skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure.

The elimination or reduction of true work schedule flexibility (which we don't have entirely yet, but will have soon). A Boss. Red tape. Bureaucracy. Suits. TPS Reports. Worthless meetings. Sub committees. Work that isn't "work". And most importantly, corporate rules and protocol not in line with our philosophies of living & working.

TicketStumbler is a bit of a different animal than most startups & companies. I plan on writing about this extensively in the future (http://intheteeth.com). I'm not saying acquisitions never make sense or never add value or that I'll never have a Company that will be acquired...just that TicketStumbler more than likely won't be "that" Company.
I've heard this repeated a lot, but honestly I found the story trite, and the combat pretty generic after a few levels. Maybe I was hoping for too much though. YMMV, of course.
I'll answer my own question! Its called uservoice and I found it cos the stack overflow guys were using it for their beta!
Factor (http://factorcode.org/) is another postfix / stack-based language that may be worth a look.
...the 3D hardware revolution sparked by 3dfx in 1997 will prove to only be a 10-year hiatus from the natural evolution of CPU-driven rendering.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.htm...
Web Science: Studying the Internet to Protect Our Future
you are not wrong, and there are many companies that operate like this. it sounds like you're in a service-oriented company, where the product is built to fit the requirements of the customers. there are many companies that operate like this. they're typically steady paychecks, but not engaging or challenging jobs.

if you dislike whats happening, you're not going to change it, as the atmosphere is typically a byproduct of management's direction for the company. look for a job elsewhere.
I think there needs to be another "Halo Law" for non-profitable internet acquisitions.
So it sounds like the JPL's reason (at least the reason they gave - whether you want to believe it was some anti-Lisp conspiracy or just bad office politics is your own business) was that Lisp was too big. I wonder if Scheme would have been a better fit? (It was certainly around in 1988; SICP was written in 1985.)

There's something about Lisp that gives it a reputation as inherently individualist (as opposed to the "workers are expendable cogs" project management model that the linked article associates with Java). Same with Forth. At this point, the Lisp community seems to encourage that idea, but what in the language itself supports this?

I hear arguments that it's a harder language, but let's not kid ourselves. I think programming well in, say, C++ or Haskell is much, much harder. (Should a language be hard to use well?) Or: Lisp code is hard to read. Potentially, sure -- the readability of the code is more dependent than most languages on the developers' abilities to name things well. (Same with Forth.) You can write unmaintainable garbage in any language, though - just copy and paste things where they're used instead of naming and referencing them, give variables meaningless names, etc. Just add water and presto, big ball of mud. (http://www.laputan.org/mud/) Also, most programmers are probably used to good editors handling paren balancing in any language.

Besides being significantly different from the main languages people are exposed to, what? All it takes for a language to be different from e.g. C/Java is to not be C/Java. Is it because you can create your own idioms / extensions to the core language? I also think the syntax is something of a red herring - sure, you may dislike the syntax, but I can think of popular languages that have disastrous syntaxes. (I guess Dylan could be a control group here, but I don't know anybody who has real experience with it, let alone its reputation among management.)

No answers, but I'd really like to know. Working on my own language, and all that.

Also: I'm most definitely not looking for thinly-veiled bragging about how "not everyone can handle such a superior language" either, because... come on.
Fisker Raises $65 Million for Karma Plug-In Hybrid Sports Car.. from Quatar
Notes on programming in C
Especially if you look in the right usenet group.
Are you sure about that? I haven't asked a programming question (in public) for a number of years. I am too lazy to sit and wait for someone to tell me how to solve my problem when I could discover the solution on my own.

I assume that most people here are like that. (Otherwise they would be on Reddit instead ;)
Aww man, you couldn't have described my situation any better. I came to the decision it wasn't worth my time to try to make a difference (they didn't really deserve the help anyway). I started working only hard enough to not get fired while living like a miser and working crazy hours on my own projects. It was really only a few months before I was ready to make the jump.

