skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the language debate comes down to two classes of people: (1) people who care passionately about languages and code aesthetics, and (2) people who don't really care. Unfortunately, the second class of people are more unified and comprise at least a plurality, so they win.

The problem with the first camp is that we all want to use different languages-- Haskell, ML, Clojure, Scala. And these are all good languages! But companies can't afford to have more languages than there are people, not as the latter number grows and as being able to read code becomes more important than being able to write it. So every company needs to limit its white list. Those of us who are passionate about good languages nonetheless disagree on which of those good language to use. And we do ourselves a disservice when we bash Python because it sucks compared to Haskell; the result of this disagreement is we end up having to use C++ or Java.

The perversion here is that the reason so many companies coerce their codebases to C++ (i.e. limiting the whitelist) is that they recognize the importance of reading code. Yet they choose languages (C++, Java) where reading average (not bad code, mind you, but 50th-percentile code in a production system) code is extremely difficult. A good C++ programmer can write eventually comprehensible, but not beautiful code; a bad or average one can easily make an illegible and unmaintainable mess. For contrast, a good ML programmer can write beautiful, easy-to-read code while bad ML programmers are practically non-existent because they can't get their code to compile. For bad programmers, ML is that evil little language that caused them to nearly flunk that PL course they had to take in college.

What I wonder is how Yahoo managed to get people of sufficient talent to do the project. It seems like one of those hard-but-shitty projects that never succeeds because the people who are competent enough to do it have better options. Do-the-same-thing rewrites are never popular projects, and most people who understand Lisp are not going to be happy about taking on such a project for the sake of C++.

(No, I'm not saying that there aren't good programmers who use C++. There are great programmers who use C++. That said, someone who understands functional programming well enough to read Lisp is not likely to be among them; people who understand FP want to use it.)
I don't know why this was so much fun. More engaging and challenging than a casual flash game. Here's my digital counter: http://i.imgur.com/gYoHb.png.

Now I'm wondering how I can convince my daughter it's a game :)
"... In a typical gui file manager that kind of stuff is just not possible. The possibility space for what you can do is limited by the visual abstractions the original designer came up with for file manipulation. With command line tools that space is virtually infinite."

whilst i certainly agree with this, i would speculate that 80-90% of the average user's time is spent carrying out a handful of simple operations that are better catered for by guis. for the other 10-20% we have our virtually infinite space: the shell.
True Blood Season 4 Episode 7
Remotely Control A DSLR Camera Through An Android App
Lambda: The Ultimate Political Party -

http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PS/Lambda.html
Creative Commons Operating Systems Textbook (Source on Github)
Readwriteweb adds no value here; just click thru to the github repo - https://github.com/danlucraft/git.js

Also, already discussed - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2747216
The judgement he claims at the start of the essay you point to is probably this: <http://newswire.xbiz.com/view.php?id=136832>. It's worth noting that this is the "pay up or we'll sue you for downloading gay porn" extortion racket, and the $10,401 judgement is a settlement. So his negligence theory probably hasn't been tested in court.
Also, you need a designer; please don't take it personally, but the design looks like 30 min in Photoshop. Sorry for being harsh, but I love Ruby community and I would not stand a ugly site being the entry-point. The ruby-lang.org site is actually really beautiful, it's just the irrelevant information on it that is the problem.

Wow. There are so many wrong things about your comment I don't know where to start. You're borderline insulting with a criticism that has zero information apart from the fact that you hate it, and then you act like you had to do it to save the Ruby community. And then, icing on the cake, you announce that the official Ruby site is "is actually really beautiful" like an absolute truth.

Be constructive. If you can't, have some respect for other people's effort and keep your hate to yourself.
Write the entire site in Mandarin Chinese

(I kid, I kid)
Well, for one thing, keeping personal data on people without their consent is probably illegal under most European nations' law, no matter how many of their friends tell you it's OK.

This is my basic problem with Facebook's whole MO: it tries to solve the one problem no single data mining company can ever solve -- having enough resources to spy effectively on everyone -- by recruiting people's own friends to do much of the spying for it. There is something fundamentally shady about that, if you believe privacy and control of sensitive personal data have any value.
Lean Government as a Platform for Innovation
The inside story of Keurig's rise to a billion-dollar coffee empire
That is absurd logic. Law enforcement has no problem getting information about the people you contact from your phone company.
Haha, Genius idea!
My apps http://cascadesoft.net/EconomyApp.aspx (iPhone, iPad, Windows PC) provide a snapshot of the US economy. The iPad and iPhone apps were once ranked #1 on Apple's top charts for the Finance category.

Obviously, I can't claim to be entirely objective in this matter, but I think that the app is a great resource for anyone who wants to understand the US economy.
Dr. Kay is a genius of the highest order. He not only understands that we're not at the Promise Land, he understands why we're not and gives valid advice on how to get there, including working on it himself.

