skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My notion of supercompilation is just the evaluating of expressions at compile time that do not depend on things at run time.

A trivial case that most compilers do is converting print 1+1 to print 2. Since 1+1 does not depend on anything that could happen at run time and does not produce any other side effects. (You need to analyze that + hasn't been overloaded to have side effects/etc.).

The idea is that many of the expressions being passed into eval could be calculated in entirety at compile time, so there is no need to have eval in the compiled result at all. Just evaluate at compile time, remove the eval and the quotes.

I am not talking about trying to optimize eval, if you have a variable string going in, you can't possibly do that. I guess I shouldn't have used the term supercompiling, it may mean something more powerful than in the cases I'd seen it and I was probably trying too hard to use a buzzword...
> 1) you think that people interested in reading about Airbnb are behaving irrationally

Every angry mob is irrational, even if there is a perfectly rational reason for their anger.

While concern about what has happened, is happening, should be happening (in various peoples opinions), and so forth is definitely rational as is an interest in watching it all play out (even if you don't care for airbnb at all specifically, this could possibly have implications elsewhere too).

People posting the same thing that others have already posted (or something so similar it makes no difference) and other people voting everything up whether it is a duplicate or not is irrational. It bends the system here potentially making the site less useful/interesting to others, it isn't going to change the situation, and the confusion of partial discussions spread over threads is going to put people off that might have otherwise cared about the situation (they'll stop reading any post about it, no matter how high up pages 1 it is, as they'll start to assume it is the same as last time).

lt;dr: the interest/concern is not irrational but some of the behaviour seeming steming from that is, so suggesting some people are behaving irrationally is not incorrect (IMO).
You can easily write eval as a regular function, right? Except it needs magical access to the global environment. (Please correct me if I'm wrong; I haven't used Clojure, just checked out http://clojure.org/evaluation.)

So I'd blame the definition of Clojure's eval function more than the implementation goals here -- if users had to write (eval foo (the-global-environment)) then you could leave the-global-environment out and still supply a useful eval without any problem in compiling programs.
We've all written code like this:

class Foo
method bar(x)
switch x
case even?
case odd?

This is closed. What if I want to add a new case without modifying this class? I could subclass but then I have to know a lot about how Foo works. Perhaps bars has assumptions about whether it needs to run before or after I run my subclassed version, and on and on. This kind of nastiness pervades too much code.

method bar Foo even?(x)
method bar Foo odd?(x)
...

As far as logic programming - I think the paradigm is so little known that people fail to see how useful it is. Yet many non-trivial programs use ... relational databases!

How would you even begin to express the following idea in JavaScript?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6713424/how-do-i-express-...

Note that the idea is actually quite simple and useful!

Another example is to produce all words that form a specific telephone number:

https://gist.github.com/1107653

Of particular interest is the encode function, the relevant bit:

(run* [q]
(exist [x y xo yo]
(appendo x y s) ;; infer all possible lists that could concat
;; to form s
(wordo x xo) (wordo y yo) ;; convert to words
(project [xo yo]
(== q (apply str xo yo)))) ;; create the combined string

Note I don't have to mention indices, for loops, list comprehensions or any other iterative machinery.

All the other solutions I saw had a lot of boilerplate to express this simple idea of inferring the lists that could be concatenated to form s.
Expect to see a lot more of this. AirBnb are vulnerable right now, and in a very competitive marketplace. They really need to step up their efforts to contain the issue, or competitors are going to walk all over them.
Hasn't the window already closed? Short of doing everything you listed at considerable expense, how does this get made right? is that even enough? The heirlooms are gone at this point, you had a chance a few weeks ago but that stuff is long gone now.

There should have been a plan for this before it happened. part of that would be "hey, we'll do all these things, x, y, and z, in exchange please take your blog down" or at least "please blog that you've been made whole by the company, without mentioning specifics" or if you're a real pro, you present the victim with a contract before it even occurs to them to blog about it and you put that in it. It's too late now. Not just too late, but they've added to the "wrong" done to this woman. Plus if you "fix it" the pressure will be to reveal what was done, complete with rumors and misinformation bouncing around, rumors you can't control or fix.

I think it's business 101 in some line of work. Look at the LA Dodgers, a fan was nearly beaten to death at a game earlier this year and the team had reduced the security, fired the chief of security and done some otherwise stupid things prior to this (read: the dodgers may be responsible.) They can't stop the news, it made the news, but they swooped in, made some undisclosed financial arrangements and the news is about catching the criminals now. FWIW, this fan will never make a full recovery. The Dodgers have other problems and they aren't glossing over the beating but it's clearly not the focus it could be.

