skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> My standard of proof is whether the proposed language change will make the source of a real program shorter

Short != Clear. Brevity is a false economy, I think you are pushing for the wrong goal.
Actually, that's just one reason. Other problems include:

* Attracting people who care more about talking about politics than other things, which creates a negative feedback loop.

* 'Pack' voting down of whoever is currently unpopular with the current groupthink. This is reinforced by the people above.
Yes. Not knowing exactly when it will be finished, trying to see if the light is just "on" or pulsating. Getting off the train while it's still at your station or getting on a plane etc.
Religious communities and atheists. Thou shalt be religious by yourself, otherwise: TERRORISTNAZIONTWITTER!!!
If you did it right I think it would work.

iTunes makes money by unpackaging songs and selling alcarte why not news?

The POD device could offer other printed materials as well and you could sell it to the news stands as a way to avoid buying a bunch of inventory that is going to go stale in 1 to 30 days anyways.

What that article is really saying is that you could charge more for a customized paper even if it had less content and people wouldn't care.
That's true, but I think that a serious argument can be made for the last few decades being the first point in time in humanity's recent history in which we are absolutely capable of achieving it.

There's definitely a shift going on. I suppose there has always been a shift going on - but it seems like throughout history the "shifts" have been relatively evenly spaced with regards to how they affect the "average persons" lifestyle, and what new things they enable us to do. The "shifting" going on right now, due largely to the advent of the internet, has obvious potential to radically change a lot of things about they way people live and organize.

It's become so much easier for a couple of people to start up a business doing what they like to do, and make a living off of it in the last decade that it's hard to believe - and this is almost all due to massive increases in the ability of people to communicate over large distances.

I'm young, but I really think that we may be living in a time where something closer to "utopia" for humanity (if you can ignore the cliche term) has moved, in about ten years time, from being the stuff of "nice ideals that simply won't happen" to "oh my this could actually happen, and is indeed happening in some areas".

Of course, just because we have the ability to doesn't mean we will. I would guess that as the average person becomes more aware of the sheer scale of the things we could be accomplishing that we will continue to move closer to all the failed promises and visions of the past, at an increasing rate.

To put it another way, the promises of the last century that you speak of were made by people who saw the potential of what could be done, but the advances were not enough to push the small groups ability to successfully implement things to the point where they could do so easily, or without a lot of capitol - large infrastructures, and people working 40 hours a week in said things were, at least partially, still necessary as business expanded to utilize the advances.

Now (for example) we have people paying their rent and bills by selling shirts that they silkscreen themselves in their homes, and they can sell to a global market with relative ease. A passionate individual or small group of people do not have nearly the amount of an uphill battle that they would have had even 5 years ago.

Granted, a lot of these people aren't going to be getting rich - but for a lot of people my age and younger (I'm 23), simply being able to have a roof over our heads and food in our stomachs without having to succumb to the 9 to 5 doing something that we absolutely do not care about at all (and that could probably be automated) is incentive enough.
I didn't say that making programs shorter was a sufficient condition for implementing a proposed change.
The parallel is pretty weak. Publicly funded education is for children, while publicly funded health care would be delivered to adults.

We also consider preventing sex with children to be a legitimate function of the government, while preventing sex with adults is a matter of personal privacy.
While it is true that a corporation can only sell what people want to buy, a lot of large corporate entities have spend a lot of time and money researching how to influence what people want to buy. To a really ridiculous degree. Furthermore, a lot of large corporate entities have no problem doing things that the vast majority of people would consider immoral (at the very least) to reduce their costs, or increase the likelihood of someone purchasing more of their product(s).

People who hate corporations for being corporations generally aren't really thinking about what they don't like about said corps, and also rarely take the time to consider how the corporations actions would be justifiable (in a human sense, not necessarily just in the profit-motive sense) to the people running them.

