skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know what exactly the guy's point was, but I don't consider this a surprise. C++ and C# are still one of the best choices for developing standalone applications (C# when you are under Windows only and speed is not critical, C++ otherwise). If you are doing more scripting/web stuff, then you will use scripting languages for the job.

What I would like to HN guys ask is this. I saw quite a lot of critique of C++ here, but really, what is a better choice for developing commercial standalone application, where speed is critical? I mean real established language with good library and IDE support. I am just really curious to know, I personally have nothing against anyone disliking C++. ;-)
While I hear many people complaining about the "awkward" and "hard-to-read" syntax, it's rare to hear someone compliment the syntax of lisp. I am a big fan of the Lisp syntax because it's so simple and consistent - probably a relic of its roots in lambda calculus. Not having to worry about operator precedence is a huge bonus in itself - I don't know why on one hand people cling to PEMDAS, logic, assignment, etc having a complicated hierarchy of precedence and on the other reject lisp because it's too "foreign".
A response by Dan Weinreb:
http://danweinreb.org/blog/the-failure-of-lisp-a-reply-to-br...
Thanks YC: 500 Tasty Bookmarks
Here you go, made a greasemonkey script to take care of it.
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33974
You know. Looking at this, and for a second ignoring I probably need to buy a Mac as well to develop for the iPhone, I'm pretty sure I will never ever hack together a small app for shits and giggles. Not on a platform like this.

For instance a phone client for my online Yahtzee game is something I should be able to hack together on Windows Mobile in no time. Build, debug, deploy. Repeat a few times. Done. You know, the way things usually work.

It might just be me, but trying to work with this platform seems to severely break that whole flow thing real programmers have when they get working on something.
Can someone please explain in basic terms, what exactly are the advantages of functional programming, over other mainstream approaches like OOP? AFAIK, some FP support was added to the newest version of C#, but I couldn't immediately tell how exactly can I make use of it.
Segway Inventor Crowd Sourcing Mobile Apps to Change the World
It was the most thorny and un-inspiring community I've ever participated in, despite my extreme interest in the language. It's jaw dropping that a language with such promise has sat out the resurgence, and speaks to what an un-friendly and un-inviting community can do a technology platform.

As a Lisp newb who frequents #lisp every now and then, I’ve noticed quite the opposite. People in the channel are very open to newcomers and as friendly as hackers can get.

Uninspiring? Why? Lack of smug as Cal Hendersen says?
I was a bit surprised by this because I would have expected there to be lesser and lesser "stand-alone applications" (desktop applications) being developed amd more web applications.

For web application development, I'd expect PHP/RoR to have a bigger footprint.
Soon you may need to thank the Wallstreeters who help fill the jobs listed on your site :):

http://www.leavewallstreetjoinastartup.com/
Ask HN: Anybody use Second Life as a Collaborative Environment?
Here's the deal: a large client of mine was asking about using online virtual worlds as a way to do co-location and collaboration.

My opinion was that there is nothing like face-to-face work -- body language, tonal inflection, positioning, etc make human communication very nuanced.

But I'm interested in your experiences! Have you tried using technology such as Second Life to form and run a startup? If so, what happened? Know of anybody else doing it?
Zuckerberg: Thoughts on the Evolution of The Facebook
How to Make Inexpensive DIY Home-Built Solar Panels with Damaged Solar Cells from Ebay
Doing business like this is a really good way to make money and scratch one's hacker itch: have fun bashing out a prototype, get the site going, then try and sell it a short while later.

It seems like it's more financially practical than working on open-source full time, and more fun and novel than grinding on a startup for a few years.
What is the lure going to be for people to stop moving to webapps, and suddenly embrace an open platform and installable apps?

The fact that internet connectivity on a desktop vs. on your mobile device is different by an order of magnitude. When you get ubiquitous and fast internet on the mobile device (not some bizarre spotty coverage), then things will change. Maybe Europe is ahead in regards to that, but in the US, I don't see that happening very soon.