I've seen a remarkable number of tech companies do the same thing regarding security, to the point of even knowing they have problems and choosing to ignore them and hope for forgiveness rather than spend the time and money to fix them. If you're going to take that risk at least be prepared for when you lose. You have to come correct and offer up enough that it doesn't make sense for people to be angry, it has to be a legitimate apology with some contrition.
Being your own boss is different from bossing around
You make the assumption that tax money goes into the population's pockets instead of government-funded projects.

Your argument is easily reversible to raise taxes across the board in order to concentrate the money into government projects rather than having it spread around.
The code-as-data paradigm in Lisp means that you can write your own eval. Eval was an important historical discovery, because of the fact that it could be written in Lisp itself. In fact, a minimal eval is rather easy: Recurse down nested linked lists, switching on the first element to handle special forms, and recursively evaluating functions and arguments.

Eval is basically a DSL, which happens to be the same as the host language. Part of the awesomeness of Lisp is that you can write your own DSLs. Sometimes that involves macros, sometimes that involves a home-brew eval function. But either way, the full-blown eval has very few use cases.
I completely agree with most of your sentiment. I've been really confused by many of the views expressed on HN declaring the AirBnB should buy her a new house, relocate her, or some other outlandishly expensive response, but there are two issues/questions being mixed here:

A) Was AirBnB acting negligently or irresponsibly in the course of conducting business?

B) Has their response been appropriate?

On point A, I don't believe they were. As you point out, you're renting your house out to strangers. Hotels carry very, very large insurance policies to protect against the kind of stupidity and maliciousness that most of us never want to experience.

On point B, it's hard to defend them. AirBnB has issued statements that are being rebutted by the victim in this case. That's how how you want your communication to end up in these kinds of scenarios. You want to embrace the victim, and if they're being unrealistic, you have to address that head on and have confidence in the rationality of person reading your words. If it turns out you're wrong, well then it won't really matter, because point A becomes unsolvable for you. It would require significant adjustments to their business model in order to protect individual renters from the type of activity observed in this case.
I found myself reluctant to follow the phone links.

I have followed similar links (EFF among others) to generate email to reps.

Uses twilio.
I had a similar reaction to this post. Surprised that she depicted the issue being escalated all the way up to the cofounder as somehow a reduction in customer service. Not that they've seemed to have handled this well by any stretch, but they certainly seem to be taking this seriously.

Is it me, or does it take a significant amount of melodrama to negatively construe being asked to grab coffee with the cofounder of the company with whom you have some dispute as bad customer service (he didn't ask if she was alright? really?).

What happened to her sucks, and AirBnB certainly doesn't sound like a service i would use personally, but to be honest, I wasn't shocked to hear people calling into question whether or not this was a real person. She seems to be going out of her way to characterize events (as the parent mentions) in as negative a light as possible.
That makes it sound a whole lot like tofu, which is another "food" that should be avoided by anyone who isn't a culinary masochist.
Some how while I respected his attention to detail I never really respected Notch's attention to game design before this. Endermen feel Hitchcockian in nature. I'm genuinely scared of them already o_o
Maybe, when you post something, it could say (Did you know about X or Y posts) a little bit like stackoverflow. So, in a way, it's an automatic search while posting.
How to Make the “Product Business Leap”
Mozilla's Playdoh is a web application template based on Django
Just to kick off an alternate perspective on the situation: up until reading about this incident, airbnb and the whole business model of "borrow my home" has somehow escaped my attention, and even though what has happened in EJ's situation is really horrible and she has my sympathy, I definitely recognise that her case is an extreme minority case that potentially wouldn't affect me as a user of the service. After reading about airbnb following this incident and browsing their website a bit, I am actually quite keen on trying the service! So perhaps any publicity really is good publicity!
The headline is a bit too much, even for TechCrunch.

EJ is not "homeless". She almost certainly has never been homeless and will never be homeless; this is an insult to people who have been homeless, broke, and literally have nowhere to go. Choosing to not stay in a $3.8K / month loft in SF does not a homeless person make.

And she's at least a bit responsible for feeding the sensationalism of this; it is coming off a bit Drama Queen.
Video: This Guy Plays Air Drums That Actually Make Music
Actually, neither is really analogous to an individual credit limit.

As you correctly point out, the debt ceiling is an entirely voluntary constraint that the US government imposes on itself (if, as is appropriate from an economics point of view, you take the government to be the union of executive, legislature and judicative branches).

The interest rate for short-term T-bills necessarily follows very closely the monetary policy targets set by the Fed. In fact, the Fed and Treasury cooperate all the time to control the supply and demand of T-bills, in order to make sure that the interest rate established by the market matches the target rate - that's just part of normal day-to-day operations, see e.g. http://pragcap.com/resources/understanding-modern-monetary-s...

Long-term interest rates behave slightly differently, and some people believe that useful information about the state of the economy can be extracted from them.