Unless it's a job you very deeply care about you probably need an exit strategy. Both you and the world will benefit so much more if you're passionate about your work. If squeezed, management will often make concessions, but they almost never actually GET IT. If you choose to stay you will go bat-shit crazy unless you just resign yourself.

Also, you mention you're passive-agressive and I'm right there with you... I'm a type-B INTP. One thing I have really had to confront head on was that while I do great work, I have a ton of fear and uncertainty about changing gears because I'm simply not like the type-A jackass in management with more confidence than brains. So everyday I have to confront that and just be willing to live in place that feels uncomfortable and reckless.
Learn this lesson very quickly: Do not complain! You care about what you do, but think about your priorities. Really, think about them. You want to:

1. Be happy
2. Make money
3. Be promoted

It's not a startup, so you are not trying to be ultra rich. Now, when you complain you are first and foremost making yourself unhappy. That defeats the purpose of working there. First rule is that you be happy. And the best way to be happy is to ignore the bad stuff, focus on the good stuff and work on making everyone else happy.

You guys may be producing terrible code at work, but imagine a workplace where you are producing terrible code, but everyone is laughing and making jokes and so on.

Refocus your energy on making you and everyone around you happy. Forget the technology - let them make the decisions! That's what they are there for! Just focus on making yourself happy and your team members happy.

When everyone is happy, morale goes back up, make your manager part of this pleasant team. When people are laid back and relaxed, they are more likely to do sensible things.

The minute negativity comes into the team, it's all going to go downwards. You dislike your job, everyone gets infected by your dislike, and even if you win the argument, you lose at life.

So, forget the technology and focus on the people.
This was also prescient:

"I know burn rates are important, but you'll only get one shot at this, and if you blow it, it's over."

I would say this is basically what happened with the Segway.
I find it interesting how a "trust rating" would affect traditional media outlets, all of whom now publish scores of content online. A rating system wouldn't just discredit LHC doomsday sites, but could potentially be a positive source of pressure for TV news, newspapers, and magazines as well.

Anyway, I agree Duncan is being a spaz and that TBL's idea isn't completely absurd. I imagine something like a Firefox plugin for factcheck.org.
As someone who grew up evangelical, I assure you that the only inaccuracy in the statement is that millions believe the earth is 6000 years old (i.e. 4000BCE). My estimate is that 25-50% of youth and 50-75% of the 40+ crowd in the churchgoing population believe this.
This kind of hits it on the head because it begs the real question of how are you fundamentally motivated? Art or Commerce? Or?

Most people are perfectly happy settling for commerce. :-/
PHP is very fast..

OO deficiencies have mostly been solved by 5.3.

Your blanket generalizations will not get you anywhere.
Online computer help company CrossLoop gets $6M
Aggregation Gets Schooled With Wiggio
Ooo goodie. A http://TicketStumbler.com competitor (that's our company). Alexander, if you're looking for employees you should check out the job listings at http://Lab256.com. They have millions in funding and are backed by General Catalyst (they are a competitor too).
The whole problem of scientific publishing is entangled with what I call the evaluation problem: just as it is easier to set an exam and sort students by the grade they get (despite being nearly void of actual meaning), it's also easier to assign a value to each published paper (the infamous impact factor of the journal that swallowed it) and then sort applications for a professorship position by their "score".

Of course direct interviews can tell you a lot more of the real capabilities of both student and applicant, but the inherent laziness and carelessness of bureaucratic systems (like universities and ministries of science and the like), added to the excess of applicants for any given position (in most cases), leads us to the present situation in publishing: abuse of power. Scientific publishers do what they do, unchallenged, because they can.

PLoS and BMC are a first attempt to create real competition in scientific publishing. They are succeeding: both got rated high, and are respectable and well-known. Are you a scientist? Consider sending your paper to these two publishers. All your readers will get free access to your publications.

