skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Keep in mind that when those people were hired, there was a lot of maturing that needed to be done in the computer space. These people are titans by today's standards because the timing of their arrival on the scene had much to do with the amount of influence that they had. If you were to take ANY of Charles Simonyi's recognizable mainstream achievements (most notably Word and Excel) from the 80s and transported them to a startup today, they would hardly amount to a drop in a bucket (of course this is subjective, but I think you get the point!).

Today technology is commonplace and more widely distributed. I would place danah boyd in the same category as those you have mentioned because of the fact that the computer/tech/internet worlds are so much larger than it was in the 80s. She is a leading intellectual when it comes to social networking and I hope she has some influence at Microsoft in a positive direction. Because of her large amount of knowledge in the technology space as it applies to its social impact, this is indeed a key hire for Microsoft as they struggle to make heads or tails of how companies like Google and Facebook have had such a huge following.
Obviously you're not alone.

But almost 600 days and with a major election upcoming there have been very few mentions of it. Celebrate the positives!
List comprehensions don't exist in their own vacuum though. For generators (the generalization of list comprehensions) and then coroutines, it's a feature that can't be replicated in Python without serious kludges; it does indeed add semantics. It enables you to do more: threads, actor model, state machine, modularize large functions. I think the cost of implementing list comprehensions was more than worth the while for all the benefits that have been reaped from it.
I couldn't even think of opening this. Its like comparing pig shit with gold bars.
Google Book Search Adds Embeddable Previews
The best way to understanding something is by creating it.
that the ticket, grab for libraries written by loosers. That will make your web app shine.
What, Why, Where, How and more on the proposed startup
No, we did not come through YC. We did attend Startup School 2007 and we did apply, but it wasn't to be.

Thanks for the advice; this is sort of what we have in mind.
someone tried to persuade me that you don't do such things with Lisp

This always puzzled me too. Admittedly it's less of an issue now that we can deploy programs over the web. But it's still kind of weird.

Here's my speculative answer. The classic Lisp programmer doesn't care that much about building software for end users. He's more interested in amusing himself and, occasionally, other Lisp programmers.

I don't mean to slam Lisp (which I love) or Lisp programmers (I am one). But I believe I have observed evidence of the above.
Visiting less often is certainly not going to help.

You're right. I'll try to contribute more. (After a few hundred more LOC.)

Feels good just talking about it.
Headline is both misleading and out-of-date anyway, since they've already decided to keep the article after a long debate (and in the meantime, an improvement of the article). The system works.
Talk like a physicist
The Trouble With Boys
Bailout Comic Relief
This is a matter of taste, of course, as we don't have a good study of programming code comprehension yet, but I think the coolest part of JS are cond statements using the trinary operator:

var foo = predicate ? "one" :
predicate2 ? "two" :
"default";

And short-circuit and/or:

var foo = uncheckedFoo || "default";
var wiz = (bar && bar(foo)) || "default";

Truthy values get in the way sometimes (especially 0), but it sure as hell beats a ton of if...else crud.

Worst part of JS, while we're at it:

true == "0" == 0 == false
So, what's your favorite language?
Pay to Play?
I have noticed recently in my fund raising efforts that many angel groups and forums charge startups to pitch. I abhor this. Capital is precious in a fledgling startup and "sophisticated" angels should know this better than I. Most of the angels and VC's I know detest this as well, so why do I continue to see it?
Right. So ... why bother with adding a feature to the language when the language as it already exists can do it in one easily-comprehended line of six tokens? I'm sure you like the shorter syntax better. But I didn't know it, despite years of experience with scripting languages (and even this paradigm) that should have informed me about what that code means.