This is still not analogous to a credit limit, because those long-term rates can never actually constrain the US government financially. After all, Fed and Treasury can always work together to reduce the supply of long-term bonds, which will drive down the interest rate.
50+ PSD UI Web design elements
When you buy a PC it comes with all these crap "toolbars" and "dashboards" and antivirus software installed because the manufacturer gets kickbacks from the software vendors. I think the same is probably true for Android phones in the US. I have an HTC Incredible (the first one), which is a great phone, but it has a bunch of third party apps I can't remove.
I like the idea this article proposes, but I believe the author and our commenters glance over some backend difficulties. Yes, there are exactly 50 states each with precisely one two-letter abbreviation. How would you handle, say, "Boston, masachusetts" [sic]?
Now that this has happened, how (if at all) would you revise this comment about Arrington: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2719086
I would be greatly interested in finding out more... what problems did you run into? Where did you spend most of the time?
> 2. There are exactly 50 states, so 50 names and 50 abbreviations.

Quick, spell the state that starts with "M" and ends in "ets"! How about "M"-"pi"? "T"-"see"?

I know, it's almost trivial to guess at misspellings. But that's just another piece of code you have to write.
What is an example of such a legal constraint? (The only name-related legal compliance issues I can come with off the top of my head demand "full name".)
Why God Hates German Words
it's probably also worth noting that every time there are new apple tv rumors they're about it including its own app store - if that ever happens it will be very interesting to see what people go for.
I can't agree more. I love trying different text editors, but I have grown so comfortable with vim that now navigating without hjkl just seems weird as well as many other things. I plan on trying Sublime Text 2. The last time I briefly tried to use it, I did not find a lot of good documentation on how to get started with it. I hope that has changed.
Is turntable.fm legal?
Google Ends Google Friends Newsletter in Favor of Blogs, Twitter
Duplicate of a story from yesterday, and it wasn't a very good story then either.
But is it a reasonable assumption that they'll enter the abbreviation, instead of the state name?
are you asking for karma burn?
There is a significant difference, but it works the opposite way, so that beef is worse for you. Cattle have been bred under ten thousand years of domestication to have fattier meat, whereas undomesticated sources of red meat are much leaner. Off the top of my head I can point you to the index of Guns, Germs and Steel for citations.
(Not even a "beta" tagline, an "experiment".)

My go-to place for hotels is TripAdvisor. This doesn't seem to have an real improvements.
Dallas, TX, 75254.

Is "." a state? How about "75254"?
Yet another version of the same story.
"WTF", "badass", "retardedly", and "no-bullshit" aren't exactly light and un-intimidating.
I'm probably a prude but the profanity and use of "wtf", "badass" and "retardedness" are off-putting, especially if you expect to target businesses.
Ask HN: Comp Sci Student with very little real world experience seeking advice
I have just finished my first year on a Comp Sci degree at one of the top universities in the UK. However, I have very little experience with programming on my CV. I have played around and spent countless hours messing with code but I haven't actually built anything worth while and have had no experience in a job, which leaves my CV looking very empty. What would be the best route to follow to get some experience that I can actually quote? I feel that I am not good enough/experienced enough at programing to follow the open source route and I lack the experience to secure any sort of internship(and I think I would have to wait till next summer to even get one, as winter ones seem very rare, unless anyone knows of any UK-based companies that accept people over the winter?!).

If there is anyone out there who has been through a similar path, what did you do to get experience in programing, besides the toy examples that aren't interesting to prospective employers?
Any of Airbnb's competitors are going to use this to their advantage. Rightfully so too... I didn't even know about Roomorama until this story.

The biggest part of the story though was thrown in at the end:

The harrowing story of the Airbnb user EJ prompted Ms. En Teo to reach out to her competitors in order to set a precedent for sharing information about sketchy users, so if she gets a report about misbehavior she can send an alert to get him or her banned from other sites. Incidents like this hurt the entire market as well as individual users, she said.

Some kind of data sharing would be a great thing for this industry as they are all vulnerable to the same problems (theft, etc...).
I'd like to briefly point out that the "economic oligarchy" argument is just a special case of one of the classic Marxist arguments against capitalism in general. Take that as you will.
Can you provide an example of such a document from the US government that requires a split apart first/last name? I am not saying you are wrong: I am simply deeply curious (as the ones I have dealt with ask for "full name").
Right. She explained that in her blog post because she wanted us to actually understand what is going on.

To you it might not matter as long as a suspect is in jail, but I'm sure that having an investigation paused while you wait on neighboring jurisdictions feels very different than the way you'd expect reading what AirBnB said: "a suspect is now in custody, and our information will now become important evidence"
> Distributing profits via bonuses and dividends in the US without US taxes being collected on that money is bad, yes.