Edit: oh, and also the processor speeds. So, basically I will bet on webapps for mobile after 3-4 years. Until then, at least, installable apps will work better.

Another Edit: perhaps, when something like Google Gears is everywhere, it might change. But offline support - both for code and data - is kind of essential.
It's the Internet. When in doubt, assume sarcasm.

The point has already been made that the vast majority of "small to medium businesses" do not need scalability (not even a little bit--90% of those businesses could be hosted on a $10/month shared hosting account and never have a performance problem). So, we're talking about a tiny subset of an extremely cost-conscious market. Not only that, for the small businesses that do need scaling (the Twitters and the Justin.TVs), the vast majority of their scaling problems cannot be solved by adding a few applications like memcache and a pre-tuned MySQL to the distribution. Your application has to be built to scale, or you will not scale. The tuning of MySQL is trivial (and case-by-case specific, to boot...there is no way to say any particular MySQL configuration is good for all high performance use cases that balances all of the usual tradeoffs, and as much as there can be such a configuration the one provided by most distros is already pretty close to it).

You could ask me how I know, with some confidence, that web scalabilty for small to medium businesses is a bad business idea, or I could just blurt out that my first business built web scalability products for small to medium businesses. It took me seven years to figure out that they don't have any money, and that they don't know enough to know to look at the niche solutions for their problems (they call Cisco, or F5 if they're really on the technical ball), so when they do spend money, they're spending it with companies that provide a huge range of products that are sort of ancillary to the task at hand...and also happen to have a few items in their product line that can sort of address the problem, if you squint right and send them enough money. Not that I'm bitter. (Seriously, I'm actually not bitter. Just amused when folks take the "pick a problem that you have, and chances are others will have it too, and there's your perfect business idea!" to an extreme that doesn't quite mesh with reality.)

There may be the seed of a good idea in there somewhere. But building yet another Linux distribution is just dumb as rocks. And I mean that in the nicest possible way.
You can write FP in a natural way (using non-mutable functions and data) where the code is automatically scalable over hundreds or thousands of processors. It has built-in super-scalability.

The trade-off is that the code is butt-ugly, at least in this C# programmer's view.
Google’s Search Market Share Went Up In August To 63%
The models should penalize investments that are complex, hard to understand and infrequently traded, she said.

...by how much?
I see your point. One reason could be, that while there might be less stand-alone applications under development (just an assumption, I don't know whether it is so), nowadays lot of them are big apps required a lot of programmers (for example in the project I work on, there are several hundreds developers ;-). In the web apps world, the teams are usually slimmer.
What nail did he hit exactly? It was hard enough filtering through all of his leftist ranting that the "story" was hardly evident.
Well sure, I appreciate your point but don't forget that some of the biggest innovative breakthroughs that we use to this day came from hackers being bored and doing things they shouldn't. Those were probably considered destructive then.

Now, I'm not condoning what this person did. I'm not saying go around trying to gain unauthorized access to a politician's computer; but instead we've got to look at these things from multiple angles instead of immediately jumping on the 'These actions are purely irresponsible and negative', true enough.
Bigfoot Networks teams up with Dell to kill game lag
Huh? You guys just launched - why would you immediately try to migrate to some new technology you have never used? Don't you have other technological and user facing issues to face before you start optimizing the back-end?

For example, what's up the with http://ticketstumbler.com/charlotte-bobcats-playoff/ that?
It is a shame that people pay so much for this technology, and now it's just going to be more common.
Morgan Stanley In Talks To Sell Larger Stake To Chinese Firm
Actually what we really need is an easy way to transform these submissions into feature requests

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

instead of just killing them.
BOSS Challenge Submissions
Congrats. However surely 512 would be more significant around these parts. :)
So they have master servers and replication. Not to mention they've covered up for MySQLs lack of ability to kill heavy queries automatically by making some hacky perl-script.

Something tells me using MySQL didn't really help them much, as all serious DBs out there have this shit covered by default.

In fact everything mentioned in this article is stuff I would have with SQL Server Standard Edition, and that's stuff that's been around at least since 2000.

