skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also there's some functions you use all the time so you'll get to know them quickly (ex: find, remove, push, mapcar, assoc) and others you'll probably never need (ex: tagbody, prog, progv). In short you only have to learn a fraction of those 978 to be able to make something significant.

You can consult http://www.lisp.org/HyperSpec/FrontMatter/Chapter-Index.html when you need deeper knowledge in a particular topic.
maybe it's because I live in Texas or maybe because I'm a minority, but I sense more hostility from whites towards blacks than vice versa

My experience as a white person living in northern cities is very different. I've been called racial slurs when walking through black neighborhoods, and several of my friends have been mugged. Walking through black neighbords and hearing hip-hop blasting that demonizes people of my skin color is not a very comfortable experience. This blog post is good introduction to the topic, from the black northerner perspective: http://www.ta-nehisi.com/2008/07/a-very-uncomfortable-post-a...

the phrase "telling black people that" really bothers me because it subtly implies black people can't figure it out without help

Most people rely on the media and educational institutions for their information, that's the job of those institutions. And a lot of it is black leaders telling black people that racism is the problem.

I haven't seen any research that has tied racial hostilities to lack of economic advancement in the US. You could actually argue the opposite since US became an economic powerhouse after WWII, and racial tensions were very high then

In the north, there is far more residential segregation today than there was fifty years ago. I think a major factor for this is that it's just not very safe for a white person to live in many predominately black neighborhoods. This ends up cutting off the black community economically.
try:

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs614/2004sp/papers/BHO99....

and

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/quicksilver/public_pdfs/B...

both by Ken Birman
I just posted this comment on my blog in response to another developer/entrepreneur with their doubts about my strategy:

Thank you. Your comment summarizes the response I've had from a lot of developers and you are right. However there are a few details I should have but didn't explain. For me it's only temporary to get the foundation ready - the startup itself will have a full team. I am also doing this to give myself time to continue to talk to possible investors and decide where I want to locate.

Will I then throw away all the code and start over?

No and this is why: I have two user interfaces, one for the web and one as a browser extension, in any case they would have been developed by different people. They're two completely independent parts. As last I have the backend, a complex database structure but is setup to only accept a few easy and standard queries. The rest of the queries are handled on database level.

Looking at one of these parts you can't find out my completive advantage, looking at them all together you have my startup. I am incredibly aware of the risks I take with this and especially if I switch developers the problems that can (probably will) come up. I find it harder to read other people's code then to start from scratch and make it myself. Therefore all the complicated parts occur on database level, the code I wrote myself. So no matter what happens there will always be someone in the team (myself) who can work on that, or explain it to others.
I'm assuming if your comment has negative karma its links are necessarily nofollowed?

edit: Then the strategy aswanson alleges occam is pursuing is totally misguided. Maybe a little note on the bottom of the comment box that all links are nofollowed would prevent any further such attempts.
Why does this matter in a discussion of whether you need to take out loans for a car?

Surely you're not suggesting that people should take out loans for gas?
There are almost no other activities, no special classes, no school sports (only p.e. for everybody), no advanced classes and teaching is mostly done with books, paper and board.

Maybe this is good.
Download Las Vegas Episodes - Watch Full TV Show Online
Las Vegas TV Show, a drama follows the best Las Vegas Surveillance team. The team is appointed for maintaining the security of Sin City’s Biggest Resorts and Casinos. Big Ed Deline stars as the head of the surveillance team for the Montecito Resort & Casino.
Uh... that title is completely fiction as far as I can tell.
+ XGA LCD Projector ($800)
All links in comments are nofollowed.
Can you cite a credible source?
Great! Thank you very much.
Steve Jobs Doesn't Have Cancer, Calls NYT Columnist a "Slime Bucket"
lexlibra's comment is lame ... People who advocate conclusions for which the evidence is weak merely lead one away from the truth

I'm curious what was lame about the comment?

The evidence for the two main propositions is pretty overwhelming. People of West African descent dominate short distance running at the highest levels. For instance, in the past six olympics, all 48 male finalists in the 100 meter dash were of West African descent. Likewise, the speed positions in football are dominated by African-Americans compared to the non-speed positions.

On the second proposition, for whatever the reason, black Americans of West African descent consistently score a standard deviation lower on IQ tests and IQ-like tests ( SAT, Armed Forces Qualifying Exam). The American Psychological Association reports: "The relatively low mean of the distribution of African-American intelligence test scores has been discussed for many years. Although studies using different tests and samples yield a range of results, the Black mean is typically about one standard deviation (about 15 points) below that of Whites (Loehlin et al, 1975; Jensen, 1980; Reynolds et al, 1987)." ( http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/apa_01.html ) The existence of the IQ gap is simply not in dispute.

