skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not "hard", it's just "different". I don't see how it breaks a "certain type of thinking" that we are "wired" for, other than that it fundamentally different from the imperative / structured programming that 99% of programmers are introduced to in their first language. I don't see how breaking with that model is beyond the ken of human beings. You can even take intermediate steps; learning Python and its code introspection features makes "code == data" a lot simpler to grok because you've already seen that sort of thing before.

Maybe the electrician just wired your brain wrong. You might want to try and get a refund.
Standard Oil also did pretty well during the Panic of 1873.
A Critique of Krugman's Economic (not political) Commentary
Banks not using bailout money for loans
Number 2 is the killer feature in my opinion. Leveraging a humongous, popular, and mature set of libraries that the JVM gives makes Clojure stand out, and is probably why it's getting so much attention. The "real world" usually favors languages with "batteries included".
I think the advertised domain should clearly be bits.blogs.nytimes.com, not nytimes.com.
from the post:

"You start with a container, in our example /articles/. Do GET /articles/ to get a JSON document listing the URLs of all the articles. These URLs are relative to the container URL. You’ll get a response like [’./1′, ‘./2′, ‘./3′] (actually [’1′, ‘2′, ‘3′] would be fine too). Do GET {article-url} to get the article representation."

The original post that started this interesting conversation did mention that summary data could be included along with the individual item URLs. If that summary data is complete to a point where action can be taken without further queries, then I'm totally on-board.

If not, then imagine the impact on your service if every data aggregation api query performed by your database resulted in dozens of follow-on queries as people traverse result lists and ask to get each item individually.
What Will Jobs Announce at MacWorld 2009?
Interactive Mirror
Yeah, when was the last time you wrote code on a whiteboard when you WEREN'T in an interview? Definitely good advice, but I would caution that it's just an interview skill, and only serves to improve your performance rather than your content.

Also, you should remember from your test-taking skills that time asleep is more valuable than time studying. Thus, as pointed out, you should really make sure you're well-rested.
Strang is the man. I actually bought this textbook to supplement my Calc III textbook because I was having a hard time (prof being crap didn't help). So I bought this text (which has multivariable at the end + a nice section on LinALg of course) and I dominated the last portion of the course. Great book.
> I think you are too coward to even expose your identity

Ah, yes. Rational arguments. Nice.

> .. below commenter (I guess its the same person)

and conspiracy theories to boot. I don't know who the "below commenter" you are referring to is, but as I mentioned, there is a created field in the profile so you can see if my profile was created yesterday just to bother you. You ignored that. But then I guess that would of course be dealing with facts.

The point of my original post was to give you something to think about on two fronts : "full of either brahmins or SC/ST" and regarding the south that "casteism has always been a problem here". The population talk was regarding the second point (as I also mentioned in the original post). But again, you seem to have missed that.

> There is no point debating with you. Closed.

Thanks and consider the favour returned.
I think he's endorsing "data driven development", i.e. if you focus on capturing the right data, you can simplify your application logic immensely. In his magazine example, by encoding the magazine regulation rules as table columns, the owner would have been able to modify the behavior himself. Instead the rules are encapsulated in complex program logic that neither the author or owner are willing to modify for fear of breaking.

I think DSLs (or domain specific language) would probably be too difficult for the magazine owner. If it was database driven, he could use a gui tool such as phpmyadmin to edit the magazine regulation rules.
It's too early for libraries to be built on a language that is still in the experimental stage.

While I enjoyed writing arc code, I'm in no hurry to see a huge infrastructure pop up around the language as it stands. What's the rush? Let pg and rtm take whatever time they need to build a language they are happy with.
Powerful libraries are a cheap way to make a new language the language du jour. (Think Rails.) They're not the critical ingredient if you're trying to make something to last; they may even hurt.
While I disagree with you, I think it's unfortunate that your comment was modded down.

I'd respond by saying that lisp is an easier language to learn than C (for example) - they syntax is much more consistent.
You might want to check out the Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in Information Technology (BFOIT).

They have a class which introduces programming and gets kids excited, teaching all the basic concepts in a much more intuitive way than AP computer science (java).

http://www.bfoit.org/itp/itp.html

The language is constantly being improved by Guy Haas, the head instructor of the program.

Schools and instructors all over the world use the lessons provided in their classes.
This is a link to Brian Harvey's home page which includes his book series: Computer Science Logo Style

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/
In our company, the rule is that we are not allowed to upgrade core MS software ourselves (XP, Office, IE, service packs etc.) This is done by the security department and rolled out automatically to workstations. Other than that, I can install what I want. We did not experience anything horrible regarding security - it is just we need a few full-time employees to take care of that.

