skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You simply can't do upward funargs in a C-family language without breaking the memory and activation-record model of the language. For example, let's say C++ had upward funargs. Any time you return a function value, or otherwise keep it around for longer than the lifetime of the function activation in which it is activated, any free local variables in the closure which are captured by the containing environment must refer to locations on the heap. (Copying them by-value breaks the semantics of closures.) This conflicts with the assumption in C++ that auto variables local to a function activation are part of the function's activation record on the stack.

You could get around this problem with spaghetti stacks or something, but you'd need to find a way to free the activation records that are floating around after their enclosing scopes have expired -- enter garbage collection which you do NOT want to require for C++.

That's the problem with Lisp, it's almost all-or-nothing. If you want to correctly include some of the benefits of the Lisp execution model -- like lambdas -- you need to accept the whole thing, lock, stock, and barrel. Including heap-allocated local vars and the garbage collector. (And yes -- Python, Ruby, Haskell, and Standard ML have a "Lisp execution model" in this sense.)

So we get compromises and hulking abominations like C++0x lambdas or -- worse yet -- their predecessor, Boost Lambdas.

tl;dr: Upward funargs are hard, let's go shopping.
If you want to make a split, it would probably be touch and keyboard/mouse.
When the pioneer goes out into the wilderness and establishes a farm, doing the hard work of removing stumps and planting a crop, he has added to the value of that land and deserves to have ownership recognized and protected.

The freedom of others to wander the wilderness, eating whatever they find is taken away. But it is reasonable to curtail it, because agriculture is very productive compared to the hunter gatherer approach. And it is just that the one that plants should be the one that gets to eat the results or trade it for the work of other people.

Its also reasonable that when it takes time and effort to develop a solution to a problem that the one solving it should be able to derive financial benefit from it.

If we don't want people to grow food, live in houses or build Disney Land, we should eliminate physical property rights. And if we don't want people to invent smart phones, cures for cancer and televisions, we should eliminate patents.

Why should we curtail the humans freedom to go anywhere they please? Or sell any device they decide to make?

For the very same reason that we recognize each other's rights to begin with. Because it is in our mutual self interest to do so.

I could just eat the people around me for dinner, but when I recognize their right to exist, to speak freely, to have property, a whole world of commerce and culture becomes possible. And that benefits me. In fact, my food is actually easier to get.

And so it is with intellectual property. Or should be. Whatever rules we use, they should be promoting our mutual well being.
"What it boils down to for me is that SOME colleges are not helping their students."

Some colleges and some majors. I wrote elsewhere: "the word "college" can now mean so many things in so many places that it's hard to compare them. Does a random community college have much to do with a four-year party school, an Ivy-League school, a Midwestern technical school, or a Cal State school filled with first generation students? Probably not." This also applies to majors / departments, and the problem with criticizing "college" is that you're criticizing such a heterogeneous set of institutions, practices, and experiences that you're not actually describing a specific good or ill.
All of these seem like really solid tips
I believe Path is what you are referring to with the emoticons. That was the first feature of Path that I found really innovative - it encourages greater participation because it's faster than commenting, like the "Like" button, but allows you to convey a greater degree of emotion. But I still comment on photos in Path - having real conversations are valuable in most situations.

Hard to answer for your particular site without knowing more detail, but why not just use Disqus? They're likely to be better than what you hack together yourself, and most early adopter types are familiar with it which will probably increase your engagement rate.
I'm skeptical that a market consisting of products which range in price from free to one dollar requires sophisticated discovery systems. Most mobile games (and virtually all web games) are free to try - there's no need for social proof.

This is the reason casual game reviewing has never been anywhere near as valuable as in the traditional market. People just don't need to read a review about a free game before trying it, they can just sink 5 minutes in and see how it is.

The other aspect of this product is also underwhelming; the check-ins. You're essentially trying to gamify... well, games. A good game will have more than enough intrinsic rewards that layering these extrinsic ones on top will add little value in my opinion.
Donations page: http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/donate.php
I sure did. And then 1.8.5 came out and my Rails app broke again.
Totally fair to disagree. I've enjoyed the discussion. It's forced me to re-evaluate my thinking on the topic. While I still think there are strong elements of a ponzi scheme at work here and that there truly is a de facto ponzi scheme; Groupon doesn't really qualify as an de jure ponzi scheme.

That said; what's more important than the vocabulary is understanding the total lack of ethics happening here--and the fact that (unlike the early investors who are now going to make their big bucks) the general public who are foolish enough to buy into Groupon will likely never see that investment returned and the only reason the early investors will get money is the investment capital from the IPO will be funneled to them.
When they stop spending so much money on growing, it should be easy to show a profit.