But it didn't, for the simple reason that it looked funny because I haven't been keeping up with Python. I'll say it one last time: this idea, that the language should cater to its experts by adding features wherever possible, is what has killed C++ as a hacker's language. Python is walking blindly down the same path.
Actually I think the guy's correct in that it helps. I've seen this for sure in startups. I just think he's incorrect in that it's necessary, or that it should be a defining characteristic of an entrepreneur.
I submitted this because Peg Tyre's eponymous book came out last week. There are a couple things in this article she backs away from, most notably she no longer holds Gurian up as a reputable authority. Other than that the book is similar to the article, but much expanded and with many more facts and figures. The book is good but not brilliant, and there are actually a few errors in it, but overall I'd say it's still worth reading if you're interested in the subject or have a young kid. The author clearly spent a lot of time in the classroom and talking with parents, so it's really useful for highlighting what actually goes on in the classroom these days and how it may differ from when you were a kid.
Shining Chrome (of Google)
The other security design flaw of Rails that drives me nuts is that it is vulnerable to XSS attacks by default because it takes positive action to strip HTML from user input.

I believe that security should be the default, automatic choice, and you should have to take an affirmative step to disable that when you need to.

Rails does get a lot right with automatic cross-site request forgery protection and nearly automatic SQL injection protection but the lack of automatic HTML stripping and the default accessible attributes thing makes me sad.
Part of the problem in discussions like these is that people aren't really clear whether they're complaining about testing or TDD in particular, whether they're arguing about the benefits of TDD specifically, unit testing, or testing in general, and everybody involved may read the wrong thing into any ambiguity.

I, for one, would not argue with unit testing (particularly for libraries) or regression testing, but I think that an insistence on TDD can be excessive.
What is the "HN Quotient" of a story?
Reading the regular debates over what is or isn't "hacker news," one point that comes up repeatedly is that if a story is on digg, or MSN, or something else, it shouldn't be on HN. And then there are people who say that if it is on the reddit front page, they don't need it in HN.

Which leads me to wonder... Imagine a computed value for each story, call it the "HN Quotient." It is the degree to which the story is uniquely hacker news.

Stories that do well here but poorly on reddit, for example, would have high HN Quotient. Stories posted here first would have high HN Quotient.

It would be a kind of "uniqueness ranking." Would that be interesting? How could it be calculated?

(I am not suggesting that stories with low HN Quotient would not belong on HN, just curious about how such a thing could be measured and what it might tell us)
High horse? I feel no impetus to participate in that community.

What I do find interesting is how it seems very much an extrapolation of Jeff Atwood's blog - much as HN, I suppose, is largely populated by people who are attracted to Paul Graham's essays. On the one hand, this is perfectly natural; on the other hand I find it fascinating.

Edit: I'm not saying that the people in these communities necessarily agree with the opinions of their founders.
What a silly comment.

* DC includes Baltimore metro, which includes Columbia, MD, which actually is a small hotbed of tech startups.

* Not everyone works for the government; some people sell to the government. Plenty of enterprise startups funded themselves with one or two SA contracts.

* People in rural VA are "totally into NASCAR", and if you want to introduce this particular emotional market inefficiency, other entrepreneurs should be happy to exploit it. Believe it or not, there are plenty of very smart red-staters.

* People in urban Virginia just brought one of the Dem's strongest new senators to office, and Virginia has a Dem governor strong enough to be on Obama's running mate short list.

* You apparently didn't even read the post, since his argument is that the crappy weather makes people more productive, and you ignored the argument instead of shooting it down.
Several times over? I guess if we must, we must...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191212

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31834

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=185
Python could have had generators without having lisp comprehensions, so you don't get to use "generators good" to conclude "list comprehensions good".

List comprehensions were initially syntax for loops over generators. The current version introduces another variable scope.
The IE hack recommendation is great advice. I won't use conditional comments, it's much easier to maintain a few IE hacks in the main stylesheet.