Disclaimer: I'm somewhat of a DB-purist and I hate seeing things like this encouraged or praised, when I consider this reinventing a old, old wheel for the millionth time.
7 VCS Reviewed
I suppose this is about as much of an unfair advantage as someone playing on a 19" screen against someone with a 56" inch screen.
Anyone remember that screen design web app that was here a couple months ago?
Howdy, there was a really good screen design / wireframing web app posted here a couple of months ago. I've searched for it but I can't find it. Anyone remember what it was?
Geez, My Local Cable Company Borrowed the Amazon.com Logo. Almost Exactly.
Europe is way way ahead so perhaps that is where the difference lies.

I don't know about processor speed, I can see some intensive 3d special effect games needing native, but for puzzle games, or most 'apps' javascript in a browser is pretty much there.
Flex: The Unix Geek's Ideal Flash Environment
I don't think you can generalize the PC's lead over Mac to say that Android will eventually overtake.

First, if you narrow you scope a bit you see that the Mac is still the market leader in certain market segments.

Those markets have always been dominated by Mac.

The PC dominates overall because it is a generic business machine. But can you say the same about cellphones?

It seems to me that cellphones are much more narrowly defined and used. Some are fashion accessories, some like the Blackberry are like a communication utility.

But none are a generic computing device, and I don't think they'll ever be. So it is easy to imagine the cell market being dominated by the most shiny thingy.

You could even say that with Vista's DRM, even the PC is heading that way, where the open platform will eventually be relegated to a niche enthusiast market.

People like us will pay a premium to get a PC as open as one anyone can by today.
balsamiq.com ?
I also recently learnt async/event-driven programming with Twisted. One of those really fun learning experiences: a few days of fumbling around in the dark wondering if my brain is broken, then the great moment when the lightbulb goes on and I've got a shiny new tool to play with.`
Where is the best place to find potential CTO/Head Programmers for a start-up?
Beyond reaching out to contacts and getting referrals, is there any places or resources to look for CTO/head programmer candidates in the market for new projects and start-ups?
This is an idiosyncratically YC definition of the term "startup". Go to NEWS.GOOGLE.COM, search for "startup", and you'll see the term used in the mainstream press in pretty much every conceivable way.

The word "startup" to me distinguishes new independent nationwide business from corporate spinoffs, established niche companies, and regional businesses. It doesn't have any more meaning than that.

You can say startup means "shoot the moon" all you want, but I'm going to keep calling my company a bootstrapped startup.
Nah, it doesn't break your flow. These steps are everything before and after your flow. Flow, to me, is when you're in deep actually developing.

Once you have it up and rolling and have done it more than once, it's pretty easy. Setting up new projects is easy (1-3 steps rather than 20). It's just figuring it out the first time that is difficult.
Twisted is awesome. I used it to write justin.tv's chat server, which is currently running on 18 cpus (3 physical machines) and scales to over 10,000 concurrent connections per cpu. Kyle wrote the video server in Twisted too.
Is this yet another variant of the question: Where can I find a programmer to implement my great startup idea? That gets asked here about once a month, and the reaction is generally fairly contemptuous.
Using Single Table Inheritance Is Okay
Panda: Open Source Merb-Based Video System
isss niice
After you write your app to be shared-nothing, VMware will happily scale it for you. That may ease system administration, but it won't make parallel programming any easier.
Pittsburgh's AlphaLab incubator applications open
ha fair point, sir.
http://www.cofoundr.com/

http://www.partnerup.com/
It means about as much as any other English word. I.e. it's not mathematically precise, but it does convey something.
um...we've got more jobs posted than them (?)

ha definitely aiming for some quant talent. shoulda used that $YC to take out a billboard on Times Square...ROI focused.
HN Footer greasemonkey script
There was a feature request that made it to he front page of HN today about adding a footer to the bottom of the comments pages. I agreed with the sentiment and made a greasemonkey script to do the job. You can find it here: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33974

The original post about a comments footer is now dead, as it should have been posted to the Feature Request page. You can find the comments to the dead post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=308047

