skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This was not a very well written article. It's full of opinions that don't come with good reasoning. It completely omits popular flavors of Lisp, like Racket. And it also shows a hint of critiqueless fanboy-ism with Clojure, when he goes on rambling about how writing Cocoa with Nu is a mess when using Java libraries with Clojure is almost just as bad (or someone has already written a wrapper layer). He also likes to bash C++ and Common Lisp while not really giving good reasons why - I guess it's popular to say bad things about C++/Common Lisp/Java/COBOL/any language with an ANSI or ISO standard.

Not to mention that it doesn't have any insight about the future of Lisp - apart from the fact that the author thinks that Clojure is the ultimate Lisp which is his own opinion.
If you've tried the latest build, litereally every issue he's described has been fixed.
So what does that make webOS? If I take the Linux kernel, and put webkit on top, in what way would it be different to webOS?
Insulting Perl helped Python and Ruby, but I doubt that insulting Common Lisp and Scheme will help Clojure.

If the Clojure community thinks that its better to attract more Ruby and Java programmers, and alienate other lispers, please, keep producing ignorant crap like this.

Claiming Common Lisp is dead and comparing it to C++? Why should anybody listen to somebody’s extremely narrow minded opinion on THE FUTURE OF LISP, when that person has shown that he knows NOTHING about lisps past and present.

Mr. Fogus, you know much better that to post such ignorance to Hacker News. Keep Clojure awesome, don't let the fanboys spread FUD. Inter-dialect respect, yaw! :)
But they do fail, often and to the tune of billions.
How can an internet based project rack up a 100 million budget. How can any IT project rack up 20 BILLION pounds:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1542486/20bn-NHS-comp...

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/29/bloomberg-seeks...

I'm not saying to run the project like a startup and I'm not saying to have startup type people implement it. Just that those bids, which are often a ten thousand page manuscript nobody actually reads is passed by professionals from the startup world so that they can mark up the bullshit that those companies use to generate such bills..

You can build Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter, to 1:1 scale for 20 Billion pounds...
std::thread is a library - in fact, all of std:: are libraries. The new C++ standard has an actual memory model and a thread interface but that's not the same as parallelism being integrated into the language.

Hans Boehm's paper, Threads Should Cannot be Implemented as a Library: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.90...., brought this up a while back. The new memory model in C++ (http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/c++mm/) helps solve the problems he brought up in that paper. The new C++ standard now has a memory model, and (if I understand the implications correctly), there is well-defined behavior when using threads in C++.

But the author's point is deeper. Providing an interface to threads, and a well-defined memory model, is a good step. But threads are a primitive for implementing parallelism. They are a very thin abstraction. The author of this article is arguing for richer abstractions that are integrated into the language. If you want to write parallel programs, and you have to use threads, mutexes and condition variables to do it, your code is going to be harder to write, debug and reason about than if you had used higher level abstractions. (And you will probably end up reimplementing some parts of those higher level abstractions.) In this regard, C++ is behind. So, kudos to the Cilk team for integrating their work into g++.
Chevy vs Ford
In fairness, these are AI experts. Surely they, more than anyone, know how to reliably distinguish people from non-people?
What I would like to know is whether Google is actually getting into hardware manufacturing operations? It is not clear from the articles if motorola mobile was using contract manufacturers for their hardware or not

They [motorola mobile] clearly owned huge facilities, did they still run the manufacturing too?
ROM = Read Only Memory, so yes they do mean "flash" as you understand it.
This is not true universally, regardless of what contracts you sign.

For instance, in California you have section 2870 of the Labor Code:
Any provision in an employment agreement which provides
that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her
rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an
invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time
without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or
trade secret information...

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab...
I don't think C has a well-defined memory model. So it still has the problems Hans Boehm talked about in his Threads Cannot be Implemented as a Library paper: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.90....
I worked in both as well, and I know a lot of those budgets are fluff. See my other comment as well - I'm not saying it should be run by startups or as startups - just that the bids themselves are scrutinized by the same pros that run facebook, rabbitmq, mongodb etc, to weed out all the bullshit. Think of it like a paid version of Jury duty for geeks.
Why Are Scientific Retractions Increasing?
I'm curious if any of the Stanford students who are paying thousands for this course are worried about the diminished return they might get from their professor. Don't get me wrong, I love this idea as the free recipient, I'm just curious if students who are paying, and obviously getting lots more, have any views on this.
Google Catalogs
Sorry to be all nit-picky, but the title of the submission here is significantly different from the title of the petition. The title here suggests running government IT like a startup (and a number of comments seem to be addressing that idea), while the petition is for government internet projects to be approved by a panel of startup pros.
I've often thought of doing a high volume messaging project with Node.js but I seem to be addicted to jBoss Netty.
Icons in a toolbar are like keyboard shortcuts: they have to be learned, but in the end they're more efficient.

