skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I was young, I went with my parents to buy one (to replace a really old gas mower). We tried out a few at the store on the patch of grass out front, and they were a lot of work. I could just barely push it. Then we pulled out the instruction manual and read how to adjust the blades, made one small adjustment, and it instantly became really easy. Even easier than our old gas mower.

I've heard TV stores intentionally adjust some TVs (which would otherwise all look virtually the same) to look worse, to convince you to buy one nicer than that. Could it be that lawnmower stores keep some push mowers sitting in the back, with the blades cranked all the way down to "impossible to push", to convince you to pay a lot more for a gas mower?

I'd never buy a gas mower again. They're bigger, more expensive to buy and operate, harder to clean, and loud and stinky to use. The push mower I've used was neither "inconsistent" nor "hard work".
Waste an afternoon...'programming' with this game
Who are the Richest People in Tech ?
TicketStumbler knows the Bobcats won't make the playoffs for another ten years and is simply testing our users' savvy.

Just kidding - thanks for pointing that out. Our biggest user issue, like my favorite female body part, has to do with the back end.
Alphab works closely with its companies to help them with their business strategy.
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Confessions of a Banned Digger
C++ has a great support and is stable, has a super powerful community, good libs (boost)

C# is also good and stable, if you want Linux, you can use Mono.

Java - is ok as well here, can be mixed with C++

I would personaly choose C++(low)/Python(high) pair for this task
Because writing a good distributed OS, is a piece of cake.

The _ _ _ _ is a _ _ _!
Tim O'Reilly: Stop throwing sheep, do something worthy
SlideRocket Open to Public
Yep it's a variant of that. Those links above are what I'm looking for, so if any others have some suggestions, sprinkle them with a little contempt, I'll take em!
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I do think ease of use will be more of a selling point then power and capability.

I think you're wrong, but not because the tradeoff will be "ease of use" vs. "power and capability". Power and capability are coming to mobile devices, both from Apple and from the market at large, and people will use that power and capability. It won't matter whether you ("you" being a placeholder for pretty much everybody in the developed world) think you need more apps running on your phone--you will have them, and you will like them, and you will use them more and more in place of your desktop or laptop machine. This is the way it will be in a couple years time, and you can quote me on that.

You're coming to the conclusions you are (that the iPhone will somehow become the leading mobile device--note that I didn't say it would maintain a leadership position, because it has never had a leadership position...it has 25% of the smart phone market, but that's a small niche of the whole mobile market) because you're framing the question wrong.

You're assuming there are huge tradeoffs: Ease of use with the apps that Apple says you can have vs. hard to use, ugly, but with super jet powered applications that allow you to rule the world while sitting on the toilet. The reality will be more like how the PC industry shook out (I'm pretty darned sure, anyway): Good enough ease of use, good enough products, nice enough looking, and dramatically cheaper and more powerful than the Apple counterpart.

When every phone is a smart phone, the smart phone market will look dramatically different than it does today. It'll look a lot more like the regular mobile phone market (which is to say, a hodgepodge of products from a hodgepodge of manufacturers--but Android has a good chance at being a leading OS on those products).
I wonder how they deal with spam. Twitter doesn't even require email verification. Someone could create a bunch of twitter accounts, connect them, and shotgun URLs by script.
The reason that Microsoft/Windows has such a dominant market share has nothing to do with how 'open' the PC market is—it is due to the historical predominance of Microsoft DOS which is related to the fact that IBM was the first company that sold 'Personal' Computers into businesses. In the 1970's virtually no individuals had computers of their own, and the vast majority of people who had used a computer were exposed to it at work.

As businesses purchased IBM PCs instead of terminals for large IBM mainframes or minis, more and more people were exposed to computers. Apple was selling computers into a very different market—they were serving computer 'enthusiasts', in the 1970's that was a very limited group akin to those people who build thier own sailboats or airplanes. IBM was exposing a much larger and more homogenous group of people to computers—people with jobs ;-)

As computers became more mainstream over the years there were just more people who had used and were familiar with 'PCs' running MS-DOS, which eventually transitioned into Windows. The Microsoft piece of the personal-computer market has ALWAYS been bigger in the modern era, because it was the easy choice—people used it at work, bought it for home, and were comfortable recommending the same approach for their friends and co-workers.

Mobile devices such as smartphones are VERY 'personal'. With the possible exception of the BlackBerry, which will have been imposed on a lot of people through their jobs (as the PC/MS combo was in the 70's and 80's) people are free to choose whatever they want for their device. The majority of the market will not choose a smartphone based on whether or not the OS is 'open' or 'closed'—they will very likely not understand the distinction.