This is not to say the he doesn't get many things wrong. VPRI's COLA, for example, and the IQ/Knowledge/Outlook portion of this presentation is horribly off-base. I won't go into it here, the margins are too small and it doesn't matter. The main point is that he's still the bright torch in a dark night.
Scott Adams: The Heady Thrill of Having Nothing to Do
To make it clear - you could replace lisp with erlang/haskell/forth and it still would be sad. I am still student and I see that many people who are still in college (so their programming habits are relatively new and shallow) are reluctant to try new technologies. I am aware that good projects are not about choosing cool, full of buzzwords like 'monad' language, but still, most people want to stick with tool they learned first for everything, which is sad.
I'm conflicted about this post. I think your expressions are heartfelt, but it sounds like you've been window shopping when you don't have the funds to buy.

If you knew you didn't have the money to fairly pay for this designer's services, why ask? To the more cynical among us, this post may seem like a manipulative way to indirectly guilt-trip this guy into working for you far below his asking rate.

Look, you know how to get press and upvotes on HN. You obviously know how to influence people. But maybe now isn't the time to be speaking about this hiring issue while it's still unresolved.
i see this point made every time the discussion about military spending comes up, and i hate it so so much.

what this argument boils down to, for me, is "we need to keep killing foreigners so that our economy doesn't suffer", and this is a morally reprehensible position.
Does it really make sense that each new generation of programmers learns all of the previous generation's knowledge, as well as the "new" knowledge? Take this 10 generations into the future, are you really expecting them to know about AND gates and race conditions? What's the point? Could they not spend the time advancing technology further, instead of looking back?
Sure Science has become where spezialized and you personally can't reproduce every result from every sientist but what we can do is WAY WAY WAY better than just accepting it on faith the same way some people accept that god created earth in 7 days. What I mean is that we have to use the same word for both things but that does not mean that the two things are the same.
Also on that site, I just noticed he posted admin and db info for MIT
damn
Is there a list somewhere of all these different leaks? It is getting hard to keep track, these days.
Choosing not to is like choosing not to give your child a decent diet.

Every pediatric doctor I've spoken to on the subject disputes this as outdated. The only cases where this still holds true is in places where there is limited access to modern baby formula and clean water.
Galaxy S2 comes Friday, Watch These Fun Galaxy S2 Ads to Pass the Time
Some countries make sure that you're to blame in any case...

http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2010/05/12/german-court...

Edit: Note that I'm not really against educating people about encryption. But - how am I supposed to run a private hotspot now? And how the hell would it help if someone now turns on WEP?
How are faster browsers and javascript engines part of HTML5?
Has there been ANY programs written in lisp that has risen to the status of anything more than novelty?

IBM's watson, the best thing we got going for artificial intelligence, is it written in lisp? NO, it's written in java. The link from lisp to artificial intelligence is a lie. Lisp is just a very poor language, it's designed to get eager novices working on things that are irrelevant so they will learn (the hard way) that being a good programmer means laughing at the people who promote lisp as "an epic language". Lisp had its day, somewhere back in the 1950's/1960's. That day is gone.

If I'm working on any sort of problem needing a programming solution, and someone suggests we use lisp, I buy that person a copy of "The pragmatic Programmer", and tell them to read it closely.
The same story from many sources:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2851277

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2851408

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2852393 : A few comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2853758

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2853970 : A few comments
more liberal than conservative yet no suggestion to raise taxes which are at their lowest levels in 50 years (http://www.chamberofcommerce.com/business-advice/tax-prepara...) ? not even on billionaires sucking the government dry via the bush tax cuts (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/11/the_bush...) ?
Interview Street (YC S11) streamlines the search for great programmers
>Driving economic activity by having the military act as a major consumer is really just running on a treadmill.

I think you're missing my point. It's not that military spending drives manufacturing, service, and R&D industries (although it does), it's that direct military action has often been, and is often used to promote US economic interests. See the military's actions in Latin America in support of United Fruit, military support of right-wing (pro-US and pro-business) dictators everywhere, or the military-political interventions in the Middle East in support of energy interests.

My contention is not simply that making tanks is an economic activity that many people benefit from, but that those tanks are used to assert and defend economic dominance, which has a massive spillover effect for other industries.
Works for me (Firefox 5 on Linux). Post your browser/OS so the OP knows there's a defect and can test against that combination.
Also create opportunities for corruption at all levels of the military, instead of just a few. Plus it would open the way to fads and fashions, instead of evidence-based decisions.
This is a concern but it has not been borne out by previous events. One of the challenges (and its a 'good' challenge) is that we don't have a lot of data about what happens when people are exposed to environmental contamination. Primary sources are the post Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings, testing data from populations in Utah and Nevada who were down wind of the test site. And folks who were exposed in the Bikini islands during testing there.