And they're not labelled (but usually have tooltips) because of screen real estate. They're simply faster shortcuts to menu options, or dialog-box options.
Pretty cool, but wouldn't it still severely damage your internal organs? It's not like the force of the bullet just disappears once it hits your skin.
How many of these people who have complaints, actually have solutions? People are quick to criticize, but slow to offer solutions.
It might sound too obvious but often people try to come up with "ideas" instead of building what people need/want. I am pretty sure you just meant to ask: what should I build?

To find out what people need/want there are different ways to find out: Sites like: http://www.43things.com/zeitgeist/goals might help.

Also take a look at PGs "Ideas for Startups": http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html
Yes, you are right std::thread is a library. I meant to write "provided by an external library". But I won't edit my original comment as doing so would take-away from your response.

I see std::thread as a great first step. The richer abstractions will come later, but I think discounting std::thread is unwise. It's a great advance for C++.
that's what they said about financial experts ...
So that's the justification? That the GIMP expects WM settings that were only the default on TWM and the like over 15 years ago?

Well, I must say that I haven't seen any other application of its size take the "NO WARRANTY" shouting of the GPL so seriously.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

But the program did start as a showcase for some graphics manipulation algorithms that the authors made. Maybe the fault is with the people with the high hopes that it was actually meant for them to use and edit their photos.
Ever hear of "Ford families" or "Chevy families"? My family is a "Chevy family". 8*D
I use my vibrams primarily for running and have also found that my knee problems have almost completely vanished since I started running in them.
Launcher, notification manager, settings manager, appstore, developer kit, consistent theming and widgets, etc etc etc.

You know, all that stuff that Linux users have a hard time caring about but really appeal to regular people and devs.
Stanford Offers 13 classes, including AI, for free
yes you're right. Sorry about that. Can't edit it though...
The plural of index is indices, not indexes...
The article suggests that the programmer should not have to explicitly manage threads but instead expand the semantics of the language the language so that the programmer can express which tasks and data can be handled in parallel, then let the compiler/hardware decide how to do it.
Each class has been announced individually, thought I'd give the full list.
Coremark isn't a good benchmark. I have been benchmarking Snapdragons and Atoms myself on a variety of integer and floating point codes. I will publish them sometime soon but Atom-based netbooks came ahead of the Snapdragon based systems I had access to. I suspect this is partially because you have more memory bandwidth available in netbooks compared to mobile devices.

edit: Also, I do expect results to change quite a bit when the Krait architecture comes into play for Qualcomm.
So.. it's click tracking. Big deal. The magic of HTML is that the link that's displayed (the original if shorter?) doesn't have to match the actual href.

To use the zombo.com example above, why can't Twitter use the "shortener" to track redirects in the link and display the actual? <a href="http://t.co/?r=zombo.com>http://zombo.com</a>;

They're already doing something similar with elided URLs, why not with short ones?

I'm not familiar with the API--this of course assumes are tweets returned as html, not text.
Correct, the real headline was "58,000 Want Course."

Kind of sensationalist of mhb to change it like that, unless NYT secretly updated the article, which I've heard they're fond of doing.
Ask HN: Intro to Linear Algebra?
I'm excited about Andrew Ng's upcoming Machine Learning class, but I know from the past YouTube videos that Andrew Ng has posted the course will be heavily dependent on strong knowledge of Linear Algebra.

I took Linear Algebra in college, but I don't remember any of it now 9 years later. What is your favorite concise primer/refresher on Linear Algebra?
What kinds of consulting opportunities are there for Lisp people? I don't see a lot of postings for those skills but maybe it's a more specialized market?
Out of order processors do it all the time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-order_execution Most modern processors execute instructions out of order. They have hardware logic specifically designed to keep track of dependencies among the instructions, ensuring that even though instructions are executed out of order, instructions are committed in order, and if instruction A depends on the result of B, A does not execute until B finishes.

And therein lies your answer: many operations "don't care" what order they are executed in. Consider the algebraic expression A + B + C + D + E. You can "execute" that expression in any way, even doing some in "parallel" and still end up with the same answer that you would if you did it the intuitive way, from left to right. That's trivial. If you have A + B * C + D * E, then it's a little more complicated because you have to ensure that B * C happens before the additions that involve B and C, and same with D * E. But surely it's not hard to imagine a static analysis that recognizes such dependencies, and a runtime that enforces their order. So no matter what order the expressions were actually executed in, you can pretend they happend in the serial one you expected.
Fukushima Radiation in California
Sipping some Monte-Carlo in Scala ,Clojure: TDD, living without branches
He's totally right, but people have wanted this, and tried to implement it, several times. There's UPC (http://upc.lbl.gov/), Co-Array Fortran (http://www.co-array.org/), OpenMP (http://openmp.org/wp/), TBB (http://threadingbuildingblocks.org/), Cilk from MIT per scott_s, then there are the CUDA/OpenCL accelerator extensions ...