Apple understands that users will not be interested in apportioning blame between the hardware manufacturer, the OS provider and the applications developers. AT&T probably understands this too, and so will other carriers. If/when Android develops any of the little issues that are very common with applications written for other 'open' platforms, those issues will reflect poorly on all parties involved.

The public at large will not understand and accept the compromises in applications that those of us in the "blogosphere" take for granted They will not keep coming back to try an application through 25 "point" releases until it is finally/potentially better and more robust than any 'closed-OS' alternative - they will give up on it.

Customers will choose smartphones based on how USABLE they are, how many useful and easy-to-use features they have, how reliable they are, and how 'cool' they are. Unfortunately, Android and any other completely 'open' OS is likely to have more buggy applications and security issues than a semi-monitored 'closed' system like the iPhone OS. I do not think Android will ever be a major player in the smartphone space unless/until they modify their definition of 'open' to allow some method for 'vetting' of applications.
I think that you definitely want an architecture that can handle random failures of database servers. Thus you never know exactly how many you have at a specific time. That's the whole point.
The Mos Eisley Cantina.

Seriously though, isn't there a FAQ about this somewhere?
Speed tests of Javascript frameworks
... this is getting confusing. Isn't Intellectual Ventures your run-of-the-mill patent troll? Don't invent anything worthwhile, acquire patents, sue companies that get stuff done?...
"you never know exactly how many you have at a specific time."

This is a completely unmeasurable quantity is it??
i'll summarize by quoting a fark headline:

Palin email hack raises question a lot of people seem to have been ignoring: what the hell is a government official doing conducting sensitive government business on an unsecured private account?
don't forget that some of the biggest innovative breakthroughs that we use to this day came from hackers being bored and doing things they shouldn't.

Such as?

We need to be careful to distinguish between two types of "shouldn't". There's the "shouldn't" that's merely against some kind of arbitrary rules, and there's the "shouldn't" that's actually immoral because it hurts people.

Plenty of useful things were invented by breaking stupid rules, but few were invented by actually being a malicious jerk.
Missing Simons:

http://www.forbes.com/lists/2008/54/400list08_James-Simons_5...

Who, if not a tech guy, is clearly a bit of a hacker.
I don't know CL, but from the subset of scheme that i know, i cant imagine how can this language fail. It just feels too good and the code is so beautiful. I could say for certain that scheme has made me into a better programmer.
This is really rather simple to understand: Part of the motivation for inventing complex new derivatives is to create things that look conservative to the model but are actually risky.

The personal incentives for traders are to get big returns, which implies making risky bets. But your risk management system won't let you make risky bets directly. So instead, you make risky bets indirectly through instruments specifically engineered to game the risk management system.

It's nothing new. Michael Lewis' excellent book "Liar's Poker" describes how Solomon Brothers invented ways to obtain triple-A credit ratings for incredibly risky forex trades so that they could be sold to S&L's with strict rules about the credit-worthiness of their investments. And that was at least twenty years ago.
Too bad there're no conditionals. 'Twould be fun to write a brainfuck interpreter with this.
I thought this was a scam. You don't "kill game lag" by speeding up one hop on the route. Their marketing: "Killer uses LLR™ Technology to reduce the lag and latency that often occurs in high action interactive MMO and First Person Shooter games." It's news that Dell says it's legitimate in their opinion.
It's a good idea. But I'm confused -- in what way is this "open source"?
10 Paradoxical Traits of the Creative Personality
I've been a bit curious on how serious the "stay in Pennsylvania" part is. Are they heavily enforcing it, hasn't really been an issue, etc?

I'm guessing for the HN crowd here, not being able to head West after something like this might be a downer.

Pittsburgh is a nice place around the CMU/Pitt/etc. area. Can't really speak for the rest of the city as I didn't really get around much while at school there.
It continually amazes me why people have such intense hatred of Apple. At least, you give credit, but still: "bastards"? Abusive contracts: who knows who forced an abusive contract for the phone? I agree with you that cheaper, working things will beat the crap out of the iPhone, but still: "bastards"? What did they do to you, man?
Ask YC: Is there a utility that takes thumbnail style 'screenshots' of webpages?
I have noticed more and more different websites displaying little thumbnail screenshot images of entire webpages, for instance (picking something a total random:

http://dzone.com/links/gumbo_inline_twoway_data_binding.html

Notice the snapshot image of the website it links to in the center of the page. How do you do that? Its appearing in so many places, I am guessing there must be a library for it somewhere, but I have no idea what!
That's a lot more difficult than rounding pi to 3.2 though.
Sandy Jen - Scaling Synchronous Web Apps: Lessons Learned from Meebo
I'm intrigued by the idea of Lisps built on top of other run-times.