I'm not convinced that this follows from what we know about the numbers. It looks like one could just as easily make a case for the numbers indicating that the moment Groupon stops spending like crazy, their revenue will drop like a rock. What if they must cold-call dozens or hundreds of businesses in order to generate a sale? What if there isn't a way to sustain that without those aggressive sales tactics and the huge staff of sales people? What if they can't keep consumer interest without spending millions on marketing? What if there is a saturation point where people are simply bored of Groupon deals? (I unsubscribed after about 4 days, but I'm not much of a coupon kinda guy, so I don't know that I'm the ideal data point.)

I'm not saying it can't be true, I'm just saying I don't see that it is obvious that the hypothesis that there is a super-profitable business (or, at least profitable enough to justify their current valuation) underneath all the growth expenses is true.
Only goes up to $25 billion... The I.P.O. probably will go even higher than that. $30 billion?
I think alternatives could exist and be extremely popular, especially since people are crunched for time. On the flip side, sites like HN exist for the insights provided by comments.
Who`s going to host our hackathons now?

Also, congrats!
Reddit - The Hunters and the Gabberers
No, puts are bought and sold in contracts of 100 options, but the price quoted is for a single option. The contract costs 100x that price.
"College is a system created to create employees so it's not surprising many entrepreneurs think of it as a waste of time (and money, especially in the expensive US system)"

This isn't really true. Universities got started in the Middle Ages to a) collect what knowledge existed, especially from Greek and Roman sources and b) to a lesser extent, train religious authorities and theologians. In the U.S., universities got going to basically create gentlemen, and later to create scholars and researchers (Menand goes over a lot of this in his book The Marketplace of Ideas: http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis...).

Today, a lot of colleges and college majors focus on creating employees, but that's a relatively recent shift that only began taking place on a large scale circa 1980, as far as I can tell. That's when the number of business majors, relative to the liberal arts and sciences, really takes off in the U.S. I don't know enough about the European situation to comment on it.
Cutting for Stone -- Abraham Verghese
I've been giving slimgems grief but not Loren, I've actually been in regular, productive dialogue with Loren since this started. But actually, you're right, my public presence may not reflect that and it's time for me to change strategies. Here's what I plan to do instead now:
http://blog.majesticseacreature.com/rubygems-peace-rally-vs-...

Sorry if I don't reply to this comment, but I just wanted to make sure that folks here see that I've heard their thoughts and decided to act on them.
The Shark Whisperer - video
As absurd as it is, I'm pretty sick of every media outlet on earth attempting to herd me to their FB/Twitter page every time they're on air or commercial.
This is a case where I toss all my personal philosophies aside and say, "Yeah!"

They now do "news segments" on what's being said on Twitter. Make the news agencies behave like grown-ups, even if it kills them.
Spotlight on external Go libraries
Guitar perfectly in tune when its strings aren’t ~ Innovation Investment Journal
I agree with you that the technology is secondary, but one of the biggest things that I like about Github is that navigating through source files is always very fast.

I hate having to go to a source control site where it's not immediately obvious where to get to the source, or even worse, where it takes multiple seconds for a page to load.

With Github I can flip through all the source files to see what I'm looking for without having to bring the repo down locally. The same thing is also very useful to me when I want to remember how I did something in some project but don't have all my source with me. If navigating between files was slow or cumbersome, I don't think they'd be nearly as successful.
Hi sawyer,

Social discovery is not just about social proof but also about getting signal from noise. With 70k games and growing knowing what games your friends are playing is a great way of decided what games to try out. Price cost of games may be low but no one has time to try them all out.

Check-ins are more of a broadcast mechanism rather than a gamifying one. Some users check-in for badges but a lot do it for broadcasting to the community. We are going to be providing more value to check-ins by also recommending games from them. Did you get a chance to try it out?
There's a lot of other stuff I would much rather see "declared a human right".

I'd also like to see what we mean by "human right" defined more clearly. It certainly doesn't seem to mean that everyone has a right to it, or that depriving it from someone is a crime against humanity.
While I agree that it is annoying, a law is not the way to fix that. It's also very useful, as it connects the viewers with more information. I don't think anything would convince news outlets to stop since it drives up their website traffic, etc.
Seriously, the 2nd part is a tired argument. It's like the philosophers who claim that altruism is impossible.

And the first part is taking one weird historical 'moral' thing and applying it to the rest of our present laws. Sex was abhorrent to Victorians, so we still have an irrational hang up about it. For some reason in the early 20th century drugs joined the moral hit list so we still have an irrational hang up about that. I think it will eventually go the way of other bizarre 'moral' hangups such as feminism and homosexuality, but there is an element of self-harm to drugs that makes it more tricky.