We don't need a call to arms without a pretty good idea of how to do it, and why it is different/better than the existing shots at parallelism. Jamming it into C/C++ is one idea, and making a new language like Fortress (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_(programming_language) ) is another.

And those are all just the languages / language extensions. There's also the message-passing (MPI, PVM) vs. remote put-get (ARMCI/Global Arrays/...) It's clearly a hot topic with how multi-core chips are coming along. I didn't see much here that adds to the existing attempts, other than perhaps bemoaning that they are currently proprietary. That seems natural, though. With so many competing ideas, you see which one gains traction first, then work on incorporating it into the standards.
It's not really. The most useful thing a teacher can do is give feedback. That said, one student among 300 doesn't get a lot of feedback.
Yes sorry for the throw-away.. it's so I don't get a mailbox full of $15/hr contracting requests :)

Thanks for the comments - I will check those out.
What HP needs to do is to get a 3.7" mobile phone and a 7" tablet out on the market.

As part of there development program, HP sent me a Pre 2, which I used for ten days before switching back to my iPhone 4. The OS was great to use and there are plenty of apps out there in the App Catalog, and even more apps and tweaks in the homebrew catalog, but the main thing that took me back to the iPhone was the screen size (3.1" on the Pre 1 and 2, the Veer and Pixi are 2.6"). I just couldn't get enough information on the screen at once, and scrolling and pinching got annoying quickly.

There's a glut of 10" tablets on the market. The iPad dominates the market and the ten or so 10" Android tablets do nothing to help HP's situation there. 7" tablets are completely different when it comes to portability, there isn't as much competition at this screen size, and Apple has stated that they have no intentions to build a 7" tablet (which means that it's coming, but it's not here yet and doesn't have 80-95% market share like the 10" iPad does). A $250-$300 7" tablet has the opportunity to give HP a nice foothold into the market, and once they do, they can go back and fight for 2nd place in the 10" market. Building 7" marketshare and building consumer mindshare to eliminate also-ran status is the only way HP (or anyone else for that matter) will have a fighting chance in the tablet space.
This fails to stop corruption and just introduces further red tape.

It seems that you're looking for a sanity check to veto insanely out of date and silly practises, but having read the synopsis of the petition I would say that you are introducing further ability to have private industry act corruptly and direct more tax payer money into their pockets without actually providing the sanity check you're looking for.

I say that speaking as someone who has taken part in a number of multi-million pound bids for work in the past.

What you've got to do is stop the vendors from being the decision makers. Government lacks the knowledge of how to do things and keeps asking private industry, who then write their wish list of work that keeps them flush for another 10 years. Nothing in your proposal stops this, and all it seems to do is to make this corruption even more official as they would just pay another 3rd party to approve the proposal.
This is pretty cool to see that LinkedIn used node.js for their mobile interface for pretty much the exact same reasons I used node for the last mobile interface I built. To echo the article's sentiment, node works really well when you are interfacing with a bunch of other services.
This is the story from the guy who originally had a dispute with hosting provider.

http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/jk195/stay_the_f...
Exporting is loosely-defined here. It means that they can't show export-controlled data (ie: some parts of rocket / missile technology) to foreign nationals. Just showing the document inside a US company to a non-US person is classified as "exporting".
Big corporations are a lot more likely to do this. Smaller companies and startups (like where I am right now) are much more likely to just open source stuff that isn't core business logic.
ADO.NET Connection Pooling, Internals and Issues
ADO.NET connection pooling. How it works internally and what issues it can cause.
Court allows Samsung Galaxy Tab to again sell in Europe
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra-...
In the "Macro Basics" section, he seems to completely glaze over the _other_ problem with unhygenic macros.[1]

Consider:

(defmacro square (x)
`(* ,x ,x))

(let ((* my-vector-dot-product))
...
(square (* bar baz)))

He seems a bit brash in his attacks on Scheme and insistence that hygenic macros are bad. He doesn't even mention Clinger's explicit renaming macros which solve the problem without using a DSL (an approach which he derides).

Also, what about side effecting arguments to macros? I'm hesitant to put too much credence in this book when it seems to ignore significant problems with defmacro.

[1] http://letoverlambda.com/index.cl/guest/chap3.html#sec_5
New Delhi Police Arrest Leader of Anti-Corruption Protest
Taiwan's HTC sues Apple over patents
Ask HN: Is it possible to commute into a Bay Area startup?
I am a great type of person to have at a startup. I am a product manager who can actually code (and not Excel, I've got code in the Erlang VM and have extended CouchDB for our needs), which means I know how to decide what to build and how to build it, too. There is no skill at a startup more important than knowing what to build, IMO, and I would love to use my product management skills to help a startup.