I've never been in favor of breaking up a stylesheet very much. I'm writing a "CSS framework" right now that will only involve one extra CSS file, simple to use and easy to read. I'd much rather have a few marks in the file and fold code as needed than fumble with 10 tabs to make a few changes. And where does layout depart from pure styling? This is a question that confuses me when dealing with broken-up CSS. Border-width is layout, yes, but it's definitely also a visual element and doesn't feel like layout.

I think that this is the best way to format code, and almost all coders are familiar with it. Better to use a coding standard, I think.

.single .selector {
/* indent four spaces */
}

.multiple .selector1,
.multiple .selector2
{
/* indent four spaces */
}

/**
* Block comments
*/
.single .selector { single: property; }

Over-documentation means your class names and HTML semantics are incomplete. Most CSS code is very, very easy to figure out (you can pick a page apart with a glance at Firebug if it's tableless), and you either need to strip it out or unnecessarily increases load times.
Oracle Enters the AWS Cloud
Labels launch slotMusic format, miss point of digital music
Rails is no more vulnerable to XSS than any other web stack; I pay for my dev team by looking at apps all day, and they all have this problem.

You're right that taking positive action to neutralize metacharacters is a weak design. There is a setting in Rails, IIRC, that automatically h() filters outputs, but it should be the default. Just as importantly, though, even if h() is the default, you still have to audit all the places where you deliberately allow HTML output, and every app has to do that somewhere.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but I am saying that there's a major difference between mass-assignment, which is a problem Rails seems to have blundered into, and XSS, which is endemic to web apps.
Startup metrics, Prototyping, Scaling, Developing, Marketing, and Funding
12:13 PDT

4 articles in the top 60 listings on hacker news (and only one on the front page) about financial or political news.

doesn't seem too out-of-whack.
Hiring star from 90s to fix Vista's rep adds to impression that Microsoft is in time warp
Yes, the money would be used to pay 2-3 full-time salaries plus office space and possibly incentivize some other development directly beneficial to us.

The only urgency is the cyclical nature of the industry; we'd like to be in a good position before the next season begins on June 1 2009.
you can't be serious.

is this MySpace?

understand the sentiments, but this is a tad bit ridiculous. everybody talking about doing instead of doing, and getting super excited when someone suggests more talking...
If you were using a C compiler that produced executables that dynamically linked libc and other libraries, would you have any problems understanding that you can't run those executables on a machine that doesn't have the relevant libraries?

The lisp environment is basically the run-time library for lisp programs. In some cases, that run-time can be statically linked. In others, it can't.

You wouldn't find this confusing wrt C programs, so why is it a hard concept wrt Lisp programs?
"So ... why bother with adding a feature to the language when the language as it already exists can do it in one easily-comprehended line of six tokens?"

The decorator syntax is easier to read. It's at the top of the function where the arguments list and docstring are. Yes, there are tradeoffs when introducing new syntax, but decorators are definitely worth it.
I am actually looking forward to "smart money" as much for the smart as the money. We are encompassed with so many opportunities that it will be extremely helpful to have another vested party with significant experience to boot.
It's the NY Post, so yes. They're a tabloid who has it in their best interest to panic and frighten people.

"Facts" don't come into play at Rupert Murdoch's news outlets :)
I'm very skeptical about the value of stripping HTML from user input - what if your site is a forum where people discuss HTML? Or a site where people might want to talk about the <head> conference? http://www.headconference.com/

Stripping HTML on input also means you lose the ability to audit attempted attacks against your site.

A much smarter strategy in my opinion is to escape everything on output. That way it doesn't matter what people submit to your site - unless you explicitly say "this is safe to display unescaped" in your templates harmful characters will be neutralised.
The first Thinking Machines computer had tens of thousands of very dumb/slow processors. Their second system had far fewer processrs but they were significantly more capable.