It seems that my explanation fits the evidence better than anything else proposed here. If there is evidence controverting my view, or supporting another, I would be happy to hear it.
Canada has extremely rigorous requirements for immigrants.
This just in: Speculation about a 'MacBook Touch' builds when rumor sites post articles with titles like "Speculation About a 'MacBook Touch' Builds"
I went to a Montessori school from pre-k to 5th grade. The school I went to was just completely different from any public elementary school I have visited in this country.

Instead of a one-size-fits-all mentality for education, each teacher developed a work-plan for each student that he/she was to complete at the end of the week. There were no desks, but workmats that we could arrange on the floor or at a table. Everything we did had to be kept on the workmat, but allowed for freedom of working wherever in the classroom. There were 9 week assessments which determined our progress and helped establish the pacing of our work-plans. Almost everything was independent. Teachers only taught in small groups of similarly leveled students, but this was maybe twice a week. They seemed to serve more as facilitators of learning, not leaders.

A similarity to this article was that second/third languages started early. I went to Montessori only speaking Persian and a little English, but within 1 year I was also enrolled in Spanish, and 3 years later in French. I have since forgotten the French--there are few to speak it with in Alabama, but I have retained decent fluency in Spanish. We had little in the way of sports aside from PE, but we had art classes twice a week (visual arts once on tuesdays and musical arts on thursdays). We also had computer training from a very early age; I remember being on the early internet waaaaay back in 1995 when I was 7.

Classes were interestingly set up as well. In one classroom there were 3 grades of students with two teachers. I think there were maybe 40 kids spread amongst the years. We stayed with the same teacher for 3 year blocks. My experiences were Pre-K and Kindergarten / First-Third Grades / Fourth-Sixth Grades. Interaction and cooperative learning between both grade-level and skill-level was encouraged, with the idea that one could only master the material if you could teach it to someone else.

Any further questions? I'll try to answer to the best of my ability.
The climate is pretty bad in the US for teachers.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_1_how_i_joined.html

...not every school is like that obviously, but particularily chaotic institutions will drag down the average.
This is a sensitive topic for me, since I'm in love with studying.
I have to disagree with a few points, namely that universities have developed into bureaucracies primarily seeking to further careers. I worked as an undergraduate researcher in a neuroscience lab, and although publication was always a pressure, I don't know anyone who wasn't there because they didn't want to be. Studying the same subject on such an exclusive basis for 5 years or more can cause burnout, but everyone in the lab came in excited at the possibilities of solving new problems.
However, universities can do more to ensure that their work helps the community directly - big research needs to continue unabated, or perhaps even on an accelerated schedule, but students and many professors can shift their focus from class-centric papers and projects to community-based projects.
Actually, this is the startup I'm working on right now, and it came about because students "do not want to churn out meaningless solutions to irrelevant problems", they want to do meaningful things.
No; I'm saying the amount of information at any given time is finite, which is what the original article was talking about. But even if there is growth in memory size (say that memory size increases linearly), the information you get at any specific instant is finite (even if unbounded)... just as you have infinite natural numbers but none of them has an infinite value. But anyway, with finite space even in infinite time you couldn't build an infinite memory.

And also... the original article was talking about the size of the system at a specific instant, so growth doesn't matter here.
This dissertation on how not to feel like a worthless gnat because of simple turns of phrase makes me think of another mantra I use to feel better about myself:

Get serious.
The best method to protect the site from being inundated with more stuff like this...

You may be right. It may not (yet) be possible to have a sincere public discussion that isn't drowned out by PC ideologues on one side and racists and xenophobes on the other. It's not always easy to tell who's who, either: sometimes uttering "what you can't say" is an act of courage, sometimes it just means you're an asshole. Intentions and emotions are part of this, and they're harder to read outside the personal sphere.
All I had to read was the url: macRUMOURS.com. They get traffic based on such speculation. Skewed incentives?
"Worse, we may get more of his constituency moving in. (There goes the neighborhood)."

We should do everything we can to keep out these immigrants.
Owen, you built it - don't you have some pull still. You have the right idea, layoff the excess to get cash flow positive.

