skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it is similar to today's economic problems. When everyone else is being flaky, now is a good time to establish a reputation for dependability.
Yes, you use the power of lisp to solve your own problem, and that's good. And I absolutely agree with you that lisp is an excellent languages for solving problems.

But it does not change the fact that lisp is not easily accessible for most people, and that particular limitation of lisp is why it will not be 'the next big thing'.

On a personal note, I don't think that using DSLs is good programming practise. It is my opinion that this makes your code too specific to you and you force anyone trying to understand your code to first learn a new language - the one you just invented.

It's like comparing Seth Godins writing to the writings of Kant. There was a time when I was in philosophical mood and I bought the original German version of a book by Kant. Kant is often described as one of the great thinkers, but he sure is not one of the great writers. His sentences are long and unwieldy and it's very difficult to understand what he's trying to say. Seth Godin writes plainly, however, and he communicates his ideas clearly.

The core purpose of reading both their writings is to gain in knowledge, and when the sentence structure of one writing is so obscure that one can't even parse the sentence, then this purpose is not being achieved.

Writing a DSL is the same thing - if nobody else understands what you wrote, then, though you may have succeeded in communicating your meaning to the computer, you have failed in communicating to anybody else who may want to improve your code. And that second part of things is also an important part of programming.
I never found this objects first idea very plausible. It's just OO dogma, not cognitive science. Which of the following expressions is most "natural" in your view?

person.buy(house, agency, contract)

agency.sell(house, contract, person)

house.sale(person, agency, contract)

contract.fulfil(house, person, agency)

Of course the decision is not taken based on what's easiest to explain to non computer users but rather on which object's encapsulated data is most affected by the operation, or which inheritance hierarchy should be used to look up the operation. In most non trivial cases that's extremely subjective. Being forced to make that decision _every time_ you call or write a function is a complete waste of intellectual effort.

Since there is always one name for what should happen (the name of the function) but potentially many objects that are involved in some capacity, it seems much more consistent to give a special syntactical place to the function rather than to any of the objects:

sell(house, person, contract) or if you prefer (sell house person contract)
sure. but i only put forward the 'expand your intuition" argument as a rebuttal to your "models of understanding". i am saying though that the very same concepts that gave rise to lisp, also make it more powerful in practice. "in the field" as they say. but it takes a little practice to get there.

yes, lisp won't ever be more popular. just like "30 Rock" won't ever be more popular than "the office"
#Skimming the article, it is sounding a
#little bit like "intelligent design",
#when it talks of "programming" humans.

Well, I am really disappointed that the article sounds like "intelligent design." That may be due to my inarticulateness. I have no intention of advocating "intelligent design."

I am just curious to know if there is an academic or scholarly field where people study programming outside of computers, more specifically, programming humans.

#In a sense, natural selection programs all
#organisms by allowing only the fit variations
#in a given generation to survive, promulgating
#the "fit genes" forward, but "design" or "program"
#are terms in this context to be used metaphorically.

But it seems to me that "natural selection" is a term that needs to be used metaphorically as well.

In the article, the Prometheus story is not metaphorical. It is a real story written by a real person. I am trying to understand if humans reading the Prometheus story can be considred to be programmed in analogy to computer programming.

So when I read a Sunday paper supplement about discounted items and I go buy one, am I being programmed? What is the scholarly field that studies such programming?
hello I am Alex
that's interesting. in the original german! you're braver than me.

i think DSL's are good for the same points you bring up. i am more concerned with the DSL ability to express a problem/solution. the DSL itself of course necessitates different expertise. just like there a lots of python users, but only a few people who work on the python core. or for that matter linux users vs the linux kernel team.
I'd also add that, in my experience, web app development Python and Ruby can (a) get interesting, and (b) provide a good segue into other development. Most Rails and Django developers that I know make well over $30/hour (3-4 times that, typically), work on interesting projects, and work on things other than just web apps.
I think that's the first time I've seen "brain waves" and "YouTube" in the same sentence.
Creating a Blackberry Version of Your Rails Application
Yes, but without powerful libraries a language isn't much good for real world use. And if nobody uses the language it won't have a community and feedback. Without a community people will move on, and it will end up as a pet project.
How To Win "Survivor: The Valley": Tips From The Undertaker
I find that after a year of Common Lisp, I don't really care about Clojure. On the other hand, through the JVM and the Java API, it offers for free some of the things which were never available as a CL standard feature.

