skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Haskell. I tried three times so far, and stalled each time once I reached monad transformers. Scratch that: I consistently stalled at understanding monads. I understand the Maybe monad, but I couldn't wrap my head around the implementation of the State monad. Then I looked at monad transformers, and they made my eyes cross. (If Haskell's syntax was just a tiny bit less jarring to my Lisp-addled eyes, maybe I'd try more often than once a year...)
If you're presenting your own work -- and it seems like they're trying to give a very strong bias towards this -- then I don't think repeat presentations would be a major issue.

I definitely agree that you need care to prevent things from degenerating into an unfriendly and unpleasant meatspace flamefest, though.
Groovy (or is it considered Java)
yup! Met sean at the hacker news meetup a few weeks ago, but have heard of the bootstrappers breakfast before. Great meetup, run by an awesome person. I def suggest anyone who can attends.
hey its 2 miles off 101. Get off at the san antonio exit, make a right onto charleston, then left on el camino. its 1/10 mile down the road on el camino.
This is why god invented craigslist.
OCaml and Objective C
Unless of course you already know Python and want to learn Ruby next (or the other way around).
Is this still true? Has .NET been sufficiently updated to allow full Scheme?

This is no longer true: not because of any change in the VM, but because of a new way to model first-class continuations. Qv "Continuations from Generalized Stack Inspection", http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/pc... -

Implementing first-class continuations can pose a challenge if the target machine makes no provisions for accessing and re-installing the run-time stack. In this paper, we present a novel translation that overcomes this problem. In the first half of the paper, we introduce a theoretical model that shows how to eliminate the capture and the use of first-class continuations in the presence of a generalized stack inspection mechanism. [...] Second, we show how to use our new technique to copy and reconstitute the stack on MSIL.Net using exception handlers. This establishes that Scheme's first-class continuations can exist on non-cooperative virtual machines.
The creator of this Poll is a PHP programmer, that's why PHP is not on the list.
Continuations are absolutely possible. This is absurd that your professor isn't staying up to date. Especially considering he's teaching a PL class. See Section 4.2 for academic "proof" http://www.ccs.neu.edu/scheme/pubs/icfp05-pcmkf.pdf

When .NET clr and C# beta first came out, closures were said to be impossible! C# 2.0 supports lexical closures and CPS (continuation passing style). So no call/cc but most everything else. Most developers don't even know the difference between closures and continuations to begin with. So I understand the compiler team's reasons for not implementing continuations yet. But back in 2001 - 2002 closures were said to be impossible too.

Mono has implemented continuations already... (of course) http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/mono-devel-list/2006-April...

.NET clr does not explicitly support them. Neither does the jvm. The jvm is planning on explicitly adding support http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6655643

There are plenty of things missing in the jvm (by design). That the clr has and some of those have ended up being useful. I don't know how many developers remember but the clr really pushed changes to the jvm. But that is for a different thread.

Microsoft will support continuations and other advanced features as more developers begin to use those coding styles. The more .NET scheme, python, ruby developers the better. Or maybe the pressure will come from the web development side where continuations are promising (weblocks, arc, seaside).

[EDIT: A few sentences and fixing grammar]
Can the iPhone hit crucial network density for noticable cluster effects?
True that; but wouldn't you be better off learning a language that is a lot more different?
Social Networks That Drive Traffic | TechJaws
U.S.S. Oriskany, From Aircraft Carrier to Largest Artificial Reef in the World
GW-BASIC
They caused an order of magnitude slowdown without hitting the disk? That's impressive.

Apple totally fucked sqlite for awhile (it may still be, I compile from source now) by doing a full filesystem flush (not fsync) on every commit:

http://adiumx.com/pipermail/adium-devl_adiumx.com/2008-April...