I think HN needs a better feature request system. Maybe something that could categorize the requests at least.
I'm currently part of the first cycle of this program. AlphaLab has some benefits over YC:

* includes office space
* more money for less equity
* longer program
* cheaper city to live in
But none are a generic computing device, and I don't think they'll ever be

Matt's central assumption is that they will become generic computing devices and I concur. Why do you think they won't ever be generic computing devices? I think of my iPhone as pretty generic and "capable" of doing a lot of things. I had a dumb phone-only-phone a year ago.
Google's quest for the intelligent cloud
I used to run a fairly large social networking site (before it was called a social network) with forums, photo galleries etc. and had a similar experience. We changed the design fairly drastically and there was mass revolt.

Two competing sites were started that were similar to our previous design. For weeks it was all anyone talked about. People left, they said they'd never come back and they joined the other sites.

After a month or two people started coming back. They started to see the merits of the new design and features. After 3 or 4 months it was if nothing had ever happened. The competing sites fizzled out and most of our users returned.

Lesson learned was that people hate change but if it is change for the better they'll generally recover from it.
I've worked in C++ for many years, in both biotech and video editing, both have the same demands about speed and memory footprint, hence C++.

But I also like Python, and I would be hard pressed to justify C++ for anything that doesn't truly need it.

Still, I am pleasantly surprised C++ is in demand at startups.
The real difference between liberals and conservatives
Can anyone else speak to the merits of AlphaLab? This is the first I have heard of them.
How to get distribution advantage on the iPhone
Their (new) client's implementation could very well independently violate another patent or an unknown extension of the licensed patent. What would they gain from taking on this risk?

The broken patent system has bumbled along precisely because large companies generally have cross licensing deals with each other, leaving only the little guy subject to vague infringement claims. Now that there's a well-funded company which doesn't require 'incoming' licenses (by not making anything), there's real money involved for the big guys.

On another day I might be arguing for abolishing patents, but I just don't see how this is an abuse of the current system.
I don't understand why you auto-kill feature requests, seems to me the visibility and resultant discussion could be quite useful.
In the short run, these markets selected for people who didn't properly analyze the risk. If the average CDO makes you 7% a year until one day it loses 20%, it's not a prudent investment -- but if you somehow estimate that the maximum loss is 2% instead, you will be willing to buy many more of them, and your return on capital will look a whole lot better. If you're not the only one doing this, the flow of all that money into risky products will give you returns even higher than you expected -- and if you're like the average investor, you will adjust your reasoning in retrospect to make yourself as brilliant as possible.

So it's actually unsurprising that people outside of the finance business were disproportionately aware that the whole real estate bubble was crazy. Someone with your views working for a big bank would be the equivalent of a peacock who realizes who impractical those feathers are.
Mostly I think the UI has much less bandwidth then something like a laptop.

Why I say UI, I don't mean the iPhone, or any one phone, but any device small enough to fit into one hand.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but I do think ease of use will be more of a selling point then power and capability.
Sorry, but if you went through all the steps required to actually build and ship a real application on a normal platform (Mac/Win), it'd probably seem a lot more complex, but just not in a bureaucratic way.

(He said, having just gone through all this pain himself. Our app is still in review, but if you're interested, there's a pre-release website for it: http://grafly.com. It's a 2d/3d equation graph explorer with some pretty interesting technology hidden inside. (I didn't write that part. ;-))

There's some nonsense here, yes, but it's just part of the ecosystem.

It might actually consume 2-3 days of your life; if you're serious about making apps for the iPhone, that's really not a barrier.

Maybe it keeps out the whiners. ;-)
Still on Step 3 for the past two weeks now.

Keep in mind Step 0 is to buy/own some Macs.
First, if you narrow you scope a bit you see that the Mac is still the market leader in certain market segments.

If you're willing to play the "in this market segment" game, you can make anybody a winner. OpenBSD totally has a lock on the "paranoid dudes in their mom's basement who think Debian is too damned corporate" market segment.