Since when are bonuses and dividends not taxed?
When the major media picks up this whole rent-a-room-to-a-stranger-fiasco the bad guys will be AirBNB and the good guys will be the roomorama (and other competitors that capitalize on it)
Couple things that impressed me ...

- Results are returned instantly.
- The heat map idea, coupled with draggable area, is pretty cool.

Nice to see more competition and innovation in hotel search.
They have to be careful, though, as this kind of thing can be considered libel or slander if not 100% true, and collusion even if it is true. Having an industry-wide blacklist will almost definitely run afoul of the law.
"At this point in time, I wonder if it's in pg's best interest to cut loss, and sever the relationship with airbnb altogether. Sell yc's stake in airbnb, and avoid talking about them ever again."

Give them a chance to rectify this ONE publicized incident before throwing them under the bus.

Thankfully, I would think most level headed investors would feel the same.
As a partial solution, how about adding a polite note on the "submit" page, asking people nicely to check the past few days' worth of front pages before submitting, to see whether there has already been a discussion on the same subject.

I've just been to the "new" page, where I flagged a few versions of the "Internet Explorer Users Are Stupid" story from yesterday.

And it wasn't a very good story the first time (though it's exactly the sort of thing which tends to get a lot of upvotes, for entirely the wrong reasons).
I understood the article fine. But who cares if it's 100% juice or not? 100% juice is bad. Coca-Cola wouldn't be better for you if it were 100% sugar and carbonated water.

You make a great point about raw fruit— Sugars in a whole orange: 12g. That is to say, a glass of orange juice has the sugar water from two oranges, without the fiber that blocks absorption and sends satiety signals after an orange and a half. Clearly these are comparable things.
'We Don't Want to Trade Security for Volume' = 'we don't want to be successful'.
Build a website and launch it. Nothing says you can do stuff more than showing the stuff you've done.
Ask HN: Why Dropbox iOS app needs my location to upload files?
Really, I never understood this. Anyone care to explain—or know?
I'm well aware that I don't know everything--but, with what little respect is due a troll like yourself, apparently I know more than you. :-) After all, I'm not the one saying "you don't need that" because I don't understand it; on the contrary--I am saying that these tools greatly empower a programmer to write better code. Because they do. You can certainly write "good" Java, but it will not be in the same ballpark as "good" Scala or "good" C# or "good" any-other-remotely-modern-language. The effort expended to write "good" Java is much greater, and as such it is a worse tool.

As for your ad hominem: I've been doing this at some level for ten years, thanks. I've been getting paid to do this stuff for about six. I didn't "just" start programming. I work in a fairly high-level, demanding environment with plenty of hard problems and a lot of code smell that can be directly attributed to poor Java expressivity.

That you can only fall back on "you're a kid" as a way to attack claims says much, much more about you than I.

You are describing to a T the sort of Blub programmer that is referred to in the Graham article I linked upthread, but I won't bother advising you to read it--you won't recognize yourself. Have a nice day. :)
GoDaddy Instant DataCenter
"The success or failure of any of these phones means almost nothing to the company. And so, the product development and rollout of any of these phones is not a bet-the-company gamble. Accordingly, very little effort is made on design, engineering, and customer support. None of these companies have terribly loyal customers, most seem to buy a given phone based on carrier affiliation, or based on costs."

In the long run, Google needs to do something about this, or face it doing severe damage to the image of their platform.
If you have $1 you are holding more cash than the US.
Digg handled this very well. When you submit a new story it looks up current submitted stories to see anything matches and recommends those to be used instead.

I loved that because it leaves the decision to the user and gave them option to still post a new one if it had material not covered in already submitted stories
I agree they've done a horrible job of communication. But I don't think they were lying... I think they just weren't paying enough attention.

She says someone was arrested, but in the end, wasn't charmed for the crimes against her. AirBnB is only saying someone was arrested. They apparently didn't do any further checking, while she did. (It could be that the police wouldn't tell them anything, but I doubt it.)

They didn't maintain contact with her. They only renewed contact to ask her to do them favors... Ridiculous favors. And they reached out again after it became a big thing without actually showing any compassion. They're making their agenda pretty clear, and that's pathetic. It's pathetic even if that isn't their agenda!
Have you spoken to people that have used them for any length of time?

I only ask because I read a review that said, although the Sony remote looked horrific, it wasn't too bad in actual use.
Free app (with ads) has over nearly half of the nation’s doctors (NYTimes)
Bars do this all the time in areas where there are problems - they scan your ID and then share the information with other bars, particularly if you get booted.

In the United States, if you make a good faith claim about someone, it's pretty hard to win a libel suit, and, I suspect, it would be even harder to claim that grading an individual rises to the level of slander/libel, particularly if you provide a mechanism to challenge the claims.

If this were not the cases, then credit rating agencies would have a difficult time existing.