There was a (crazy-talk) rationale for it, though: fsync wasn't thought to be "reliable" enough, so the order-of-magnitude slowdown was for our own good. Doubt bless() really "needed" the slowdown for RHEL.
In its first full quarter of sales, the iPhone exceeded the marketshare of Microsoft's entire lineup of Windows Mobile smartphones in North America. That's HUGE. Despite Microsoft's massive head start, years of smartphones sold, they were overtaken in a single quarter. You could easily call that "total failure" without it being a huge hyperbole.
Mozart (http://www.mozart-oz.org/) by reading "Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming" (http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html)
All of the above to various degrees? I'd want to at least get a vague feel for what each of them is good for, how it interacts with the system, and the general thought processes that accompany it for each one of them, so that I could say that "I could write something in it with some research".

It's more about expanding my mind than about picking up a tool, with a number of exceptions for my workhorse languages (which are constantly changing)
One issue worth pointing out is that this slots nicely into the various "Why should we have to learn C?" discussions that pop up here from time to time.

This is why. Eventually, something dumb will happen inside your tools, and you'll need to figure it out. Blind faith in any of the software you rely on is bad, you need to know how it works. And to first approximation, all the software you rely on is written in C.
I think there are far better ways to get an idea of who I am than to look at my photo, but if you insist there's my twitter profile pic http://twitter.com/offbytwo
factor, Ocaml/ jocaml, groovy,
Correlation is not causation. We're a lot richer now than in 1890, but is has nothing to do with public schools.

1) We are rich today because we have lots of high-tech machinery. From Otto and Daimler to Ford and the Wright brothers to Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak, much of this technology was created by self-taught hackers. Some industrial/engineering education was helpful at points, but it played a much more minor role, and it comprises a tiny fraction of K-16 education today.

2) The modern American schooling system is so degenerate it is actively destructive of the engineering/hacking ethic.

3) 90% of jobs in the economy require nothing more than reading, writing, and arithmetic plus on the job training. Before the establishment of public schools, New England states had 99% literacy rates. Thus historical evidence shows that public schooling was never necessary. Poor people did not reach the middle class through public schools, they did it by finding jobs, teaching themselves skills, and working their way into the middle class. Most though, achieved middle class status because the tools invented by hackers made them far more productive. An assembly worker in 1925 was richer than a worker in 1900 thanks to Henry Ford, not because public schools taught him to build a car more quickly.

4) Despite the fact that public schooling has little or know connection to creating high tech machinery or to teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, we dedicate an insane amount of time and money to it. As the article noted, 40% of Americans are either full-time students or full time educators.

5) Education spending outpaces inflation year after year, while the quality gets worse and worse. See this graph for instance ( http://lazowska.cs.washington.edu/img082.gif )

Given these facts, I don't think arguing for complete abolition is unreasonable at all. When you have a cancer, you do not sit around thinking about how you might be able to mutate that cancer into something beneficial. You remove the cancer.
I too hope demons are not shooting out of a hole in Russia.
Here is a mostly complete list of .NET languages.

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

For all those Python coders - IronPython is usable in production now. It's stable and the differences between cpython and ironpython are well documented.
System calls: windows, linux
It’s Not the Mistakes, But How You Fix Them
Anandtech re: Nehalem
i second that. Lua is very much fun to work with. It has actually full closures, upvars, and functions are first class citizen.

The only thing is lacking a little bit of OO design. It is duable, but OO on lua always feels a little bit hacky.
MikeCapone, I like TreeHugger, I read TreeHugger, I just don't want to see near every post on TreeHugger submitted here.
The RFID photo booth
Ouch, zero points for Arc. Even MPI has one (prospective) devotee!