The PC dominates overall because it is a generic business machine. But can you say the same about cellphones?

I think you can. "A generic mobile device". There, I said it.

The PC, in hindsight, I think was obviously a case of fully proprietary (Apple) vs. mostly open (the PC, with DOS and later Windows). One can easily say, "It's the applications!" And you'd be right...but why were there more apps for PC than Mac? Bigger market, sure. But, if Apple could stop people from making applications for the Mac, and Microsoft couldn't, I know which OS I'd be developing for. And that's the situation here. Apple are basically being bastards to their customers and their developers, and because Apple products are really attractive, extremely well-executed, and generally good and useful, people haven't immediately noticed what a bastard Apple is being about the whole thing. But, I think Matt's right. People will notice that Apple is treating them like crap, with abusive contracts, abusive terms for distribution of applications, and anti-competitive practices with regard to who gets to make and sell apps for the iPhone. It's already happening, and Apple will either wise up, or lose out.

You could even say that with Vista's DRM, even the PC is heading that way, where the open platform will eventually be relegated to a niche enthusiast market.

Nobody is saying that Microsoft is open, or good for consumers. At least, I didn't take Matt's post to indicate that at all. He merely used the early PC vs. Mac war as an interesting historical precedent for what's going to play out in the mobile market and for the very same reasons: Cost, availability of apps, and control (i.e. who controls your device: you, or the manufacturer?).

I think the comparisons are pretty obvious and pretty difficult to argue against. The current behavior and direction of Microsoft (and its own historical abusive behavior) is irrelevant. Nobody is going to argue that the PC was a less open platform than the Mac in the 80s and 90s, and changes in the landscape since then don't alter history.

So it is easy to imagine the cell market being dominated by the most shiny thingy.

I think it'll be dominated by the cheapest thing that does what people want, just like PCs. It is becoming a commodity...as most mass-manufactured goods do.
Just look at some simple uses of closures and you'll see they open a world of possibilities. (and there's so much more to it than this!)
They also let you make compilers easily but I won't get into that here.

CL-USER> (sort (list 1 8 3 2 5) #'<) ; sort just needs a function of 2 arguments that tells if the first parameter is strictly less than the second
=> (1 2 3 5 8)
CL-USER> (sort (list 1 8 3 2 5) #'>)
=> (8 5 3 2 1)
CL-USER> (sort (list "hello" "HELLO" "hey" "bye") #'string<)
=> ("HELLO" "bye" "hello" "hey")
CL-USER> (mapcar #'1+ '(1 7 3 9))
;mapcar applies a function to each element of the lists passed as arguments and returns a new list with the results
=> (2 8 4 10)
CL-USER> (cons 1 2)
=> (1 . 2)
CL-USER> (mapcar #'cons '(A B C) '(1 2 3))
=> ((A . 1) (B . 2) (C . 3))
CL-USER> (defun make-adder (how-much-to-add)
(lambda (initial-value)
(+ initial-value how-much-to-add)))
=> MAKE-ADDER
CL-USER> (mapcar (make-adder 10) '(1 7 3 9))
=> (11 17 13 19)
CL-USER> (defvar *my-favorite-adder* (make-adder 42))
=> *MY-FAVORITE-ADDER*
CL-USER> (mapcar *my-favorite-adder* '(1 7 3 9))
=> (43 49 45 51)
CL-USER> (defun make-modifier (operator operand) ; a bit more general than make-adder
(lambda (initial-value)
(funcall operator initial-value operand)))
=> MAKE-MODIFIER
CL-USER> (mapcar (make-modifier #'expt 3) '(1 7 3 9))
=> (1 343 27 729)
CL-USER> (find-if #'numberp '(a "hi" nil 8 "test" 100))
=> 8
CL-USER> (find-if #'numberp '(a "hi" nil 8 "test" 100) :from-end t)
=> 100
CL-USER> (apply #'+ (remove-if-not #'numberp '(a "hi" nil 8 "test" 100)))
=> 108

That's not even (by a long shot) the tip of the iceberg.