However, CL is a language specification, while Java is for better or worse much more than that.
interesting idea - clear target audiences. trick will be getting those audiences to use this. seems like a relatively good problem to have, especially for a communication network play, though by no means cake.

two design tweaks:

on my pretty good lcd, the 'sign up today', 'journalism' and 'business & pr' calls-to-action lack enough contrast for the white type to pop without me adjusting my screen settings.

looking at the press release template - your logo is huge. which is ok - once i realized that that's where the (my) companies logo would go. even then it's a little large. regardless of the size, though, i would think about changing your example press release to something other than your own company as understanding whose logo that is is a subtly you don't need to create.
Here's the discussion from the last time this was submitted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21795
Really good read. Only thing, I hate excuses...

White board problems are killers, no matter how well you know your stuff. I definitely advocate this too.

I'm interested if anyone else here has interviewed at fb, I'd love to hear more about this as I'm working out solutions to their programming puzzles too.
This is an interesting point. The analysis was done on the 'index value' of the S&P 500 (from Yahoo Finance), not on any individual equities. I'm trying to discover how long a 'long term investment' need be, if one invests in an S&P 500 index / ETF / iShare. (I'm no expert on the subtleties of those investment vehicles). My understanding is that they track (as best they can) the value of the index by investing in the stocks that compose the index. Therefore I guess that when company in the S&P 500 goes bust the effect that has on one's investment closely matches the effect it has on index value. I'll research that. Assuming this is true, I think we needn’t be concerned by the bankruptcy issue that you make. But please correct me if I'm wrong about that - I'm interested.

I'll try to add TSR in the next analysis too.
User Registration Apps for Django @ Irrational Exuberance
Actually, I have authored a piece commercial Common Lisp based web 2.0 software. It's small, simple, and for whatever problems I didn't feel like resolving myself, I could find a library to solve it for me.

In my book, Lisp is great.

P.S. And I'll keep using it for future projects!
Yeah, the article has too much self congratulation. I do think matt's right about our capabilities, but the whole attitude doesn't help things. We need to keep our ambition and drive, but drop the sense that people need to bow to our whims. It is much more effective to learn our work environments and how the system works, and work that to our advantage.

In short, both generations make the same mistake. Both treat their management like parents, and are dependent on them. Consequently, they both use children's strategies to get their way. One goes the goody two shoes route and the other goes the pouty route.
Search Engine Submission that you need.
I don't think that Java is more complex than C++ in terms of the language itself. I think that being simpler is actually one of the reasons it has caught on.
Mencoder or FFmpeg are fantastic OSS options for transcoding just about any input format to h263 (flv) or h264 (mp4) - both of which are supported under the latest flash players. In order to do VP6 you'll need a solution from On2 (www.on2.com).

Jeroenwijering's media player is probably the best open source player out there, and commercial licenses can be had for something like $35USD.
I notice I am jumping overly to his defense when I have no reason to other than that I like his writings.
"sex is both a basic animal (and human) instinct and also something we frown on and obsess over to the extent that it's frightening."

That sentence stood out to me too. Yeah, wouldn't want to acknowledge that humans are animals, especially when talking about sex.
I actually watched my work PC booting up the other day and noticed that XP is (c) 2001. No-one seems able to clearly articulate what exactly it is Vista does that XP can't, in a corporate setting at least. That's Microsoft's problem, that XP was "good enough". Whereas if you look at their server products, the reasons to move from NT4 to 2000 to 2003 to 2008 are all, the message is much clearer.
There wouldn't be any need to make a new language. I can change anything I want in this one. There's very little working code out there; that is in fact probably the main complaint about Arc; and one reason that's so is that I don't want it to be hard to change:

http://www.paulgraham.com/core.html

I'm not deeply committed to the current approach to iteration. But I don't want to switch to something more complicated till I can prove it's a net win. My standard of proof is whether the proposed language change will make the source of a real program shorter. So if you have an idea for a new iteration abstraction that would make some piece of code in news.arc shorter, please show me the source before and after. (You don't have to implement the new abstraction; just show me what code using it would look like.)
Statistically. Isn't. A whole sentence.
didn't at first want to work for facebook because he thought it was a toy, but was eventually persuaded and now loves it

...

Apparently he's responsible for the "Gift" feature in facebook (you know, the hole-in-a-box/heart/pantie/etc. little graphic you can gift to people?). He was the sole person responsible for that.

Fight fiercely, Harvard. It amazes me that code-up-a-copycat-in-a-weekend websites like facebook think that they need 1st rate engineers.

"It was either the little graphic gift heart, or control systems for helicopters..."
ahh, yes you're tracking S & P 500. Sorry, I probably read the aricle a little quickly... I don't know for sure, but I would think you're right in your assertion that the index incorporates the risk of companies failing.
The point is that entrepreneurship (at any significant scale) is intimately related to the availability of capital. That applies to all sectors of business, but particularly to capital-intensive ones.
Features include "record-level locking — multi-versioning provides non-blocking reads" and "highly concurrent database access", but "the database file cannot be shared between multiple processes simultaneously."