The catch, though, is that publishing has a cost. Both PLoS and BMC charge anywhere between $500 and $1500 for a published paper. Then they don't charge the readers. All other journals charge subscription fees (for libraries, the fees are in the tens or even the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year), while not charging the authors one single dime (most subscription-based for-profit journals, at least in biology, do not charge for publishing). So researchers are enticed to send their papers there and be done with it, not draining grant money for the purpose.

When looking at tax dollars spent, though, those researchers who publish in subscription-based for-profit journals are committing a disservice to the public that funds their research.
"Do not those of us in free countries benefit from receiving news that isn’t filtered and controlled by the corporate media elite?"

... Sounds naive.
Solving a layout optimization problem using genetic algorithms and prolog
Hubble Finds Unidentified Object in Space, Scientists Puzzled
Let's just hope that's not the price of a loaf of bread.
Also, if things don't work out, I'll give you $250 & Teddy Grahams for your domain (http://ticketfeed.com). Maybe we can have a similar arrangement for http://TicketStumbler.com if things don't work out for us.

Good luck finding your "cofounders" - this is a fun business to be in.

Warm regards,

Dan

Cofounder - http://TicketStumbler.com
Ask HN: Building Credit
So I have spent the past (nearly) 10 years controlling my credit and not committing major mistakes. I've kept my borrowed money low and currently have less than $5,000 in debt.

My car died a month ago and after careful research I decide go and try to lease a Honda Element. Lease because Honda is in theory making a Hybrid Element in the next two-three years and this provided the best plan for my budget according my research.

I didn't get approved because, well, my credit is too clean. I haven't shown them that I really, you know, borrow money. So the question is, how should I go about building credit? I thought having a Credit Card and such would have done this but apparently not well enough.

So fellow Hackers, tell me how to hack the system ;)
Agreed; that's why I didn't get very far with the site (and I was a member during the beta period). It seems that people answer questions very quickly and it feels like you're in a contest for the "points" - who wants to compete against others for mere points on a single site? Not me - so I stopped going there.

That said, I think it will be excellent for those asking the questions, but for those answering..? It'll just be the prima donnas and gold-hoarders playing the game.
Most? Really? Government grants don't fund more than half of scientific research, do they?
Could have potentially shipped it directly from Thailand too.
A return to software rendering could present an interesting opportunity for Linux. A major barrier against using Linux is the lack of availability of A-list games. If a game no longer requires DirectX, then it would seem to be an easier task to port it to many operating systems. It would not be a magic fix, but it would be one more step toward the possibility of a mass market Linux on the desktop.
The 3 pillars of our Rails Monitoring Stack
I read this before, but still love this conversation with his Google manager:

Me: I'd like to talk to you about something...

Him: Let me guess - you want to use Smalltalk.

Me: Er, no...

Him: Lisp?

Me: Right.

Him: No way.

I just find it an amusing encapsulation of how so many of the high achieving people that Google hires like to program in high productivity languages like Lisp, Smalltalk, Ruby (see Yegge) but Google keeps a tight rein on it by keeping the languages they will deploy on their servers down to 4 or so (Python, C++, Java and Javascript being the 4 I've heard).
Leave.

The bullet points all sound like typical developer gripes, except being forbidden to talk to team members means one of two things:
1. Management is all messed up and is attacking 'troublemakers' instead of the problems.
2. Your coworkers have complained to management that you are a ball of negativity that they don't want to hear.

Read the book "My Job Went To India". It's a great book for career planning and it'll help you figure out whether you're in 1 or 2, I can't guess which.
If it's 1, you can't fix it, you need to find a company with a healthy culture. If it's 2, you need to start fresh with a good attitude at a new company.