I voted Haskell, because their libraries are finally getting the language to a point where it is competitive. There's even a story about this on the front page today!
I link to the same paper - different repository in my comment. Excellent quote.
PHP fatal errors: E_ERROR, E_PARSE, ...
Actually, I think it having a fairly high price is a good thing. If everyone has one it's worthless, granted it would make them exceptionally easy to discover if there was ever a catastrophic collapse of human civilization. However, what I get from it is that the project is to get museums and collectors (vis-a-vis people who'll protect it) to buy them and keep them, so that when human languages mutate then our ancestors will be able to look at it and use it to translate other documents.
It depends on the purpose of learning said language. Are you learning to broaden your horizons to explore new paradigms and such? Or are you learning a language because you're part (or planning to be part) of X group who happens to be developing in Y and you just need to be productive/marketable?
I was actually just laughing at that quote. That period of low profits and M&A resulting in hundreds of competitors eventually ending in a few happens in EVERY major industry. Cars, airlines, cell phone providers. It would have happened if Linux beat MS to the punch.
unfortunately. Mixing Objective-C and C and your code looks a little bit frankestein-ly, and it is impossible to avoid. The messaging pass part of Object-C is no near as elegant as erlang.
This seems to be all about the name, not about the actual game play:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris#History
Yeah, be my guest, try running a country without a judicial system. Go back 4000 years or more, or into a hunter-gatherer society...
GPS is missing! :(
Interesting ideas. I've been thinking along really similar lines.

Good point about how a large number of tabs on the screen can be distracting. One of my friends actually moved his tab bar to the bottom of the screen, and he said that he finds it much less distracting. It's there if you need it, but stays out of your way when you don't.
Bugs in .NET 3.5 SP1:
I have no plans to learn new languages for the time being. I've been exposed to most of the big concepts, so I feel a creeping sense of diminishing returns as I have to invest time in increasingly different syntaxes to learn anything really different.

That is time I could spend building out more productive libraries and architecture for my real goals.
I would attend one if it had a whelk's chance in a supernova of spreading to Tampa Bay.
1) People aren't as tactless and rejection-happy in real life as they are on the internet.
2) If it survives past two meetings, it'll be because the respected elders have cultivated an environment of constructive criticism, focused on the hack. Relentless haranguing of the hacker doing the presenting will be reserved for the marketing flacks that try to sneak in.
A Java Syntax Quirk
Community driven sounds too geeky for your target audience. How about "Real Advice from Real People" or "Answers to Your Relationship Questions" or something along those lines. Then maybe you can include a more detailed description with what the site does for people.
I would be suspicious of inflation adjusted prices, since they do not adequately account for deflation caused by technological development. For example in 2007 inflation adjusted dollars a round trip by steamer to Europe was $2000 dollars http://equator.eftours.com/2008/05/transatlantic-t.html. I have flown to London, Madrid and Paris from Washington D.C. for prices ranging from $600 to $800 dollars. By comparison the trip cost 30% to 40% of the 1925 cost and took less than 10% of the time. Assuming that a dollar buys less over time is not quit accurate.
Actually Gatto is correct, it's just that the grandparent's summary of Gatto is wrong. And, for the record, the Wikipedia article you cited also contains factual mistakes.
A Web Site Valuation Guide
Previous discussion: http://kk.org/kk/2008/08/very-longterm-backup.php
I really like it. Great work!

The main addition I would like to see is an "accept" option in addition to the "ignore" button. When a list of suggestions is given, I would like to be able to select one and see that reflected in the text.
I like "Real Advice from Real People".
Erlang: tuples , fixed-size and extensible pseudo-arrays.
The weird thing is, that open source vendors - for all their talk - are almost as bad as the closed source ones. Atleast there's a build from source solution, though.
That still only transfers to a market where people are used to lockins. In Europe the Apple iPhone lockins make it a lot less sexy.

I'm not saying it's a phone which can be ignored entirely, but the truth is that I still see Windows Mobile smart-phones everywhere having a hard time seeing anything else. Hence calling Windows mobile a complete failure seems like a rather narrow look at things which has no basis in reality.

Add to this that basically every brand of phone sold here except for the iPhone comes with any carrier and any plan you like, and the iPhone has serious hurdles it needs to overcome to be a viable alternative to most people here.
Milewski: threads don't scale, processes do
New Perl documentation site (with short urls like PHP's docs)
Characterizing people as non-linear, first-order components in software development
This is the same guy that buys offices for all his coders and gives them first class tickets if they travel.