Almost everyone at the time thought that the second machine was far more useable. Were they wrong? If so, why?
Thanks everyone for the insightful and helpful answers.
Excellent submission. I found his use of the phrase "the Mandarin disease" really intriguing, and it turns out so did other people; if you Google the phrase there is a lot of really good commentary on this piece.
No, Lisp is for weenies.
Finding and fixing mass assignment problems in Rails applications
I think you're agreeing with tjr. The concept isn't hard, it makes perfect sense. What's puzzling is why it's hard to get a simple answer when you ask how to do it - or rather why the question itself is frowned upon.
It's a very simplified explanation. In the future you will have a choice between fewer, fatter cores (Nehalem etc.) or many, slower cores (Niagara, Larrabee, Tilera, etc.). The massive multicore chips will have more MIPS and MIPS/W if you can use them. But if you can't use them, don't buy them.
> but the best-known Rails sample code is all vulnerable.

Rails is moving so fast now that most sample code is very outdated. Take authentication for example, there's at least 5 different plugins, all favoured as the best way to authenticate in rails at one time or another. Totally hopeless for a newbie to dig out which is the solution to go with, or at least it's a few days trial and error, trying out tutorials here and there. I've done a few rails projects on and off and each time I come back there's tons of new stuff, which is really great, but I would personally like to have more batteries included or "blessed" official plugins because I don't spend all my time in rails land, and it's hard to keep track of all the new goodies.

Really interesting article.
None of these people care about scaling anything but the attention they're paid
I don't think anyone argues or don't understand this concept. The problem is: instead of answering the question: "How do I create executable?" people got lectured on why they shouldn't do that. I think it is much more productive for everyone just to give an answer and then, once you get the usual follow up question quickly explain why executable is big. This way lisp community might get more users.

But as it stands now all we hear is complaints that lisp community is bunch of jerks - the answers people get for this simple question is one of the reason why people think that the lisp community is not friendly.
Wow. I'm quite embarrassed.
The classic Lisp programmer doesn't care that much about building software for end users. He's more interested in amusing himself and, occasionally, other Lisp programmers.

What a great quote !
If they have excess cash that they have no clue how to spend, they should return it to investors via a dividend.

See http://blogmaverick.com/2008/09/08/talking-stocks-and-money/

Note the section "Microsoft, Dividends and Stock Buybacks," originally written four years ago.
This is pretty cool, it seems a lot of developments in the wireless world has approached things from a macro level (whole networks) but what about the micro (a room full of cellphones)?

I.E. my cellphone can connect me to all sorts of things out there in the "cloud' but what about what's in front of me?
How Startups and Ad Agencies Can Collaborate
It looks like the StopBits enumeration is in place for type-safety. It has the values None, One, Two, and OnePointFive. With just those four values, any representation other than an enumeration would be either inefficient or confusing.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.ports.stop...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_start-stop
I'm guessing the reasoning behind that statement is the power consumption. The higher the clock rate of a core, the more power it consumes and the more heat it dissipates. If you don't slow down each core in a crowded multicore, things might heat up too much and melt down. Until we get some other semiconductors that can withstand the heat, I'd say that's probably going to happen.
No, they weren't wrong. People like Hillis and now Patterson are thinking hardware-centric; the most efficient thing to build is many small cores. But users don't want that. If people bought hardware efficiency, we'd all be using Transputers, Alphas, and Cells. The real challenge is to figure out the most efficient design that customers will actually buy.
Adobe is announcing their CS4 line-up tomorrow
Music On microSD: I Can’t Believe The Labels Fell For This
Just mentioning,
Dr Scheme has a make-exe command in the menu. But that's the only way I know how to make an exe out of a lisp program. But then I have never looked for a way either.
They care about one social network at a time, at most.

People don't give a fuck about anything social outside of Facebook. Not most people.
1. Can you list a couple of features of C++ you are talking about?

2. Why do you thing that list comprehensions are so difficuilt to learn? iterators, generators and list comprehensions are easy and clean concepts.

If you want a feature, you write a lib. Once the feature is widely deployed it becomes a recognized pattern, so why not to include this one into the language?