Best of luck with your career.
Alternatively, people will just start publishing online, on blogs or wikis or something else. It's already starting to happen; math is leading the way. Much of my website is somewhere in the space between 'blog entry' and 'paper'.
The marketing crack is 100% fair but explainable. Sometimes the only way to justify our existence as marketers is to completely mystify the higher-ups with data-storms.
Could an Inner Zombie Be Controlling Your Brain?
Why is this being voted up and not being counted as spam? This is absolutely a waste of my time, and a waste of a space on the front page.

Please, stop posting co-founder searches.
It is interesting to imagine what the world would be like if Google had disallowed Java and had written everything in Lisp instead.
The connexions site mentioned in the article is at http://cnx.org/ - I found it recently while looking up some maths, looks like some good stuff in there.
Wouldn't it be safer to demonstrate results?
>> Was it worth it?

yes.
I can see where they're coming from, though: If every time a new popular language came out (Ruby or Clojure or Blorf or Java+++ or ...) somebody wanted to also add that as a dependency, it would quickly become a maintenance nightmare.

At the same time, Smalltalk and Lisp were both languages with decades of history, so it was something other than managers trying to help focus programmers who (understandably) want to try out every new shiny thing. What, though? (See my other comment.)
Online paranoia and the LHC: "The conspiracy mindset is rampant in this country"
Just when you thought selling out was only a concern for musicians and painters, eh?
There's something about Lisp that seems inherently individualist. At this point, the Lisp community seems to encourage that idea, but what in the language itself supports this?

I think the people that choose Lisp select it after a study of the various options. Choosing and evaluating programming languages is not a social activity -- you do it by yourself. Contrast this to Java programmers, who use Java because it's what they learned in school. They aren't individualistic, they just do what they are told.

(Java's popularity is helped by the "tools" are "easy to use". SLIME and Emacs are "hard to use", so you have to want to use them to be able to use them. I use quotes because I disagree with the sentiment. Eclipse is a nightmare to use. Emacs is a dream.)

As for Java's popularity, I think it comes down to social factors rather than differences in the syntax of the language. Java developers want less money than Lisp developers. It's also easier to hire Java developers, because you can just require a Sun certification. Easy!
Now, rendering at 60 fps you've got to render in 16ms. This actually turns out to not be much time in a networked environment.

Not true. Human reaction times are 180 to 200 milliseconds for visual stimuli. That's the limit on your pipeline. You still need to render once every 16 ms, but it can take longer for each frame to get there than that.
And here I thought that they were talking about AVL trees.
By "inherently individualist" do you mean that Lisp programmers tend not to work in teams? Or just that there aren't many of them, so they tend to be thinly scattered and thus isolated?

My current pet theory is that only a minority of people feel comfortable thinking in s-expressions. For the majority, trees with many levels of nesting aren't a natural medium for expressing their thoughts. (I don't know why this would be, but it's worth pointing out that human language has a very low tolerance for nesting (in fact you almost never see it go beyond level 1)).

I know two very good programmers who gave Lisp a good try and just don't feel comfortable in it. So I don't buy the inferiority argument either. Interestingly, both of those guys strongly prefer Smalltalk, which is arguably as close to Lisp-with-all-those-trees-unwound as anyone has got.

Edit: I'll add that if the nesting theory is correct, I feel lucky to be in the minority that finds it comfortable to build programs that way... what I'm able to do in Lisp far outstrips what I was able to do before.
"The situation is particularly ironic because the argument that has been advanced for discarding Lisp in favor of C++ (and now for Java) is that JPL should use "industry best practice." The problem with this argument is twofold: first, we're confusing best practice with standard practice. The two are not the same."

To me, this is the crux. We have this ridiculous idea that "industry" drives technological advance.

Industry software "engineers" trained up in trade schools or worse, without any awareness that they are reimplementing solutions (poorly) to problems that were solved decades ago...and we get...horrible industrial monstrosities like Java (and Microsoft Windows) roaming the earth, while remote diamonds like Lisp and Scheme shine kindly down.
Windbelt - Third World Power - Wind Generator
Strike! And he's outta here!
Anyone else find it odd that they didn't at least mention the effect of piracy on the market, especially after having a big piece on it a few weeks back?
So you'd say that more Lisp-users tend to be self-taught / come to the language themselves, rather than using $current_job_security_language?