I don't generally fit in at large companies as a result of my schizophrenic career personality and the startup ecosystem where I'm at is marginal. I've been working at a startup for the last 18 months (in a weird, not-quite-founder way). The "not-quite" part has become untenable for me, so it's time to move on.

Is it possible to become involved with the Bay Area startup scene without moving to the Bay Area? For personal reasons, I am unable to move to the Bay Area, though I am close enough that I could commute in regularly and, since I'm outside of the Bay Area, I could use some of the salary difference to cover that.

I recognize this likely wouldn't work for a two-person startup, but is it possible to get involved early in a place this way? If so, how would you go about breaking in?
Show HN: Fileslap, online file sharing with built in viewing capabilities
Please can you kill your Chrome IE plugin popup (on IE7), if I had an alternative way of browsing your site on a corporate machine I already would do, dropping a massive popup covering the content that I can't get past doesn't help.
ZeroMQ is pretty good at making them parallel. Erlang nifs can get the job done too if you want a more exotic solution. Ship has sailed for putting something directly in the language.
But it has more tablet-capable apps than android. ~300 at last count.
Libraries are the same no matter what namespace they live in [1]. The C++ compiler does not give special treatment to the libraries in std::. So there's no different between "external" libraries and libraries specified by the standard.

[1] I suspect that most of the compilers will make the std::atomic_* interface (http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2007/n242...) compile down to compiler intrinsics, but the interface will still be just a template library.
Ask HN: Have you had an iOS app rejected?  If so, why?
About to submit to the app store. Rather than page through lots of generic advice, thought it would be interesting to get a few first-hand accounts.

If you've ever had your app rejected, why? And also, how surprised were you by the rejection? Did you know you were doing something questionable?
Cheap Handbags
Google's Strategic Mistakes Drove Motorola Buy
Not sure why you were down voted. This seems like it would be a legitimate concern to me if I were a "regular" Stanford student enrolled in (and paying for) this course.
Survey of Syntactic Extensions in Lisp Family : elisp, CL, Clojure,Arc, defmacro
ZocDoc's CEO on how to raise $70m from 5 billionaires
I was still living in Singapore at the time the preverbal matter hit the rotating device. Whether or not you think Arrington or Fusion Garage were at fault for their falling out, I reckon their squabble did more to set back Singapore's IT industry reputation than anything else in recent memory.

In the papers and discussing it with IT professionals working there, there were sour grapes on both sides of the debate, ranging from people claiming Fusion Garage was being unfairly beaten up by an arrogant overseas blogger, to those who expressed resentment and even anger at a local company they claimed reflected poorly on their entire IT industry.

Needless to say, the iPad's introduction and everyone forgetting about the JooJoo helped a lot, but the damage has been done. I grew up there and wouldn't hesitate working with Singaporean companies, but I would understand if other foreigners (aka "angmos") would have reservations. Which is a shame, because there is some extrodinary talent over there.
Yeah - I appreciate that the loop macro is a bit like a wee looping DSL that has been bolted onto Lisp!
Hi Martin,

clickable: http://www.upout.com

http://www.upout.com/martin <- dead link from company page

http://blog.upout.com/ <- dead link from home page
Thank you. What you say is correct, but not to the point. The expression you gave is not explicitly parallel. And more to the point, if I can expect expressions to be executed in a serial order, than I don't see how I can make them explicitly parallel.
"Government should sponsor this kind of thing"

Maybe 60% of the budget of Stanford is from research grants from the US Federal Government. For the students, there are also scholarships, e.g., from the NSF, NIH, etc., which is more "government" support.

Be not at all in doubt: Look at the Stanford campus with all its buildings, lawns, people, equipment, etc. and know that nearly all of it is paid for by the US Federal government.
Even when there's a compilation step it can be hidden. Homebrew on OS X does compile each package, but produces no actual compiler output. VMWare Player regularly recompiles kernel modules when it detects a kernel upgrade invalidating them. To the user it looks like an bullet list installation step.
With so many competing ideas, you see which one gains traction first, then work on incorporating it into the standards.

But that's what he's promoting. Cilk has been around for a long time, since before the current multicore era.
Yes exactly, "what should I build" is a better way to ask this question.

Great links - thanks. I had read the PG article a while ago but a re-read is good idea.
Are Linux Users Smarter or is Everyone Else Just Lazy?
Human Consultants in Business are a Dying Breed
SkillShare Raises $3.1 Million to Turn Users into Educators
"If he think that his tax rate isn't high enough, he's free to write a check."

When you try to make the rules of the game better, you don't personally start playing by the new rules, you try to make the rules of the game better.
I assume windsurfer below is correct and that most of these have been fixed in the latest build (unavailable to me yet).

I will wait for it to become available and then write a small list with the issues and try to send it to the mailing list/bugzilla.