One of the effects of the low number of data points was that latent radiation enhanced cancer deaths which were predicted for folks around Chernobyl didn't actually materialize according to the UN report. Basically the theory is still being developed and their predictions were off (by quite a bit as it turned out).

The situation is compounded by the fact that humans have evolved in a 'radiation rich' environment (relatively speaking) with UV skin damage, Radon gas sources, natural radioactivity in the earth, etc. So our bodies have a number of mechanisms which automatically deal with being exposed to radiation. If they did not, getting an x-ray would be a very dangerous thing indeed.

So we know you can be killed by an over exposure, and we know pretty accurately what those exposure rates are and yes nobody at Fukushima has had anywhere close to that level of exposure. (not to say someone couldn't walk buck naked into one of the reactor buildings and off themselves, but that is a different issue entirely)

And yes, there are radioisotopes in the environment around the plant that have raised the level of radioactive exposure folks living in those zones get. But it is entirely unclear whether or not that will lead to any significant increase in cancer (which is to say distinguishable from other causes).

So folks will be watching for elevated cancer rates of course, but if Chernobyl was any indication of what happens post accident they won't find any. Understand that the quantity and distribution of material from the Chernobyl accident still eclipses what non-TEPCO sources (notably the US DoE and the IAEA) have documented from this one by a large amount.

Given the Chernobyl results and the relative amounts of radioactive material released, I would be very surprised if there were was a higher elevation in cancer rates in Japan. Lots of economic impact, farmers can't sell food that has become contaminated, but I think the health risks are much lower than the more outspoken coverage would lead you to believe.
Do you only use mplayer with the aalib -vo option?
emacs is written in lisp (and some c for the interpreter), and it must be considered more than a novelty.

And autocad uses its own version of lisp (autolisp) as a scripting language.

Edit:

There are also the Lisp Machines from the 80's (a bit old, yes, I know) [1].

And the Jak and Daxter series of games[2]

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machines

[2] - https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Game_Oriented...
From the release:

"We have no sympathy for any of the officers or informants who may be endangered by the release of their personal information. For too long they have been using and abusing our personal information, spying on us, arresting us, beating us, and thinking that they can get away with oppressing us in secrecy. Well it's retribution time: we want them to experience just a taste of the kind of misery and suffering they inflict upon us on an everyday basis. Let this serve as a warning to would-be snitches and pigs that your leaders can no longer protect you: give up and turn on your masters now before it's too late."

You must remember, despite what the police would like you to believe most "snitches" are not little old ladies reporting violent crimes.

Edit: Yeah, just read through about half of these. Most of them are along the vein of "My neighbours keeps to themselves, therefore they do drugs". Fuck these people.

I did get a chuckle out of "jessica bruno - knows who set fire to land excavator equipment" though. The thought of setting a bulldozer on fire absurdly amusing to me for some reason ;)
From your example, most people would be more mad at the bank robber because of the malicious intent.
You could devise a means tested welfare for elderly people. There are a lot of perfectly wealthy, perfectly capable people who retire at 60 whatever for no apparent reason other than ss and tax advantaged accounts make it seem like its time. I am a big fan of retirement, and I think safety nets for the disadvantaged are a good idea. I don't think we need a retirement safety net, however, or to make a retirement an entitlement.
>what's happening in the United States now, I think it's crucial to have a good understanding of the economy

I aver its not crucial to understand economics. It is crucial to understand finance. This view was hammered into us repeatedly at the University of Chicago.

The seminal paper, by Mr. Larry Summers, on the distinction:
http://m.blog.hu/el/eltecon/file/summers_ketchup%5B1%5D.pdf
or on jstor ( http://www.jstor.org/pss/2327785 )

You need to know how to add. You don't need to know about the well-ordering principle. I say this as a math major who would love it if everyone knew why add works in an integral field( ie. Peano arithmetic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_Arithmetic#Arithmetic ).

To quote my professor, there's 2 big portions to econ - the narrative portion and the arithmetic portion. The first is mostly storytelling. Granted, there's some consensus around the arc of that story ( more consensus in micro-econ than in macro-econ ), but its still a story. The second completely ignores the story. It just says if debt is what it is, ie. some x, and inflation is y, what should the CDS be priced at ? ie. if CDS = f(x,y) what should that f look like ?