Look at lambda or bind in boost - they are scary, but people still use them, since it's a powerful concept, and it would be much better to include them into the language.
yeah and she can do for msft what she did for yhoo: BLAH BLAH BLAH
Data trumps the HiPPO (Highest Paid Poisitions Opinion)
Does someone here actually use it?
Any guess as to who the brilliant student was (whose published thesis was a "most brilliant contribution to metaphysics")?
Oracle has new licensing, but the article doesn't say what it is. $10/hour? $100?
It's difficult to have a high level discussion on something if you don't agree on a low level.

For example: individuals from the Austrian and Neo-Classical schools will necessarily have a different understanding of the current financial crisis. As such, they'll have to reconcile their underlying theories in order to coherently debate the implications of those theories.

It's rather unfortunate, I think we could largely limit such discussions to just the points relevant to 'hackers,' but I don't think that we could avoid such degeneration altogether.
oddly enough, same here. I wondered about writing papers on metaphysics...then I saw the article was dated 1903.
That may not be a particularly interesting example, but I don't think it's bad.

var a = 5;
var a = function() {
alert('hello world');
};
var a = 2;

It's not a closure (which is what I assume you were hoping for), but it definitely reveals something pretty unexpected about the language for someone who has no experience with first class functions.
Sometimes you need to express your opinion to start a discussion.
Specious article. ShareThis has fewer dedicated users than Digg and it's entering a very crowded space where not even presence on other web sites will give it a big advantage.

Is Reddit the next Digg? I think that's far more likely.
I'm guessing the Posterous founders do. ;-)

I use Tumblr, because it's more social and because the Tumblr community is basically all of the tech community that isn't on Hacker News, so I get to see both sides.
Almost like the article that was linked. The full title of the article is: "Microsoft Authorizes A Big $40 Billion Buyback; Ups Dividend"
I think the risk of this is inherently lower considering the unambiguous name of the site. However, everybody here is responsible for the articles being on the front page considering they upvoted them. It's hard for a community to be so singular in its focus.
Well, it is a good article. HN doesn't really have a mechanism for reviving good stuff beyond reposting it like this. (...by design, I assume, or some people would do nothing but reviving popular stuff.)

Maybe there should be a "best of" HN page, something like the best of Craigslist?
Or 6.7%.

doesn't seem too out-of-whack.

Most especially considering the what is happening in the world - a major, and highly contested, election and a major financial collapse. If that's the high-water mark, this community really is very strong at resisting the drift tendencies. We should be celebrating that success.
Googlewhacks for Fun and Profit
Bad signs for Blu-ray: Free discs, cheap players, and declining market share
A semi-technical review of string theory
Technorati Report: State of the Blogosphere 2008
How to create a website banner with the GIMP (a beginner tutorial)
I think other companies would have appeared to fill the void, it just would have taken longer.
Oracle puts its 11g database in Amazon's cloud
The same Arpanet built to provide communications in the event of a war with the USSR? Hmm.
I have several websites in mind that I would like to start working on, but one of my issues is that I don't really have any graphic design chops. I have opened the GIMP a few times, only to run away in horror.

In my attempts to come up with a banner for a future blog, I came across the submitted tutorial. It is a straightforward, useful introduction to the GIMP for someone who has never used it. Hopefully it can get you over that initial design hump and help you get to work on those personal websites you've been putting off.
Most of us visiting this site have an entrepreneurial mindset. If things get too bad, do what any good entrepreneur would do: create something to fill your needs.
You are mistaken, sorry. Complaining does change people's behaviour. You wouldn't be complaining about other people's behaviour if you didn't think so! That being said, you are entitled to suggest that submitting content and upvoting content is the best way to make the community "better."

But it is not the only way, at least not until HN explicitly forbids meta-posting.
not every rails application needs authentication.
Google Blog: Building a future that's clean and green
white_list is a better option, imho
Weightless threads with python generators (charming-python David Mertz)