Clojure is the example here that all the cool kids are talking about. But I just notice Nu in the list of functional languages the article mentions, which is a Lisp built on top of Objective C. The creator of Nu points out he wanted a Lisp to extend C, and that Objective C provided a dynamic run time to build on while still allowing the incorporation of straight C code. I suspect there is a good .Net Lisp out there somewhere, I just don't know what it is.

Building a Lisp on top of these languages gives you macros, code as data, culture of functional programming, etc. while still making all of the underlying libraries available.
In his Ignite Boston talk he basically said "startups are not where it's at. do something that matters"
I agree - I think the other strength of it is that macros are less messy then a language with infix operators/functions.

There is something nice about a language (lisp) that doesn't look like anything else, in an artistic sense (not sure if that counts for much).

I think when most people complain about the parens, they are really complaining about the endless ))))))) at the end of an expression.
Cross platform testing for your new website
Rejected By Apple? Sell Your iPhone App Yourself, Profit
Microsoft's Problem's are bigger than Seinfeld
Dummies Guide to the Financial Mess
well given android also uses webkit, even with the option of installable apps, this will only help web apps if it takes off - as the lowest cost way to target a mobile app for both android and iphone is a webkit compatible web app.
Blodget hires financial gossip blogger John Carney
Lisp is the second oldest high level language, having barely been pipped by FORTRAN... and it's still around, and under active development. Long way from a failure.

Equally, with that kind of a trajectory and history, you'd also have to predict Lisp isn't going anywhere soon.

If anything, the rising interest and competition in functional languages is pushing Lisp back into the spotlight.
I don't know much about C#, but functional code in functional languages is beautiful. Attractiveness of functional vs. imperative code seems to have more to do with the intentions of the language desires than anything inherent to the language. Take Ocaml, for instance. The syntax for imperative structures and object-oriented programming is very ugly, but the syntax for functional programming is beautiful.
Some discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196148
Interlisp had the last part correct. [ was a special open paren and ] closed all open parens back to (and including) the most recent [.
the next MBP will ship with a pony.
It's not the butt-ugly code, but the copying. Yes, there are tricks to avoid copying an array just to update one element (if you don't have side effects ....), but at some point you just want to modify something.
Lisp will have played its major part when other languages have real macro systems.
I thought this was a great analogy to express your conclusion:

"It was like a weather forecaster in Houston last weekend talking about the onset of Hurricane Ike by giving the average wind speed for the previous month."
Nice - I remember someone saying that that in emacs you could have it format it using indentation and now show the parens (or maybe it wasn't emacs).
Guys, at -5 I think we can stop piling on now. It wasn't that stupid a comment.
The article is focused on developing Flex using Emacs, but probably also worth mentioning that the non-free Flex development environment (Flex Builder) is Eclipse-based.

I've never truly used it in anger, but I found it extremely good. It's US$250 or something last I checked.

If you're more of an IDE-type, worth checking out.
Not so.

"So some trading desks took the most arcane security, made of slices of mortgages, and entered it into the computer if it were a simple bond with a set interest rate and duration."

I find the lying to your doctor analogy very good to describe this kind of behavior.
That is probably the future of lisp - I mean we can see it already. Clojure is one example (in use in some startups) and arc is another (being built on MzScheme - although thats probably more for practical reasons).
Typesetting UI Elements
Clarity and unambiguity aren't necessarily the same things. The human brain can handle huge amounts of ambiguity, and our spoken languages reflect this. A programming language is meant to be a bridge between our ambiguous thoughts and the unambiguous calculations of a computer. S-expressions constrain the format of the programmer's dialog with the computer, making it simple and monotonic. For some people this will add a new level of clarity to their work, but for other people it will just limit what they can easily express in code.

High-level languages like Ruby may contain lossy abstractions that obscure the low-level workings of the machine, but Lisp is another lossy abstraction that has the potential to obscure the high-level, abstruse workings of our own minds. Both of these abstractions can be valuable, but neither is without its shortcomings.
Summary: Mark Cuban's brother is obsessed with gaming digg. He and other spammers use time-delayed scripting techniques to artificially promote stories. After his first warning, he returned to using scripts and now his account is deleted, his IP address blacklisted.
www.mr-thumb.de

there are heaps of others but this site doesn't place a logo on the image.
Why can't macro systems be part of an IDE? Is there anything macros do that can't be done at compile-time?

Startup idea: web-based language-specific IDE, with a simple interface for sharing/voting on macros between users.
I think Tim is behind the curve on this one and startups have already stepped up to this challenge. Startups that create social networks or other semi-frivolous toys have already had a stigma attached to them for at least a year now.
You could electronically interact with other services, such as FaceBook or MySpace, where other older services couldn't.

I like the idea that I can authorize somebody to change my facebook status to "Hugh is dead". It would be embarrassing if it were stuck for all eternity on, say, "Hugh is going skydiving".