Regarding Vista, the reasons mentioned above applied to us as well...we didnt migrate and it seems that everyone is waiting on Win7 already.
Really? That is a surprising outcome, and would seem to be dependent on when that large initial investment was made.
Eleventh Hour: Agro
Tonight on Eleventh Hour, Special Science Advisor to the FBI Jacob Hood is going to have a hard time dealing with one of humankind’s basic necessities: food. On “Agro,” Hood and his partner, Special Agent Rachel Young
In what capitalist/mostly capitalist system have the poor gotten poorer?

Certainly, the rich may get rich faster than the poor, but that's far from the same thing.
Memories selectively, safely erased in mice
How to select your canvas printing company for canvas pictures?
If you have finally decided to create a unique Canvas Print to go with your newly decorated living room, then you have probably made the right choice. Choosing a company that does your Canvas Printing to a high standard and to the specifications that you need is extremely important. You don’t want your Canvas Printsto remind you of a bad experience every time you walk into the living room.
Microsoft already has a much faster Javascript engine in Silverlight, but they would need to make big changes in IE to integrate their next-generation Javascript implementation into it.

Besides, the IE team's approach to performance is different than Mozilla's and Apple's approach. Instead of just improving raw performance, they look at entire use cases and try to optimize them for usability and performance. To the IE team, a 50% increase in some artificial benchmark means nothing, but a 50% decrease in the number of steps and/or the amount of wall time for the user to accomplish a task is very important.

Here is what they had to say about their integrating their new Javascript implementation into IE:

Chris Wilson [MS] (Expert):
Q: Why not adapt the the Silverlight implementation of (managed) Javascript and fit it in IE.next? It's fast as hell.
A: We've been looking at Javascript engines closely. The transitions back and forth between managed code (JScript.Net) and unmanaged code (IE's DOM) would be expensive, though, so it's not as much of a slam dunk as it might seem.

- http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/chats/transcri...

By the way, once a month you can join one of those chats and ask the IE developers any question you want.
Branch Out
FedEx's CEO on McCain, free trade and the tax bias against capital-intensive industries.
I apologize for the political content, but the article actually contains very little commentary on the election.
Thats interesting. By that token, Facebook or other social networks are in some ways, restricted by what they can do because of the way people use the network
Guitar Hero 4 Commerical features ARod, Michael Phelps and Kobe
Don't feel like you have to do crazy low level stuff to be a good programmer. It's a big, diverse field and you can leave your mark wherever you want, and still have it be valued by others. Work on what gets you excited and makes you want to work hard, whether that's websites in PHP or a math library in assembly. You'll do your best work that way. And if you're good at your niche, you'll probably be able to find work doing what you love.
Libraries are just one aspect of it. Clojure's already got an excellent VM and a sound programming model to deal with concurrency.
Someone had to be on the other side of the banks' trades.
A language will always grow in complexity. But it does not become more popular because it grows in complexity.

My point was that the trend in popularity is towards less complex languages - i.e, languages that abstract away difficulty. In that respect, C++ is less complex than C.
Lisp would not be easier to learn than C if you had to do the OS specific stuff you do in C in Lisp.
I sort of see what you're saying. But the States' poor now are better off than the States' middle class was in the 1800s. The problem is, this isn't close to true in many other countries.
Whatever it is, start small. Smaller patches can be very useful and are also more likely to give you the satisfaction of being accepted. Even just correcting typos or grammar in a README can be useful as long as you're not a jerk about how you submit it to the original author. :-)

Github definitely makes contributing to open source very easy, so I'd recommend you start looking there. They also have some well-written practical guides to working with Git here:

http://github.com/guides
That's the thing with a corporation. It can only sell what people want to buy. It's like when people complain about Starbucks taking over the high street, well, Starbucks can't exist where people don't want its products and services, same as any corporation.

I have a pet theory that this is why some people have this visceral hatred of corporations: they're a mirror to the people, and people don't like what they see.
Agreed.

All I can think of is defense (not offense), intelligence, (poorly executed) safety nets, (some) education and (some) infrastructure.

Lot of qualifiers, which exemplifies the problem.
No, it's fundamentally difficult for human beings. You know why? Take a look at mathematics. It is fundamentally difficult for human beings because it does not fit the model that we grew up with evolutionarily.

Math is just a language, but it's a very difficult language for most human beings to learn because we don't naturally think using those type of expressions.

Lisp was created as mathematical notation for computers. It is based of a language that the most people have difficulty with in school.

I'm good at math, and I have no problem with lisp. I'm just pointing out that it will not be the next big thing because this type of thinking is not easy for most people to get into. Pythonic thinking on the other hand is easy for people to understand.
What you call fragmentation in the Lisp community I actually consider a sign of health. It was a sign of the vitality of the Lisp community in the 70s and 80s that people keep forking off new dialects. That was actually something I was hoping to encourage more of with Arc.

