterion for such a comparison is a category mistake.
Looking forward to reading it. I have 10 hours on the train (including return), that should give me a good start.
Very good points.

In contrast, with longer-established languages, the shortcomings tend to be well-known and acknowledged, and the emphasis in the community is often on sharing the most effective workarounds or alternative techniques.

Exactly. A good example of this is dependency injection. In Java, it was hard to mock dependencies, like you would do in a dynamic language. This forced the Java community to look into dependency injection / interface programming, to make the code testable. Dependency injection then lead to better componentization / modularity (some could say that one shouldn't have to use dependency injection if one were using a "better" language, though ;) ).

I also like established languages, because there are also established best practices. You don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Certainly different languages have different warts, and thus suit different jobs better. However, just because we haven't used a language enough to appreciate its warts, that does not mean we will not discover them to our cost at exactly the wrong moment in our new project.

That's the reason why I'm leaning on using a JVM language. I know the platform and the tools, and I can always "fall back" to Java if needed (for performance critical code or whatever).

Maturity is important, but I don't want to miss out on the power and expressiveness of higher level languages ( http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html ). Using powerful languages is also useful when hiring good hackers ( http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html ).
A bit of personal experience to relate to the article: in recent years there were certain obligations that demands distraction from my normal startup duties (in my case a part-time teaching job). I didn't really need that money, and at first I feel disturbed because most advices here tells you to put 24x7 into your startup, and I felt like a mother separated from her baby. But soon I find that when I come back from these short distractions I find myself more efficient and more energetic in what I really love to do. When I was doing startup-work completely full-time before, I will often hit those days when I am totally unmotivated and get nothing done the whole day. I never hit such a day since I "distracted" myself. I always find myself thinking "wow I can finally work on the startup again!". I think the magic is that I used some external obligations to "pull" myself away from startup to rest and recharge, rather than (wrongly) expecting myself to take breaks voluntarily.

Of course, I believe some people can really work 24x7 on ONE THING without any burnouts. But clearly not me.
Combine this with a guide to making your own OS: http://www.jamesmolloy.co.uk/tutorial_html/index.html
and you've got a very interesting project.
Yeah. People from Fort Meade are involved in a lot of NLP research, both in terms of primary research (writing their own systems) and funding research and open technology evaluations.

Video surveillance systems are getting a lot of attention now too.
Ecommerce : Live it Up Online
The idea that information, such as ebooks, should be priced based on consumer utility rather then marginal cost is something that is a naturally attractive viewpoint for the seller but not necessarily for the buyer. When you have a relatively high initial sunk cost and a relatively low marginal production/distribution cost, a lot of sellers will be trying to work very hard to push value based pricing since the alternative, of a small profit over marginal cost, scares a lot of them since the marginal cost is 0.

I think that consumer acceptance of this is based on a sense of fairness combined with knowledge of the sellers cost. A lot people have no problem paying 10c for a text message, because the amount is tiny and few know that the marginal cost for the carrier is practically 0. The lack of knowledge as well as the low price (even lower for bundled plans) makes it just easier to pay rather then protest. For ebooks a significant amount of people might have an intuitive (though possibly flawed) understanding of the marginal cost and have a reason to spend time protesting, because the amounts are significantly higher then 10c.

As with any such technology driven changes in the past, I think in the long run the price will still trend more towards the marginal cost, ie 0, in the long run. Given enough time, I think that publishers and authors will realize that given the ease of distribution for ebooks they can maintain or even increase their profits by lowering unit costs and making it up on volume. This will happen whether the producers want it or not, as they will be forced to lower prices by rampant piracy.

P.S. I have to give credit for a lot of the above ideas to a great book, Information Rules, that has been around for 10 years or so.
That would simply lead to this: rejectedbyycreject.com
9 Free Elegant Joomla Templates
The problem with the Microsoft stack is not technical -- it is financial. Why pay M$ license fees when other platforms are free? Especially as you scale?
Ask HN: Best server down notifier?
Hi all,

I'm looking for a very simple SMS/email notification service to let me know if/when the server has gone down.

Context: this weekend we ran out of space, which knocked our server over. We pull in 130 store feeds + product images, hence the overload.

Any suggestions much appreciated!
I would say hinder. If we assume that interesting events are distributed equally throughout space (i.e. the universe is uniform) but differ over time (the early universe was obviously different to the current universe) then astronomers currently get to observe a wide range of events throughout both space and time. If events were observed immediately from all distances, then astronomers would only be able to observe current events.
Personally I was hoping for John Draper.
Many Startups Stumble on International Cultures
Making Bacteria into Drug Blimps
Government programs are definitely out of control. Choice and value are declining, while costs are skyrocketing. The problem is a lack of competition and a disconnect between costs and benefits.

If people directly paid the costs for many benefits they get and had a choice about providers, they wouldn't want government and the federal government in particular to deliver them. They'd get them locally where they can give the money and their requirements to one entity, without passing them through layers of distortion and back down through layers of cost.

Which is why government likes to give out its benefits for free or subsidized. There's no way it could compete otherwise.
So, how does one become a good, non-spaghetti-code javascript developer for the web?

I don't really like js so far, but there are just no alternatives in some cases. And my code ends up like those counter examples. Where can learn how to organize it properly?
Fix error 1013 in iphone 4
Any procedure you write becomes a part of the programming language– your procedures are indistinguishable from the built-in ones. You don’t write Lisp code so much as you extend the Lisp language until it becomes a custom language for whatever it is you’re trying to do. Its a subtle difference, but a significant one.

Yes, and you can do the same thing when you extend the type system in C++, or C#. The ability to extend the type system to allow the eventual DSL created to integrate is a key consideration, and LISP is a leader in this area, but the important thing to realize is that you should work at the level of DSL, you should become a Language-Oriented Programmer.
While I haven't read it (it came out after I'd left the "game"), what Four Steps.... covers is absolutely critical, I've seen and been in too many startups that failed due to failing in Customer Discovery in one way or another.

In earlier times, here are the books I found to be particularly useful: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021570

Others have endorsed E-Myth and I'll note that what's most valuable in Walking the High-Tech High Wire is in part their Customer Discovery story....