And to be honest the recognition of the equality of women and same-sex relationships is far higher on the overall good for mankind than the right to use drugs, so as a race I think we're doing pretty well on our priorities so far.

One weird quirk of law doesn't mean at all that governments think they can freely trample over most human rights without serious opposition from the masses.
I believe what has been happening, and Mike Rowe recently talked about this in his address to congress, is that America has adopted the process of high school -> college as the norm, rather then the exception. 18 year olds go to college because they think they're supposed to, rather then going to help them accomplish something specific.

I think the anti-college movement is good because it helps draw a line between those parts of the workforce that value a degree and those that don't.
ملتقيات فلسطين المسلمة
The money should go to part of the government which are not responsible for enforcing the law for which the money was collected. Even if spread over the entire government, including the police department, it would dilute the amount enough to severely reduce the improper incentive.
I was wondering this too and spent the past 20 minutes reading the (very good) Wiki articles on both Ponzi and Pyramid schemes. I'd agree this is closer to Pyramid than Ponzi.

Side-note: Fascinating to read how the "Magic 8-Ball" model of Pyramid Schemes works: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_Scheme#The_.22Eight-Bal...
OK, I see your point regarding the terminal emulator. There are some keys that are intercepted by the terminal emulator and processed by it alone (say, whatever does "print screen" or "close window"). The shell never sees these key presses.

The thing I didn't (and still don't) like about the diagram is it implies the whole "ls -l" is delivered by the terminal emulator to the shell. Which isn't how it works. The emulator is transparent to all normal keystrokes and the shell is doing all the work, character by character, even for stuff like ctrl-H which, years ago, could have been (and sometimes was) intercepted and handled by the terminal driver.

And the presence of the kernel in the diagram is also confused. (You are right, system calls are all over, even printf() will bottom out in the kernel; I was trying to say that there is no requirement for the user program to call in to the kernel.)

Here's a sentence in the OP that has the same confusion:

"When you execute a program from Python you can choose to execute it directly with the kernel or via a shell."

The kernel is not "executing the program directly". This is nonsense.

What they want to say is that you can use a system call (execve) to directly load and run the program, or you can use an interpreter like sh.

This same point of confusion is exhibited in their diagram.
Standard of living is going up, but quality of life is definitely declining in major cities. There is a lot more money (even after adjusting for inflation) so the purchasing power has increased tremendously. There is a much richer variety of goods and services people have access to, housing is a lot nicer, people can afford vacations and so on. All that is on the positive side. On the negative side, people spend longer and longer time commuting in worse and worse traffic, suffer more water & electricity shortages. The general stress level of urban life has gone way up. Overcrowding would explain all of the negatives, and I have outlined why the overcrowding occurs. It is not just "too many people", because even the most densely populated regions of India have plenty of space when you leave major cities and India's population density is at the same general level as Western Europe. It is the inadequate infrastructure that causes massive overcrowding.

I agree with your overall point though - I am an optimist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_Dictator_For_Life ?
Wow, this is absurd! The French official said “This would be a distortion of competition. If we allow Facebook and Twitter to be cited on air, it’s opening a Pandora’s Box —other social networks will complain to us saying, ‘why not us?’”

Nobody is saying those other networks can't be mentioned. Maybe if they would improve, they /would/ be used and get mentioned. Does my service have a right to be promoted? No? Clearly the solution is to "level the playing field" and prohibit ALL promotions!
I agree the last line is a bit.. revealing about the author true colors.
It's impossible to talk about getting traffic without specifying what type of product you have. Is it a paid downloadable app, SAAS webapp, social network, etc?

Most forms of paid advertising aren't cost effective unless you have a very direct way to convert traffic quickly into money and have pretty high margins.
How hard would it be for Groupon to switch their model from targeting local merchants to spraying discounts from national brands? For instance, instead of Fred's Deli Grouponing cat food for ten cents a can and eating that loss, Friskies does targeted geographic campaigns like that to get rid of dated inventory they know are at local merchants? That'd be more efficient and effective than a weekly printed flyer coupon, no?. Other than doing that, given the large amounts of money I've seen reported being extracted from Groupon, it does smell like a pyramid.
Just to give everyone an idea... my startup tracks advertising on the Google Display Network, which is one of the primary channels that Groupon has been using for advertising since the very beginning.

Up until just a few months ago, we were finding Groupon ads at a rate of 5x the next largest advertiser on the network (US data only). Google itself was the next largest, 2nd to Groupon.

5x the reach of the next largest advertiser on the largest ad network in the world is remarkable to say the least. I haven't seen anything like it in the 2+ years that our service has been operational
To impress your peers, which is often the same reason you would buy the real item. That is why manufacturers of luxury and designer products try to conflate knockoffs and counterfeits in legislation.
I think bringing in your nationality into the debate makes it somewhat irrational.