CL was in my opinion (and in the opinion a lot of Lisp hackers) a disaster in that respect. Before CL, Lisp had evolved rapidly by spawning new dialects. Once CL was established
as the standard, this evolution practically stopped.
I think the article missed the main cause, Visa isn't very good so people don't want it.
If you have ever been in a math class with people who are not programmers, who are just plain old Joes, you'll notice that the most difficult subjects have to do with abstractions.

When particular concepts are represented by abstract concepts, and operations are executed on these concepts, that's where most people shut down. That's why many people don't go into programming - they are not able to easily deal with the abstractions that programmers have to deal with.

Languages that are similar to human languages - i.e, one word, one 'object' or 'concept' are easy for people to understand. A language like lisp is not even near to that - it depends completely on abstractions of concepts, and this is where the core difficulty for most people would lie.

For example, to take this example from wikipedia:

(list '1 '2 'foo)

The statement above is very difficult to reconcile with real world concepts, it's very difficult to put into the mental boxes we have grown up with.

Contrast with python:

if object is not null:

Languages don't have to be similar to english, but they have to be mentally mapable to models we already know. This is difficult to do with Lisp. With lisp, you have to understand new concepts. It's just not that easy for most people.
Take a look at this sample from wikipedia:

(defun factorial (n)
(if (<= n 1)
1
(* n (factorial (- n 1)))))

Now imagine trying to explain that to a person who does not use a computer. Humans always start learning by looking for the objects, then applying an action on the object. With lisp, this object is not obvious, and the actions being applies are not obvious either.
I'm pretty sure he meant "on average." And it's hardly surprising, since the market on average goes up. Dollar cost averaging decreases your expected value while also decreasing the standard deviation (risk.) I don't know the result gamble was referring to, but I'm guessing he meant that if you wanted to decrease your risk, then the better way to do so is by adjusting your stock/bond ratio.

For completeness I'll mention that there's also a strategy called "value cost averaging", which gives better returns than dollar cost averaging but is less straightforward to implement, you need to keep a spreadsheet and do some calculations--the basic idea is that instead of investing a fixed amount of dollars every period of time, you invest the amount needed to keep the value of your portfolio growing at a certain rate (i.e., you buy more when the stocks go down and less when they go up.)
Google reads brain waves to measure ads on YouTube
are the axioms of non-euclidean geometry obvious? what about special relativity?
Danielle Steele vs. Jane Austen ... or something.
But who's to say your experience with a given subject domain does not expand your intuition and creates new models of understanding?

btw, if object is not null is closer to (nil? object) than to (list '1 '2 'foo)

lisp may not be simpler, it is more powerful. it is a distillation of the ideas that gave rise to computer languages.
on the surface. yes. which one do you consider more powerful as a tool for expressing ideas?
[Ask HN] Best Way of Converting, Hosting Own Videos as Flash?
What's the best way for me to convert videos or screencasts from various formats to an emedable flash video for viewing on my own site?

Basically, I want something similar to YouTube embeded videos except I want them to only be viewable from our own domain - no outsourcing of page views to other sites.

I'm open to both software that involves hosting everything on my server and services that will outsource the entire thing but keep the pageviews on our domain.

Thanks.
You are saying that I am using the solution for a tough problem as being representative of the use of the language?

That may be so, but what I was pointing out was how different they language structure was from traditional human languages.
BrightKite iPhone App Goes Live (Finally)
C code is usually very simple. The difficulty in C is not in grasping the syntax, it's in manipulating pointers, understanding the byte layout of structures, linking libraries and so on.

If you had to do the same stuff in lisp, you'd face the same problems.
I predict that Paul will end up abandoning Arc and restarting his quest for the perfect programming language anew. It seems to happen with other successful languages - Python wasn't Guido's first attempt at a programming language, and Ruby wasn't Matz's first attempt at a language. It's hard to change fundamentals once you have already publicized a language and you have working code, and I think some of the fundamentals of Arc will definitely need to be changed. In particular, the distinctions between the different types of iterable objects - strings, arrays, lists - the inability to design your own objects that are also usable in the same ways as the built-in objects, these are pretty key aspects of the more recent programming languages. I could easily be wrong, but I still suspect the 100-year language quest needs a reboot.

Good luck, and I'll keep trying Arc 3 or whatever future stuff there is. I would love a successful language with real macro capability.
When Larry Ellison says he has no idea what the cloud is, he is faking it, he is shaking in his boots in terms of the IT industry as it is today (including the decision makers).

Cloud computing takes power from hosting, it management, it infrastructure and gives this gift to programmers/engineers and architects. This is a really good time to be a programmer and aware of the power of this paradigm change.
- Whisper. Don't Shout is cute, but it doesn't tell me anything. That's a lot of screen real estate for something that's just cute.