My 2 cents - quit trying to be something to everyone - because those of us who visited in the early years left long ago.

btw it's Merrick - had lunch with you at Pubcon in '06
"Canada" and "extremely" in the same phrase? An oxymoron!

Edit: I almost didn't post this because people are being so sensitive today. But you're a tough guy. :)
Xobni integration with LinkedIn happened about a month ago. Clearly it meant a lot more to Xobni than LinkedIn, who is just announcing it now.
It was always like that.
This is great technology, but not nearly interactive enough. What I really want is a Kindle with these capabilities, preferrably running OS X.

Hmmm - I wonder if Steve Jobs has already anticipated my desires...
Let's keep some perspective - Digg almost sold for $200,000,000 a couple days ago. Maybe they have some problems but it is still a very valuable site with lots of happy users.
What the Heck Happened to our Attention Spans?
Very little pull. Reason #400 why I left - basically because I felt that whenever I suggested a good idea, it was shot down just because I was the source.
I'll have a stab at an explanation.

I'm Danish, and I suspect that the Danish school system is similar to the Finnish. It also seems that Danes are held in some regard internationally - so an explanation rooted in the Danish educational system is probably not much off.

The Danish scchool system doesn't only teach you answers, it also teaches you which questions to ask. Schoolkids are encouraged to come up with their own ideas and explanations - and to be able to argue their validity. This ingrains a different kind of knowledge: Instead of kids that are able to recite the periodic table you get kids that are able to explain why it is put together the way it is. I think this is the pivotal point.

I don't think Danish, or Finnish, kids are smarter per se, but they are better at holistic thinking, reasoning and abstract thought because they learn from a young age to ask interesting questions and demand coherent answers.
I'm not sure I understand entirely - it sounds like MVC architecture to me. I'm not sure what layers he's handling, but seems like he's at least abstracting the database away into some simpler calls. As long as he separates everything in a reasonable way, it could even help the stability of his program.
The part I don't quite understand is how it adds any significant amount of "protection" from his code being stolen. Programmers forced to stick to a documented API would be able to reverse engineer it, more or less. If he has a secret algorithm in his secret sauce, it's possible that his workers wouldn't be able to duplicate it, but as he's not a passionate programmer, I have my doubts.
That said, it seems very closed to me, and I would feel a bit nervous working for him. But it's all just a perception from a single blog post, so I could be way off-base.
NASA Images - massive image collection now online, served by archive.org
An uptick in quality?

(Seriously, what digg did was to pull all the people stupid enough to install Alexa.)
I second the Rails Way book , its a great book thats easy to follow and organized. For learning Ruby I found
http://www.amazon.com/Ruby-Programming-Language-David-Flanag...
to be great
Plus you will find many other typical problems with remote and distributed teams (cross-communication, misunderstanding, less bouncing of ideas, bonding, agility/speed of change, etc.) to be other big bottlenecks once/if things get moving.

Being in the same place, at the same time, and working closely together with people you respect and trust is essential to creating a fast moving startup less likely to die or stagnate.

There are reasons why the most successful ones were two guys in a garage.
Overzealous use of my red-black tree hammer
The Silicon Valley VC Disease
Fixing Pathfinding Once and For All
I think the email from CMU's president sums it up very well:

Dear Colleagues:

It is with great sadness that I inform you that our dear friend and colleague Randy
Pausch passed away today, July 25, after a brave struggle against pancreatic cancer.

Randy captured the minds and hearts of millions worldwide with his Carnegie Mellon
lecture, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," and his book, "The Last Lecture."

Randy, who earned his doctorate from Carnegie Mellon in 1988, returned to the
university in 1997 as an associate professor of human-computer interaction and
computer science. Along with Carnegie Mellon Professor Don Marinelli, Randy was the
co-founder of the Entertainment Technology Center, a leading interactive multimedia
education and entertainment center.

At Carnegie Mellon, Randy was also the director of the Alice software project, a
revolutionary way to teach computer programming. The interactive Alice program
teaches computer programming by having kids make animated movies and games. A
fitting legacy to Randy's life and work, Alice may in the future help to reverse the
dramatic drop in the number of students majoring in computer science at colleges and
universities. Randy was also known as a pioneer in the development of virtual
reality, and he created the popular Building Virtual Worlds class.

An award-winning teacher and researcher, Randy was also a National Science
Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow.
He used sabbatical leaves to work at Walt Disney Imagineering and Electronic Arts
(EA), and he consulted with Google Inc. on user interface design. He is the author
or co-author of five books and more than 70 articles.