Realistically I think it'd be difficult to persuade people to give money to a brand new startup for a service which probably won't be delivered for decades. But maybe you can think of a way to do it, especially if you somehow tie yourself to some long-lived, trustworthy organization that people can be more confident will still exist in a century's time.
Thanks for posting the conference. There are going to be some ycombinator summer08 guys (backtype) speaking as well.
The lisp macro system can more or less be done at compile time, yes, but that's not the problem with other languages. The format of lisp makes it especially easy to do macros - code is data!

Here's an example. Take, for example, this class declaration:

(defclass dog (animal)
((size :accessor dog-size)
(name :accessor dog-name :init-form "Fido")))

How do you make that into data? Easy. Just quote it:

'(defclass dog (animal) ...)

Now take the equivalent in Java:

public class Dog {
int size;
String name = "Fido";
}

How do you get that into data? Well, I suppose the best you could do without modifications to the core language is just put it in a string. But then to do something useful you'd have to do so much tedious string parsing it wouldn't be worth it. I suppose you could invent a special ParseTree class or something, and a quote operator, and etc etc, but that wouldn't be nearly as easy as Lisp makes it.

What the previous poster was saying is that once other languages have a code representation that is easy to work with as data, and can manipulate that code as data at compile-time to produce complex macros, then Lisp might fade. (At least that's how I understood it, correct me if I'm wrong.)
CrossSlide: A jQuery plugin to create pan and cross-fade animations
Top 10 ways to save PC computing energy
Pure(no side-effects) functional programming means a lot less bugs and it is easier to find the ones that you do create.
It also means more modular code because of natural separation of concerns.

It is much more expressive than imperative/OO programming.

I especially like Haskell, in my opinion the most expressive language there is and at the forefront of new exciting programming features.

Haskell has an awesome typesystem. Statically typed but with optional declarations. It will infer the types by itself and verify consistency.
You can ask the interpreter for the type of a specific function(and search hoogle to find a function with the type you desire).
But it is not only interpreted, on the contrary it is a compiled language and a very fast one.
Much faster than Python, Ruby etc, rivals C at some stuff and it scales without problems to multiple cores so that advantage will only grow.
Pattern-matching, not only is thetypesystem very good for avoiding bugs but patternmatching really helps to make code more readable and makes it easier to verify that you have covered every case.

I also find functional code very beautiful and easy to read, here is a naive mergesort in haskell:

merge :: (Ord t) => [t] -> [t] -> [t]
merge xs [] = xs
merge [] ys = ys
merge (x:xs) (y:ys)
| x < y = x:(merge xs (y:ys))
| otherwise = y:(merge ys (x:xs))

mergesort :: Ord a => [a] -> [a]
mergesort [] = []
mergesort [x] = [x]
mergesort xs = merge (mergesort left) (mergesort right)
where
middle = div (length xs) 2
(left, right) = splitAt middle xs

Easy to read even if you never programmed in haskell before right?

Scala is also cool since it takes the best from both worlds and really delivers.
Building on an already existing platform and also providing nice abstractions for concurrency and parallellism.
I have always found that the aesthetic and inherent 'rightness' of mechanical tools makes a difference in how efficiently I am able to work with them. Working with Snap-On or MAC ratchet sets just feels better than using the equivalent taiwanese tools. I had not realized until just now that my feelings about developing using a Macintosh were probably related to the same sense of wonder/awe/respect :-)
Cafe 2.0: After the Gold Rush
RHEL 5 Perl fixed.
"For those who don't know, Flex allows you to write XML and JavaScript and compile it to a .swf instead of using the traditional GUI timeline based tools." uhm... you write ActionScript3, not javascript. Different beasts and likely to remain so given the current fragmentation in ecmascript recommendations.
Flash game that teaches programming
Sergey Brin's blog (?)
I would prefer something I can install on my own server as opposed to a service. That site is all in German, but it looks like its webservice that captures the images for you - am I correct?
I totally agree with O'Reilly, Companies like Slide and RockYou do not deserve half a billion valuation and I am pretty much sure Max Levchin can do better than make social apps for Social-Networks.
Fusebox Genesis (Great No BS Story on "Starting Up")
Yeah, no way to halt my recursion. :(

We may be too advanced for this game :(
Freakishly close?

pi - 3.141592653 is freakishly closer. Scared yet?
How do you decide what's worth half a billion dollars? If a social network app will drive half a billion dollars worth of advertising profit over N years, then it's worth half a billion dollars, even if the same effort is better spent combating malaria.
It seems to me that the root cause to the computer models failing was that the government stepped in to "help."

Once government requirements were put in place, I can only imagine the level of red tape required to make changes to what was a dynamic system before.

None of this was mentioned in the article. Does anyone have any facts on this?