- The term social network is somewhat tired. Everything is social now. Building a social network was sexy three years ago. Now it's just a category of sites that hearkens to the passing bubble. Say what you do. People will expect it to be social anyway, and besides, when was the last time you went looking for a "social network for $foo"?

- Connected to those two, your two key points seem to be "Create and share news releases." and "Get new story ideas or pitch your own." Those are your message. That's the reason people will be landing on your site. Those are the ideas that you want to hit people over the head with in the first seconds that they land on your site. Bonus points if you can convey that graphically.
they are different domains of expression. so that should not come as surprise. maybe one day when computers are super powerful. for now "code is data and we write in the same data structures the compiler understands" seem like the bigger win. that of course means a lisp of some sort.
If lisp is hard to pick up but those who do have a grasp of it are significantly more productive than they would be in other languages, then it should be a success.

Since so little software is written in lisp, I can only conclude that the language doesn't actually make its users much more productive or that the significance of libraries is greater than pg wants to admit or that most brilliant programmers are rather ignorant when it comes to selecting their tools.
I don't doubt that learning lisp makes you better. But the argument is about if Lisp is the next big thing. My argument is that it is not because people have to learn new things, and they don't want to. They will only want to if there are concrete advantages to it (make a website in 3 hours), and not because of a more abstract result like 'expand your intuition'.

Lisp is likely more powerful, but it is unlikely to become very popular in the form it currently exists in.
Millenial: Grew up with the Internet, uses MySpace and YouTube like experts.

Gen X: Built the Internet one damn metre of Cat5 at a time.

No comparison, really.
Ideas are best expressed in plain english. Commands to computers are best expressed in simplistic statements like those that exist in python.

Complex systems should be modelled by reducing the complexity. What I mean is that one has to black-box certain parts of complex systems such that human minds can deal with the concepts effectively. Object oriented programming is a way of doing this, but it's not the perfect way.
So if I buy a lottery ticket for $1 and then use it to win $50 million I shouldn't be paying taxes on the $50 million because I already paid income taxes on the $1?
> fundamental flaws of capitalism -- the tendency for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer

BS. Riches to shirtsleeves abound. Wealth rarely lasts three generations. Now, there are certain subgroups that seem mired in poverty, but that's another matter. The extent to which the rich have been getting richer and the poor getting poorer for the last 30 years in America has everything to do with the explosive growth of government and regulation, NOT capitalism.

Capital gains should be zero. All wealth creation is driven by savings and capital. Maximized capital investment and the incentives to save, maximize growth.

Income taxes should also be zero, by the way. It is entirely feasible to fund a properly scoped government with excise, duties, and user fees.
Makes sense to me. I also have a theory that with the world becoming more and more related with media being more and more similar across countries, your neighbors are suddenly all the celebrities and people on TV.

And we know that you value your worth relatively to what your neighbors have. So with your neighbors suddenly being much better off due to them being celebrities, you end up feeling poorer and must play the consumerism game.

I'll try to rewrite this to make more sense later - pretty tired now.
paul graham sucks balls.
I'm not sure if it's the Best Way, but the Panda project looks interesting if you're willing to host on EC2 and S3:

http://pandastream.com/
yes, but you have the ability to tailor the language and create constructs to deal with your problems more concisely.

i learned lisp before C. i always found C to be very obtuse and arbitrary. for example:

1. why can't i define a function inside a function and then return it, why can't i define a function based on some conditional?

2. macros that are just text expansions are useless (well not useless but in comparison to lisp macros!)

3. no way to embed a mini language. or way, but too difficult. in lisp you don't even have to think about it. (a little query language, or a little configuration language, or a language to do gene annotations based on certain protein sequences that non-computer people can write in :)

4. you have to compile and use a debugger. in lisp you can change and run things as you write them.

5. recursion is unequivocally expensive.

6. can't write new iteration constructs (or you can by passing function pointers but it's limited and ugly)

7. no anonymous functions! c'mon!

etc etc

so the fact that lisp doesn't map into a preconceived model of understanding has very little practical significance ... C, by all measures, is less powerful and wouldn't allow me to do my work with reasonable amount of effort. neither would python btw. as i maintain a domain specific language that would have been very difficult to write in some other language.
How could it hurt a language's lasting power for it to have powerful libraries?

Do you mean that it might hurt Clojure specifically, because it relies on Java's libraries in particular? Or was it a more general point?
Fun with Descriptors in Python
sorry, i meant explicitly to a computer.

some of the ideas i need to express in order to make a living are not so easily expressed in python:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=343738
http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Media_Player will play the videos, once you have them converted to FLV. I always used ffmpeg for that.