Perhaps the greatest lesson, however, Randy taught us all was how to live, even in
the face of great challenges, and how to follow our passion. While Randy's greatest
passion was clearly his family, he did not shy from sharing his passion for his work
as a professor, for his students, and for Carnegie Mellon. We will miss Randy, but
we will carry the memory of him and all that he did to make Carnegie Mellon a better
university and each of us who knew him a better person.

A memorial service for Randy will be scheduled at a later date.

Sincerely,

Jared L. Cohon
I stopped being a happy user a hell of a long time ago. Why do I like Hacker News? Because I have a snowball's chance in hell of people in the community reading my occasional submissions or answering questions I might pose. The last time I got a front-page story on Digg was 2005 when I posted about some dude faking a story about him giving out Ubuntu cd's at a McDonalds.
As it turns out I have a nice high paying job for a well known travel website and get employee discounts ;-). So while extended vacations are out, Tahiti might not be.
Nuclear reactors are somewhat too complicated, fragile and have not the most perfect safety track record. If we could develop an efficient technique to directly convert such radiation into electricity, we could have much cleaner and safer radioactive power generation that can also provide some very tasty fungi.

I say we should look into this.
Jay Adelson founded Equinix: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equinix. It doesn't seem like he'd be hurting for cash.
Ask HN: Way to map one database schema to another?
I recently wrote a new version of a fairly popular web application. Version 1.0 was written in PHP and version 2.0 is now Python/Django.

I need a way to get my user data from version 1.0 to 2.0. I can map the columns of 1.0 to Django model fields in 2.0 (or even the database itself if necessary).

I'm looking for a tool I can use to do this. Basically, I give it a list of maps like "version1.mytable.foo" maps to "version2.mytable.bar", hit "run", and it will transfer the information from one database to another based on the maps.

Extra points if it can do the reverse as well, in case something goes terribly wrong and we have to roll back to 1.0.

Any ideas?
One of the most insightful things I've read here all week.

Sometimes I think I should make a macro out of //HACK:
I'm pro-immigration, in the classic "the more the merrier" tradition of those with confidence in both markets and human innovation.

But to be intellectually honest, we have to acknowledge that immigrants of different languages, cultures, and economic backgrounds will bring many 'average' statistics of education (and health, etc.) down. This is even true if the immigration is a net-benefit to both natives and newcomers.

With that in mind, the massive downvoting of the parent comment (at -9 at one point) is a dishonest enforcement of political correctness.

Even if you disagree with the conclusions of the linked article, and the other views of that article's author, the comment here is factual and relevant to the topic at hand, and the linked article includes other useful facts about Finland.

If the submission question "What makes Finnish kids so smart?" is legitimate at all -- the study of why one country has different results than others -- discussion has to be free to consider major things that make that country different from others. In Finland's case, that includes its traditional and apparently legally-enforced homogeneity.

I would not want to live in such a place, but I don't want my understanding of such places crippled by a long list of "things you can't say".
Thank you - I absolutely agree. It's also the reason why I am considering moving out to SF or India. I haven't been able to find that team yet here in The Netherlands and I think that if I am in a place where technology is booming I have a much larger pond to fish in.
...other feel-good books from terminals. ie, "Tuesdays with Morrie". Remember that? Yeah, me neither...

I did read "Tuesdays with Morrie" and I remember it well. It was NOT written by a "terminal", but by his student, Mitch Albom, a wonderful sports writer for the Detriot Free Press and New York Times best selling author multiple times.

Everyone has his own 2 cents and disenting opinions often contribute to the breadth of the debate.

OTOH, it's getting to the point where one needs waders to get through the stuff that gets spewed here in the name of, "See how much smarter I am than you." Until you get your facts straight, you're not a dissenter, just another poser. Move along please.
Thank you for your comment. It's a simple system that doesn't have its power in thousands of lines of code but instead in the combination of components. Right now I am working with freelancers to get me up and running and once I am settled in a location I want to find that team.

In life it is hard though to find people who you truly connect with and can trust. I do know that when you meet them you recognize them straight away. I haven't been able to find these developers yet, most likely because I am in a location where there is almost no startup scene. However I am determined to find them and build an amazing startup as a team with no secrecy.
Firebug Lite 1.2 Released (Opera, Safari, IE supported)
Is it only me reading the message as "we don't actually know the reason, but in an act of desperation we rebooted all of our servers and hopefully this wont happen again"?
I believe this is the article that inspired Jobs and Wozniak in their first joint venture.