Uh, huh? So none of those concurrent features can actually be used?
This post just seems to be begging for comment ~ maybe it's because it's relatively rare that we get pg talking about arc.

they may even hurt.

I'm assuming you are referring to the maintenance and backward compatibility that is required as soon as you have libraries. Plus good libraries can be had even in bad languages - so it's not a good reflection of the language. Are you suggesting libraries should be a completely separate project with potentially many choices? The problem with this can be seen in Scheme. It's hard to move from project to project (job to job) when they use different implementations and those related libraries. Learning the related core libraries is often not worth it; if the scope of the project is small. Invariably libraries do not transfer well - maybe that is the problem that needs to be solved... Even with formalities like R5RS or R6RS core libraries are still implementation specific.

Plus, arc is suffering from an absentee benevolent dictator.

... You are missed over at the arclanguage forums. (http://arclanguage.org/item?id=8462) Specifically some direction for those of us that enjoy writing arc would be great. There are plenty of people that know and write arc - why not put them to work. What is your opinion of the community version of arc (http://github.com/nex3/arc/tree/master)? Do you use it? Is it blasphemy? Is this all just a giant social experiment to see what will happen to the language and community given no leadership and x-number of years?
I'd be wary of proclaiming this as "the beginning of the end", as the article title seems to imply.

There were two things wrong with Vista: 1) issues with 3rd party software & drivers, and 2) steep hardware requirements. The first was due to enhancements to user accounts & security, and is largely fixed today.

Anyway, people aren't going to be using Windows XP for the next 5 years, so they'll switch en masse to Windows 7 or to OS X. Apple still isn't competing at the lower price points, so unless Windows 7 is just really bad, I think we'll see the numbers pick back up when Win7 comes out.
Review of the first two Envycasts
Good luck teaching the unwashed masses lisp.
The article has some good points, but Paul Krugman does too. The modern "keynesian" view that the Great Depression was caused by very bad policy of the Fed (keeping very high interest rates and desperately clinging to the gold standard) seems very close to the truth. But, on the other hand, the people running the Fed now, trying to avoid the mistakes of that era, might be going to the other extreme of keeping interest rates too low and printing too much money.While that might make the current recession relatively short and mild, it will prepare the ground for further bubbles - people, worried about their cash losing value, will invest like sheep into the next big thing, until it bursts again. So, maybe the right balance is somewhere between "keynesian" and "austrian"?
I'm not directly arguing for OO. In my opinion, a good language is one which forces the black box encapsulation of complex behaviour.

'House' as an abstraction for a house is a good model. Performing an action on an abstraction should be in an intuitive manner, for example:

sell House

That's pretty clear. To cause the interaction between two objects, then one should place the action between the objects:

make "Agency" sell "House"

where 'make' is equivalent to calling a function. Now, let's bring in a contract

make "Agency" sell "House" using "Contract"

this OO model works in my opinion because there is one path between the objects, and the arguments describe the contents of the path.

make "Person" buy "House" using "TerribleContract"

I believe that programming languages are too flexible. I believe that programming languages should be constructed in a manner that forces you to abstract complex structures into aggregates of behaviour, where the input to these aggregates consist of a very low number of paths. Java, C+++ fail in this in that they allow you to break out of the abstraction hierachy. They allow you to have callbacks and inheritance and so on, which breaks the black-boxiness of your program.

A black-box should always take the same inputs and should always produce the same behaviour from those inputs. Now, what about other types of programming constructs?

Let's say I wanted to send a file to another PC using sockets:

create "File" using "/hello.txt"

As the next step I'm trying to open a port. However, a port has a number. I could try to do this:

create "Socket" using ("Port" using 8934)

"Port 8934" is something that can be merged together into a composite structure and so the user should be forced to do so:

"InputPort" is "Port" using 8934

create "Socket" using "InputPort"

make "Socket" send "File"

destroy "Socket"

This is an example of how I think a properly abstracted language should look like. Force single paths to all abstractions, and force abstraction use.
This is interesting, given the rumors that Hawking might be interested in a post at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo:

http://www.thestar.com/News/Ontario/article/461065
This whole attitude of now, now, now, seems very against the hacker ethos. What happened to procrastination and laziness?
It was just a general point. I don't know anything about Clojure.

The dangers of libraries are that they distract one's attention from the core language, and that they could conceal or perpetuate flaws in the core language.