This isn't specifically about Lisp vs. Java, though - I don't see people have this sort of kneejerk reaction about Python, for example. (Though Python seems to have been carefully designed to give a first impression of being clean and easy to use. I'd say it mostly is, but it definitely gives a good first impression.)
Download My Name Is Earl Episodes
If one wants to create art, then one should be implementing ones own ideas. If you are implementing someone elses ideas, you are a builder, not an architect. A builder should do his job as best as he can, which is to make sure the thing gets built according to the architects vision. He should not be challenging the architect.

One really has to consider these issues. If you NEED to make art, then go do your own stuff! If you are there to make money, then do the best job you can for them, which means that you should not drag down the entire workplace.

And anyways, I would not waste a day of my time in a place where I could not make myself happy. That's the most important focus - people have to make themselves as happy as they can within the system. If you want to change the world, then don't start by being a html programmer in a large company.
Linden Lab backs down on Second Life advertising licenses
There are a couple of comments on here to the tune of "Why didn't he charge more?" or "Why didn't he sell them on the internet?"

The article was written on an alumni web site, and the author lists his MBA as attained in 1984. It's likely that he attempted this business shortly thereafter. Probably would've been harder to sell on the internet 15 years before Viaweb. May have been harder to sell key chains for more than $1.50 too, though who knows.
So what do you call someone who joins a company before any salaried employees and has equity comparable to that of the founders?
Conversely, you can pay someone a salary and give them less stock than they should really have as a cofounder, and they might still be a cofounder.

As you said, it's to do with the impact that the person has on the business from inception onwards.
OTOH, we can't expect Microsoft to do nothing while Intel takes their lock-in away.
So I'm guessing people give in a list of artists they are interested in, and your site gives them an rss feed of the cheapest, nearest and best tickets when those acts are in town?

Good idea!
You can find a lot of information in the whois for the domain, from which you see that he is located in the UK. Then you follow his domain name email address to alexandermacgregor.net which then redirects you to his linked in profile. And from which you can then follow links to his younoodle that has his resume + pic. http://younoodle.com/people/alexander_macgregor

Cliffs from that info: 21 year old from U.K, still in college pursuing a management degree while working as a "buyer" at some energy company.
The Importance of Icon Metaphors
Leave.

And start your own company. It's easier than you think and you'll be a hundred billion times happier.

And if it doesn't work out, well, you can always go back to a regular job...
Larrabee runs DirectX, so games will only have to have one engine. Software rendering will only kick in once all GPUs can support it.
And I can say that in my denomination (Reformed Presbyterian, which is theologically conservative) the percentages are far, far lower. My own congregation includes several university professors (CMU, U Pittsburgh) that are not Young Earth Creationists. Heck, we even had a geology prof in the congregation for awhile, and he certainly wasn't.

I don't consider our denomination "evangelical," but I'm sure the general public would.

EDIT: I'm not trying to start a religious/cultural war...just want to point out that saying things like "50-75% of the churchgoing population" is a bit of a broad generalization.
this is another case of "I got a great idea, build it for me and we'll both be millionaires!"
Relax NG Schema for Adobe Flex 3
But what about pseudo-co-founder searches? :)
Then I guess you'll buy Bioshock.

And you should, too. For those of us interested in videogames as an artistic medium, this is one of the most exciting games out there.
I'm trying to figure out what specific characteristics give it the kind of reputation it has.

Good observation about Lisp vs. Smalltalk, by the way. (I also wonder why Smalltalk isn't more popular...)
Already profitable in the sense of paying back the money you've already spent, or profitable in the sense of making acceptable market salaries?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=247720