I'm pretty sure he's got a better motivation than reduced profit for not liking incentive pay.
Interesting idea...just for reference, I ran it on a recent blog post of mine:
http://www.ryanwaggoner.com/2008/08/how-simple-is-too-simple...
(sorry for the spam :-)

Overall, I would say that it was most useful when it was pointing out things like passive voice or cliches, and less useful when telling me to replace relatively simple words or phrases with even simpler ones. Some of the words were things like: "feedback", "solicit", "desire", etc. We could certainly replace these with "opinion", "ask for", and "want", but some of the meaning and nuance is lost, especially given the context.

I may not be the most eloquent writer, but I'm not writing for a group of 4th-graders. The "dumbing down" of language leads to dumbing down of thought in the long run.
Hedonics are in fact used in inflation data. More likely abused. It's really quite a small number of technology heavy things that have shot up in quality in great excess over the price increases.

And what about declines in quality? Vegetables have a fraction of the mineral content they did decades ago. Many food items have substituted artificial ingredients for relatively healthy natural ingredients. Many services at hotels and on airliners that were once complementary are now charged for. A great many houses built in the last ten years will have to be torn down in less than 20 years they were made so poorly. There are many examples of declining quality and these adjustments are never made.
I'm pretty sure that you don't need to adjust for inflation as the market prices it in. Very nice charts, though.
I'm currently learning Flex, which I guess means I'm learning ActionScript? I have to say I'm not enjoying it as much as I enjoy Ruby.
Two words: covered calls.
Have you seen this? http://uebb.cs.tu-berlin.de/~magr/pub/Transformers.en.html

It's the best intro to monad transformers I've come across.
And for Schemes on .NET, in addition to the listed Common Larceny (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/will/Larceny/) and IronScheme, there is also Bigloo (http://www-sop.inria.fr/mimosa/fp/Bigloo/).

Common Larceny uses the pkcfm hack for its continuations, I believe, while Bigloo continuations are more like IronScheme's ("Bigloo discourages the use of call/cc" - from the manual).

Disclaimer: I have personal experience with neither system.
What an Entrepreneur needs
Olympic Medal Count, Adjusted for Population and GDP
Sure, but with open source vendors, you can fix it yourself if it's broken, and it's important enough. That's the essential difference.

All vendors suck to different degrees. Nothing ever works perfectly. Open source gives you the ability to do something if the suckiness affects you, though. With closed source, you're stuck until the vendor gets around to your bug. With larger vendors, this may take forever.
Any company or individual that claims to be that title is very likely trying to take your money, so be careful.

As with others, I'm a fan of not outsourcing this, so it might be best to try out different strategies. If done properly (provided you can monetize your traffic), then you should do well in ~3 months.
http://www.couchsurfing.com/
That has to be really frustrating as a developer, to know that you could probably prevail in court if you could afford to defend yourself, but since you can't (and they know you can't), the mere threat of a lawsuit is enough to make you fold.

Any sympathetic attorneys out there who might want to help the guy out with a bit of advice at least?
None - at least in the near future. (Now I am curious if true hackers will downmod me for that. ;-)).
I know the developer, and he's gotten advice from others. It's just too much of a time and money burden for a student to take on.
Download The Visitor Movie
Everyone else got to see (and adore) Tom McCarthy's The Station Agent well before I had the chance to see the movie -- so by the time I caught it on DVD (and adored it), nobody really needed my half-year-late review of the flick. But I managed to catch a Sundance screening of Mr. McCarthy's second film -- and if it isn't quite as fresh or as strangely moving as The Station Agent, it's still a damn fine film with a good heart and some really excellent performances. Kinda like The Station Agent.
Download Death Race Movie
Medical science tells us that there's a portion of the brain called the R-complex that, nestled low and close to the spinal cord, governs simple, automatic brain functions like respiration and reflex and heart rate; other outlying, larger brain structures cover language, culture, memory and art. I mention this because Death Race, writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson's re-visitation of the 1975 trash-classic Death Race 2000
Download The Longshots Movie
Last year I saw Gracie, a movie about a teenage girl who wants to play high-school soccer in the late 1970s, when the game was considered a males-only sport in America, and faces a lot of opposition from her school. I finished my review with the line, "If it were football, would we be agreeing more with Gracie's opponents?" The Longshots gives us the opportunity to consider that question.
Just to say, if you're using the open-source Pligg you really should consider some kind attribution to say that you are using the software.