I think that what people tend to rail against is corporations like Monsanto. Sure, they can only sell what 'people' want to buy - but they also have no problem with showing utter disregard for human life or the environment, furthermore what they sell is not marketed at individuals - they end up being only able to sell what other corporations want to buy (who in turn don't know or don't care about said disregard for human life or the environment), and have enough money to buy their way out of most legal trouble.
Easily solved by using '!!' instead of '!'. But it doesn't matter to me. I like to complain about PHP while using it, and I get a lot of stuff done in PHP, but I don't really care about it.
Of course companies pay VAT, it is the input tax.
That's one of the many reasons I moved. What's funny is how self-important many of the people I met were even though paper shuffling & long job titles are the main currencies.
They used to charge an arm and leg, but with the economy being depressed and all, they offer a discount where you pay an arm and a foot.
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Perhaps "better educated" in the sense that if I want to learn how something works, I can do so - I am not limited by whether or not I am in college, or what is available to learn at my college, or the quality of professors - I am limited only by my desire to learn.
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Forget Web 2.0/3.0, Start Something During Web 2.5 (video)
When they were using technologies like PGP there was reason for concern. When they start using stuff like Twitter I think it's great news for all of us non-terrorists.
Where were you flying from? For flights to the US, Qantas make you supply the address at check-in.
LATEST TV NEWS
With the fifteenth and final season of the acclaimed long-running medical drama ER being aired, there’s definitely a lot of pressure on the show to retain its success. Tonight, the series brings tension for its many characters on the episode “Parental Guidance.” Focusing on the moving issues of families, the numerous occurrences on tonight’s ER will surely be both astounding and sentimental
Oddball: Video Hacks: UFO Video Best "Fake" Yet
>> More than 30% of the sub-systems that went into Chandrayaan-1 were used by us in other operations.

A strategy followed by Indian IT services companies :) See what resources they have got in other projects, pull them over quickly, finish their part and let them go. This way the project's cost won't sky rocket because they are re-using a lot of stuff which on their own would've cost a lot more to build.
I found this interesting both from the "How would you fake something like this?" standpoint and the "If not fake, what the heck is it?" standpoint.

Beats me if it's HN, but at least its non-political.
No, there is a distinction between cash flows, and income & expenses. An income or an expense does not require a cash flow, and a cash flow is not necessarily an income or an expense.

Expenses should not be tied to cash layouts, because:
(a) purchases are not necessarily expenses, but may be the buying of income-generating assets (i.e. expense is allocated over the life of the asset in the form of depreciation).
(b) You can have an expense without laying out cash (e.g. an asset loses value such as a debtor defaulting).
As a proponent of increased space exploration, it's awesome to see the emerging space race between China and India. NASA (a creature of Congress) has stagnated US efforts by hanging on far too long to the failed and obsolete Shuttle platform as the centerpiece of our activities. A diversity of inexpensive US robotic programs are the way forward-- that plus lowering the regulatory and litigation barriers to increased private space launches in the US. It's tragic that we will waste $700 billion on a Wall Street bailout when that amount could send a man to Mars and create a permanent lunar base.
It's becoming pretty standard practice now for authors to put their book talks online. There are a few websites that host them, including CSPAN's book talk. When authors come to talk at Google their talks usually get posted on Google video as well. There are lists of the best free documentaries floating around too.
I will never use FedEx again.
TV Prices Falling Fast
Apple now has more cash than Microsoft
Installing and Configuring Openfiler with DRBD and Heartbeat
You could incorporate in another jurisdiction?
"failed and obsolete Shuttle platform"

I wouldn't exactly say the Shuttle platform has failed. Nor would I argue that it's obsolete ... yet (although getting there fast).
I can has bom! lolz!1!

Dudez, watch out for copperz!! they b readin ur twitter!
The VAT is directly passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices.
I can understand why you were modded down (boo Quickbooks) but for a lot of small business owners it's a tempting strategy. And with people out there pushing carts that integrate with QB 'out of the box', it makes building something custom for people a harder sell.
Are you sure the really bad stuff isn't banned, or covered up? Saying no security through obscurity does have its limits.
I r serious hacker, this b serious thread.
I was way impressed with Indians' inventiveness with common material when I was there last.
From the article, "If the price of genuine software was lower than the fake one, who would buy the fake one?"

Brilliant argument - great journalism.
So many of the file location problems are solved by something like GoboLinux. I would like to see more effort in this very straightforward directory heirarchy.
RubyMacros 0.1.0 Released
TeachMate goes opensource, need an opinion
I've just submitted TeachMate to github, which makes it an opensource project now. And I really think it should be one, for community could actually make it the way they see it and development could go slightly faster. Would be grateful for a good advice, suggestion or opinion about the whole idea of opensourcing it.
MS had decent profits for a quarter that saw the slow selling Vista as their 'big thing' (while Apple has the 3G iPhone to sell). Windows 7 will improve on Vista's issues, I don't see MS losing it's place (on top) anytime soon.

Also, why are we praising 'cash on hand', cash is only good when you use it.
That all depends on whether or not PHP considers true == true. Knowing =='s track record... it wouldn't surprise me if it didn't :)
A fair point. If you have the talent, definitely avoid any job that can be commoditized. I think there may be as much as a 50/50 split between people who will be able to do so and those who cannot, so those in the bottom face some harsh realities. What I'm also finding, though is that a very large portion of the people I work with aren't able to accurately assess their capabilities. They're ready to be entrepeneurs with no math skills, for example. This is an obvious concern. I think that's why the article resonated with so many who read it on both sides of the fence.
This actually lines up reasonably well with market cap -- Apple is at $85B and Microsoft at $195B. Apple has seen resurgence in growth (75% year over year is pretty kick ass), but they are much more heavily tied to consumers than microsoft so it seems logical that the current economic troubles will hit them harder.