I'm not saying that languages shouldn't have powerful libraries, btw, just that they may not be 100% upside.
I think the best answer in the thread is the one by " cchooper", that starts with "Personally, I think the only thing". Search for it, it shows an interesting pov.
Facebook scalability is quite impressive. I think you do need first rate engineers for that.
There are two senses of powerful: breadth and depth. To make a language massively popular you need breadth. But for a language to have a user community all you need is depth, which is why I released news.arc with Arc.
My understanding is that each module (Photos, Notes, etc) has its own feed which gets aggregated to create the main News feed.

If each module is responsible for producing its own feed, it seems like this problem isn't too difficult to solve.

Couldn't you just cast this as a search engine problem?

You create a term vector with your social graph, and the corpus you are "searching" is people who updated their profile photo in the last 24 hours. You could compute the inverted index offline once an hour.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_index
>We absolutely have to cut the corporate tax. Our current tax rate is about 38%. Even Germany has a 25% rate.

This is so disingenuous; Germany also has a 19% VAT, and also has stronger regulations on industry.

>If we had a lower corporate tax rate with the ability to expense capital expenditures, guess what? We'd buy more triple sevens.

He wants to be able to write off the purchase of planes as expenses? What? They already get to write off depreciation on planes, but you can't write off the whole plane because you can sell the damn thing after you buy it.
Ask HN: The curse of the green card: entrepreneurship for immigrants? 
Background: I am from India. I have a PhD in engineering (Berkeley) and a steady full time job at a tech company in the valley. I work on an H1B visa and my green card application has been filed (EB2, pending AOS, received EAD).

Problem: I’ve been hacking at a startup concept for a few months now. We (my "co-founders" are also immigrants) are now at a point where we have a well functioning product and eager customers. The only thing that is preventing us from going live is incorporation (which gives us the ability to accept payments, liability protection, IP, etc). Being temporary immigrant workers on an H1B we can incorporate and "own" a company ... but CANNOT WORK for it.

o How do immigrants handle such a quandary?

o Yes, I can own a large % of equity, but I can’t write a single line of code... because that would technically be "working" for the company and could increase the value of my equity

o Some say "find someone (e.g. US citizen) to run the company for you". How does one entrust the running of a whole company to someone else while being a passive shareholder? Remember, if I send a single email to one of our customers, I’d be "working" and violating my H1B

o With the expected green card wait time of 3-5 years for an Indian citizen, I am getting frustrated by the day. Does anyone else here share my frustration? How do you deal with it?

Private comments to s t e v e s m i t h 1 5 5 @ g m a i l . c o m
I would say that fear is the correct word, but suggest that you have the context wrong. It's not the top eschelon of the generation running away and creating their own businesses that we fear, it's the bottom tier thinking they merit top tier salaries with no proportional abilities to go along with them. I welcome the former, and the latter gives me nightmares.
yeah regulation in europe is insane. You fire someone in Europe you have to continue paying their full salary for a whole year or until they get a new job.

Here its wham bam thank you mam, don't forget your box and enjoy living on $1500 a month that you get from unemployment.
Does this man not pass by hundreds of those less fortunate, either by choice or by circumstance and not think that some of his wealth should - in a fair and decent society - be used in an attempt better their lives in some key ways? Like maybe a doctor?

I hate paying taxes too, but J.H.C we live in the best damn continent (I'm Canadian) on the planet. We didn't do anything but win the birth lottery. We can't be so damn greedy all the time.

</rant>
PHP decide on namespace operator
PHP decide on backslash as the namespace operator.
wow, I had no idea. SICP is sitting on my shelf, I had no idea there was a lecture series that went along with it. I'll take a look at the first few. I will say, I suspect the fact that Harvey's lectures gain currency with the video viewer simply because some of his examples, like map reduce, are very current and topical. I'll check out the first few. But even now I can tell you I prefer scheme from Harvey over Python from How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (http://openbookproject.net/thinkCSpy/index.xhtml), although thinkCSpy is still on my to do list. I can't help but wonder if my physics background is finding functional programming more attractive. However, I still haven't gotten comfy with Emacs, still using Vi and the REPL. BTW, the torrents don't seem to be seeded.
Link: http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=8493
100 to 1 leverage: A fundamental right of all Americans.

Perhaps if this man hadn't skipped college, he would realize how stupid the business decisions he is outlining were.

Nonetheless, he makes some good points about the pervading sense of entitlement in this country, though pinning it on the democrats is simply inaccurate.
Sprint CEO: “By gosh if that Android ain’t a lump of you-know-what”
I used my wife's computer to look at my Facebook account once, and forgot to log out. She came by later, and happily accepted several of the friend invitations sitting in my inbox before realizing that it was my account, not hers. It never occurred to her that she had no idea who these people were or that maybe she should check on them before accepting the invite.

Friend collecting just makes no sense to me.
Skoggins May be a Strange Name, But its Music Booking Service is Pretty Good