Turns out that question is much more useful and actionable than the story-telling aspect. If somebody told you the Dow fell by 500 points, its more useful ( in a utilitarian sense ) to know what you should do with your personal portfolio, than to know the reasons for Dow's fall (assuming that set of reasons are even knowable). You might think the causation would be useful. It is, to a very small extent, but the actionable portion ie. what you must do, can be understood much more efficiently by simply focusing on the prices of individual instruments that characterize market indices, derivatives on those indices, ETFs that make a play on debt, inflation etc. The fact that there were 10,300 puts at 113 strike on the August DIA yesterday is more useful than what any individual economist thinks. It tells you that the short term consensus view of Dow is 113*100 = 11300 ...the trend is down-sloping in the short term.

Ironically, Summers said finance guys were mere ketchup economists. The dept. of Ketchup pays ketchup economists huge salaries so they could calculate the price of 2 quarts of ketchup if the market told them the price of 1 quart. Whereas "real economists" were engaged in doing research on why a quart of ketchup was priced the way it was ie. due to consumer wages, tomato prices, cost of harvesting tomato, soil conditions etc.

Paraphrasing Summers "Ketchup economists reject research of the ketchup market. They believe prices of ketchup are the only hard data worth studying". You may not agree with any of this - but I do urge you to read that paper. Its had a huge influence on the asset pricing community.
Hacker group declares cyber war on US police
I don't think Sagan's love for the audience could be the byproduct of the chemicals he used. There are people who are born musicians or engineers (like me). He was born a teacher.

I watched Cosmos on my teens, late at night (actually, past midnight on Fridays, which made my early Saturday classes painful, but that's another story) on a TV station not particularly known for their love of science or reality. A couple posts back, there was a discussion opposing science and religion. Both are quests for ultimate truths opposed only by the methods of their search.

When I look deep in the sky, when I contemplate the mindboggingly vast emptiness punctuated by countless whirlpools of countless stars being violently born and evolving during the ages to their fiery (or cold) deaths, of which we only see an infinitesimal fraction, or the extremely small and quick, the things we cannot see, that we can barely measure and that are so faint that border non-existence, or the irrelevance of existence of pure math, it it's impossible not to feel the same deep wonder that's associated with religious experience. Science is humbling.

I do not envy the religious (or those who call themselves such) for they take a shortcut into a comforting notion of their Truth when it's not the destination that matters - it's the quest. I hope this new Cosmos puts more kids like me on the right path.
That's why in most jurisdictions the winner of civil litigation proceedings is (generally) entitled to have their costs paid by the other party.
Viaweb?
the reason snitches talk is because they ran out of ways to avoid prosecution, so i feel the innocent would be the minority in that group, as the police wouldn't have anything on them to compel cooperation.
I don't think he says anything new that's particularly useful and everything useful said is particularly old. His major arguments against "propping up" were made even as TARP was debated and were used to justify creating a resolution authority that would provide a "bridge to bankruptcy" for ailing banks so they could be liquidated in an orderly manner.

The post doesn't make me very confident in his analytic ability, though, since he speaks of the financial system as if it were one big thing, rather than lots of smaller interlocking things that few (no?) people understand in its totality or connections.
Chat with HIM
You can't just tax to cover whatever you spend. Historically, great revenue comes with greater spending. There must be a limit to taxation in order for the economy to function.

You cannot raise enough taxes to balance the budget. Based on income, you'd have to raise approx. 175%. Based on all taxes you'd have to raise by 50%! Such enormous tax increases would destroy business, investment, and people's paychecks. We want more people paying the same rates through economic growth.

It's not a waste of time if you want to balance the budget to focus on medicare and the military, but addressing the war on drugs is. I already provided numbers proving this. The fact that two parties aren't addressing them is why everyone is pissed off and freaked out. Neither party has introduced a budget that is balanced, or even on a path to being balanced.

Poeople don't want taxes raised, but they don't want medicare cut. So they borrow. And borrow. And borrow... and now borrowing is hurting us because we've done it so much. Eventually we won't be able to borrow anymore. Infinite borrowing is consequentially the same as defaulting.

Fareed Zakaria said in February 2010: "But, in one sense, Washington is delivering to the American people exactly what they seem to want. In poll after poll, we find that the public is generally opposed to any new taxes, but we also discover that the public will immediately punish anyone who proposes spending cuts in any middle class program which are the ones where the money is in the federal budget. Now, there is only one way to square this circle short of magic, and that is to borrow money, and that is what we have done for decades now at the local, state and federal level...So, the next time you accuse Washington of being irresponsible, save some of that blame for yourself and your friends."
Why Distinct Icon Outlines Help Users Scan Faster
AFAIK shit's been real for quite a while. How is this worse than past publications?
The VCs have the well-paid, cushy, powerful and easy jobs and are pretty much guaranteed by their path-of-low-resistance career track to be rich

Then why doesn't everyone and their mom become a VC?

Hint: Because it's nowhere near as easy as you think it is.