Personally, the only thing I would like more than Apple surpassing Microsoft as the giant computing behemoth is Ubuntu making good on its goal of surpassing Apple in usability/UI.
I suggest Apple wants the low end of the market as well, just that) they are taking some of that market with the iPhone/Touch platform rather than with Macintosh.
Do 787s pay for themselves over their lifetimes?
Ubuntu can't surpass Apple until someone figures out how to teach open source developers to create good UIs. Or at least get them to stick to standards.
What is a Design Attitude and Why Would a Manager Care?
Big O Notation in Design Theory
I worry more about Facebook status updates:

Osama bin Laden's next attack will kill over 9000.

Kefka Palazzo wonders what to do with these 3 statues Sarah Palin gave him.

Kurt Godel just read the U.S. Constitution <ContradictionException @ #x1f3b7908>

Ken Lay is tired of living in his girlfriend's basement. Faking your own death fucking sucks, man.

Eric Cartman is going home.
Moreover, "fixing" CL and Scheme is not "low hanging fruit". It's a hard thing to do, and most people who try make a mess of things.

I agree here. Most people think fixing CL means making "let" use fewer parenthesis. (Clojure does this.)

Anyone that has used Lisp for more than 30 seconds knows that this is not a particularly worthwhile change. More syntax characters just to save two characters in a let binding? No thanks.

(BTW, you can always use destructuring-bind instead of let -- (destructuring-bind (foo bar baz) '(1 2 3) ...). There, you saved some parens!)

Honestly, Clojure doesn't sit really well with me. It tries to be different from both CL and Scheme simply for the sake of being different, which is pretty annoying. For example, look at the "definers". In CL, the scheme is pretty simple -- defun, defvar, defgeneric, defmethod, ... In Scheme, "define" is polymorphic, so it's all you ever need. In Clojure, the "definers" are just random words; def/defn, etc. Oh boy, we saved 3 characters! I am going to be so much more productive now!

Anyway, I will stick to CL for now.
Looks Good To Me, Part Deux -- Assigned Code Reviewers for Google Code
Reminds me of the "The Customer-Friendly System", where all of the "data" was taken out of the program and out into a Visio diagram.

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Customer-Friendly_System...

The thing is, "data" and "code" are the same thing, it's just a matter of presentation. Sometimes data is easier to read if it is in if blocks, sometimes in tables, but very rarely in Visio diagrams...
I edited the post to include the whole quote.
Many European countries have tried to introduce different ways of being 'flexible'. Often there is a cutoff for company size, the age of the employee, that kind of thing. A small company may have less requirements in terms of hiring/firing. Also, in recent years, various countries have attempted to introduce different types of contracts. By way of example, Italy has 'standard' contracts, which are the 'real difficult to fire' kind, and the new flexible sort, which are meant to be used for more flexible positions.

What has happened in practice is that newer workers, wherever possible, are hired up with the flexible contracts, which generally offer nothing in the way of severance pay or anything - less than you'd get in the US in most 'good' jobs. Older workers are hired with the standard contracts. This creates a two-tier system with lots of unhealthy side effects.

I have no idea how the details work out in France.
> so it seems logical that the current economic troubles will hit them harder.

Not sure I agree - corporates can tighten their belts as much as consumers.

A lot of corporates might choose to delay upgrading products coming out of support and/or cancel their support agreements. These are lucrative part of Microsoft's revenue.
Yeah, having cash is overrated. Give all of your cash to me ;) Seriously, Apple are raking it in. They have more cash because they make so much money every quarter. I think they should pay dividends though.
yeah, I have to admit, I grew up in Kansas and went straight into the military after high school. It has taken a long time to recognize and undo the damaged values they instill you with.
maybe the reason is because the pic talks about someone who worked 20 years at a company?
Better link: the Wired story, which actually provides a link to the FAS report: http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/10/terrorist-cell.html.
Then again, if you look at the Mars rover missions, they have vastly exceeded expections - so over-engineering can be a two-way street.

(Beagle2 might be a counterpoint to that).
All that duty, honor, country stuff?