Pligg has that weird Allegro GPL (or some similar name) as it's license model. I can't remember what it says about attribution, but it would be "playing nice" to put "powered by Pligg" on the site anyway.

I also think the current domain is a bit sucky. The two domains you have open up the opportunity for a delineating men vs women users - which could be interesting from a branding and advertising perspective.
If I Had a Startup, I’d Send All My PRs on Weekends
Might not always work, but it could be something to think about when you are working on your PR.
Well, if the theoretical demons were to come out of the hole, they'd either have to be in-part non-corporeal or they'd have to be skinny demons (look how narrow the hole is). Or maybe they were demon mice, able to squeeze through narrow gaps in the earth. Then again, if they were non-corporeal, I don't think they'd need a hole to come through, unless they were demon gas.
The human brain prefers the dumbed down language. That's why people take trash novels to the beach and not Scientific American.

Look at any novel and notice that nearly all the dialogue uses the word "said". Amateurs always switch this out with words like "exclaimed" and "retorted".

Pros know that the goal is to simply seduce the reader into their narrative as quickly and quietly as possible.
That AppStore besides being a single point of entry for developers, also sure seems to be the single point of failure, single point of getting booted, not to mention now also a handy single point of litigation for those into that game.

Excuse me for not seeing it's brilliance.
Down for anyone else?
Very functional. Good tips.

I think the "instant improvement" button should be renamed. I was looking for a "submit" button or a "show suggestions" button. Instant improvement almost implies that the changes will be made automatically.

Please try to avoid Comic Sans whenever possible. The background distracts from your logo a bit. That area could be simplified.

The whole thing is so simple it could look as clean as Google's homepage plus a couple of ads.

Overall, it's a neat tool.
I liked it a lot... but when I tried testing it more, I started getting this:

"Proxy Error

The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
The proxy server could not handle the request POST /process.slp.

Reason: Error reading from remote server

Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) Server at www.polishmywriting.com Port 80"
that article is a scam.

To illustrate it, I've redrawn the green and red bars differently to show that, lo and behold, there are another 15 years of bull market in our future.

http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=5uo9q8&s=4

This type of graph manipulation is a well known trick. No reputable journalist or economist would do something like this.
Made my first foray into ObjC this weekend; my goal is to create some iPhone/Touch apps.
Ruby and Python have some similarities but not that many. I'm getting pretty good at Ruby myself and will confess to not knowing python that well but the endless comparisons on the various blogs and forums make it very clear that these are very different languages.
Maybe. All I know is that I've outsourced my consumption to wealthier people.
I started learning OCaml to beef up for a class I'm taking in the fall, so I guess that's next. But, I'm also a student of the Scheme way of life and am always learning it.
You literally need the words About as a hyperlink. Don't get too creative here. We are used to a certain pattern that every website uses.
I don't know exactly what Joel and Jeff are doing so I feel bad criticizing but...

Avoiding deadlocks, starvation, race conditions, etc is difficult. But a good hacker should be able to think his or her way through. A piece of paper helps. Eventually you should be able to convince yourself you've got the right solution and then just make sure you're using the right tools, like PostreSQL and FreeBSD ;-)

This whole no lock is no problem, the server we're using is too aggressive in locking, seems like a bit of voodoo programming.
It would be kind of hilarious to overrun Ritual with decidedly non-hipster types. I vote for this.