You've said you are "an educated and affluent Indian".
In reality, you are "an educated and affluent person".
Whether you choose to live in India or choose to pursue a greencard in the US as a Princeton PhD in academia or industry, or maybe go to UK/Canada/Europe, or maybe even South America - Brazil, Costa Rica, all of these are/were valid choices. You've simply chosen to return to India, perhaps as some sort of default choice. But all those other choices still exist. Each of them will have some component of moral suffering and some component of psychic reward.

I think many of the "system does not work" points you've made are simply examples of a different system. When I'm back home in India and I see people pissing on the street corner, I don't think "Hey, system does not work. They should be pissing in restrooms". I think "This is a different system with some pluses & some minuses. Pluses : no infrastructure needed, organic waste in a tropic country decays rapidly, freedom to piss wherever since its accepted culturally. Minuses : the pervasive smell of ammonia."

I think that attitude makes it much easier to adapt to the different system than to try and westernize everything by saying "system doesn't work in India".
That would be incredible, I really miss pattern matching when writing Python code. Fitting it into the existing style of syntax and the language semantics is a problem though.

Pattern matching in list comprehensions would be awesome too. List comprehensions are very cool in Python but they're so much cooler in Haskell :)
I was fascinated to learn about Minitel. I had no idea that any country had such widespread adoption of a computer network before the internet.
Web sites and pages are similarly free to try... Yet there are plenty of services out there to help you discover the best of them (you're on one right now).
Yes but I wanted to be able to collect sale statistics, so either way some scraping would need to be done on the links
Amazon: Ponzi Scheme or Wal-Mart of the Web? (2000)
I've heard an argument that Python, of the widely used languages, comes closest to being "executable pseudocode", simultaneously actually code and yet readable as an informal algorithm description. It'd be interesting to know if that were true.
Ha yeah the code is a mess. I have used BeautifulSoup before but I don't understand how it works well enough and just wanted to get something out the door
Please stop trolling. I want HN to remain a place where influential people come and talk about the story behind the story. Having an inquisition about inconsequential aspects of Jason's board membership doesn't help that.

It sounds like Jason helped the company with the things he was best at (product design) and didn't have much involvement with every other aspect. His not wanting to be involved in every aspect may be part of the reason he became an advisor eventually.
Actually some common law precedent for that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deodand
http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Getting_Started_Guide has a good overview of getting FreeSWITCH going. However, if you have no experience with VoIP or SIP, things may be a little rougher.

If you don't want to muck with FreeSWITCH's XML configs, blue.box (http://wiki.2600hz.org/display/bluebox/Home) is a good GUI tool that will configure your switch for you. See the quick start guide (http://wiki.2600hz.org/display/bluebox/Quick+start+configura...) but know the docs are undergoing expansion and clarification. If you have questions, we're available on Freenode in #2600hz and have a pretty active community that likes to get folks up and running.

I work for 2600hz so I'm biased though :)
I always smile a little bit when I see the force of creative destruction. Kudos to the guys at github who ignored the threat of google and built a business that is profitable and beating established incumbents.

I am sure the folks at sourceforge have their hearts in the right place, but a tarnished brand is a tarnished brand. They could launch a better product than github tomorrow, but I'll always have the frustration of trying to use wget on SF in the back of my mind.
Isn't the "social proof" for a lot of investors the supposed $6B buyout offer they rejected from Google, last year? Was Google just way off in their valuation?

Remember all those stories about how Youtube was just a huge liability, and they were burning through bandwidth expenses, and it was so stupid for Google or anyone to buy it?
I'm glad to see the shit storm did not blow over unnoticed. The translate API is a pretty useful tool and I would happily pay for it. While nothing beats a hand-written translation by a language pro, the automated version is accurate enough for many situations I come across.
Totally agree.

I wonder how much value a news outlet derives from their follower communities and whether or not they've A/B tested the effect asking viewers to tune in on FB/Twitter hurts their ratings.
And appropriately enough the last article published under the topic 'Programming Languages' was published on Apr 3rd 2003.
"There is only one human right: the right to kill yourself."

That would seem to be more easily taken away than, say, the right to think.
The OP speaks about French resentment of Anglo-Saxon cultural encroachment as if it's some kind of childish French fixation ("That there is a deeply-rooted animosity in the French psyche towards Anglo-Saxon cultural domination cannot be disputed; indeed, it has been documented and analysed for decades.")

But then, remember Freedom Fries and cheese-eating Surrender Monkeys, and it seems like we all have our childish side.
Interesting, would love to be a fly on the wall at internal discussions at MyGengo