Keep working at recognizing the damage. They say admitting you have a problem is the first step.
Fair point. Switching gears then, how about:

Apple is a luxury brand and Microsoft isn't, so I think the current economic troubles will hit them harder.
This is why I rarely turn my laptop off.
A fast and easy way to get familiar with this if you aren't (and don't want to watch the OCW lectures that cover it):

Look up all the common data structures -- arrays, linked lists, hash tables, vectors, heaps, trees of various sorts, etc -- and chart out the big-oh for the operations they support. You should probably also be familiar with amortized analysis, which is what people mean when they say that hashtables or vectors have O(1) insert.

The Javadoc for java.util has interesting details on concrete implementations of these concepts; see TreeMap for example.
We're seeing a similar system playing out over here in some union environments, specifically airline pilots. The "old guard" managed significant concessions from industry, but the newer guys end up with a much less competitive package. So you end up with a two-tiered situation.

Doesn't seem like that is a healthy situation in general.

Speaking of more complex ways of categorizing and rewarding business and employees reminds me of my recent interaction with a local government that had a "start-up" type program in place. I asked about office space and maybe some shared services -- something like an incubator. They were very friendly: I immediately received a 40-page packet by email which was so detailed as to be incomprehensible. (For instance, parking fees were waived up to a certain point, or alternatively fees could be reduced without a limit if I used an office that was farther away). It was like reading a report put together by every aspect of local government, each trying to help but actually making the presentation so complicated it would take an expert system to use or compare it to other offers.
Right, and McCain, even without public health care, will lead to a bigger deficit than Obama.

Economists really hate the Bush tax cuts (which McCain now supports making permanent) because they favor the non-working ultra-wealthy.
Better presentation -- screeen shots, demo site running, etc. The "about" page is a little vague, I don't know anything about TeachMate, and I need to be convinced it is cool before I'm willing to go to github, etc.
First person plural: Multiple selves in all of us
"...humans have a limited cognitive capacity for reasoning when searching for a solution within a problem space. Given the relatively small size of our brain’s working memory, we can only consider a few aspects of any situation and can only analyze them in a few ways... The first step in any problem-solving episode is representing the problem, and to a large extent, that representation has the solution hidden within it (pp. 8-9)."

Always love a good economics quote -- behavioral economics, cognitive costs and etc are, generally speaking, awesome topics. See recent edge posting:
http://edge.org/3rd_culture/thaler_sendhil08/class4.html

Not a designer so the rest of the article doesn't apply to me as much...
Ok.. fair point :)
Technology Predictions from 20 Years Ago
CodeIgniter, does one really need it?
Well, the website is actually running, you don't need screenshots or demos, just go to http://teachmate.org and check yourself.
Does a hundred year programming language make sense at all? Is it possible to have the faintest clue what people will want to be programming then? Feel free to point me to prior responses :)
And here in India people are impressed when Obama expresses concern US is losing its dominance in space tech. Wish we had a politician like that.
> We're seeing a similar system playing out over here in some union environments

It's more of a contract/union thing in the US, though. In Italy, 'standard' contracts are more or less legislated. Most likely that occurs elsewhere as well, although "it's complicated". Germany, until recently, apparently did not have a minimum wage, something that really surprised me.
We believe that health care is not a right but a privilege. The Constitution does not ensure the right to "life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and $10 copays."

Moreover, we believe that almost everything the government does, it does poorly. Schools would be a great case in point.
Switzerland is one example - it's not full salary, and there are some caps - but they are both very high (I think something like 80% and 200k respectively - it's been a while since I lived there).

Sweden is another example, but I don't know the specifics. They do offer things like paid 18 months parental leave (yeap, both maternal and paternal).
I always think it's a bit of a shame when a smart innovator doesn't have a business head on his shoulders.

Apparently Mr. Lee says he doesn't have one: but I dont buy that :D posting his ideas to Youtube was a very smart move...

(I loved that video when it first appeared!)
Lua's tables seem like a pretty elegant solution to the dynamic-array-like datastructure, and they're also usable as a relational map. Also, Lua is not object-oriented, but it's trivial to build on the core semantics to make it OO, when doing so would be a practical approach to the problem at hand. (As far as the iteration concern, everything in Lua besides unboxed primitives is a (pseudo-hash) table.)

> But I don't know how to make iteration on any of these look equivalent without making the core of the language be more object oriented.

Haskell's typeclasses would work, as well, and in practice seem to generalize far better. Instead of restricting the iterator used to a specific type, restrict it to any type that supports the interface of iteration. (It's kind of like duck-typing that is verified at compile-time.) It sounds like Clojure has a similar mechanism.
For the background, take a look at: http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html
Sunday Startup: Don't Believe the Recession Hype
Wassup Obama
Desperately Seeking Enterprise Software for Macs