skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here is an interesting link about macros in Dylan. IMHO, infix notation makes it so much harder to implement macros than in CL. http://www.fun-principles.info/slot/site/dylan/alpha/openpoi...
Ruby vs. Lisp
shouldn't the focus be on profitability rather than funding.
I'm often disappointed by some of the front page submissions these days so I end up reading a few gems and for articles I'm not really into I'll go into the comments too. The comments can often be more interesting than the articles themselves. I'm right there with you!
This question is kind of apropos of nothing, but I noticed that one of the example documents [1] has a weird markup structure, lacking tags like HEAD, BODY, etc. Is this just one of those weird accidental things or is this an intentional technique? It kind of reminds me of the dark old days of IE6 workarounds.

Probably a dumb question but I don't keep up on client-side technology as much as I should so I was curious.

http://shutterstock.github.com/rickshaw/examples/y_axis.html
It's a good question. I wish I had a favorite programming language, though. I think if you spend more than ten years in the business and you still are in love with a particular tool, you probably haven't really done anything big, or you haven't ever looked around to see how other people do things.

JavaScript is probably the language I hate the least. And I'd make some of the CoffeeScript syntax standard, and maybe bring in some concepts to keep spaghetti callbacks under control.
Oh, I meant marketing positioning. That is, Google doesn't tell users holy crap this is a byzantine system of laws and mousetraps and shit!

They just say Gmail is neat, and it's free, so use it.

But, of course you're right, the creation of the sausage that is Gmail is a very complicated sequence, beset by both internal and external bureaucracy, to say nothing of the technical challenges in maintaining it.
This may be a bit out there, but how about paying for email services?
With TVs, Microsoft Is Right and Apple Is Wrong
Brain scan: Seer of the mirror world
IPhones vs. the Police
Penelope Trunk’s Skewed Perceptions Of The World, Part 2
Which means it would be impossible to provide an email service to a child, right, short of self-hosting?
Different sports have different levels of cohesion in their teams. Rugby vs. American Football, for instance.
I'd take python and add optional variable declaration and flexible explicit typing constraints (a variable can be declared as either having certain methods returning a certain type, or as being of a set of types, or as being of any type, but all type declarations are optional) that are verified at compile time.
Original REST Paper
That's not true at all. As I note in the blog post, sure, it's more likely that what I'm working on right now won't impact that many people, but there's always the chance that what you build will impact millions of people. I've already built products that have been used by hundreds of thousands of people.
You can also run an RPyC* server in your process, and connect to it from any Python shell on any computer to control it.

* http://rpyc.sourceforge.net/
Guest Post by Elle Lothlorien
Zynga CEO Mark Pincus intensely focused
From what I understood you can download a song thinking its new hottest club hit and have your Kindle bricked.
another batman function is found as a stationary solution of the non-linear 4th order extended Fisher-Kolmogorov equation:

u_t + 10^-8 u_xxxx = 10e^-4 gamma u_xx + u - u^3

which describes the propagation of domain walls in liquid crystals

batman-ears: http://www.matmol.org/images/images/kolmo.png
A reasonable and level-headed response. Thank you.
Java isn't my favorite language, but since I use it fairly often I would love to have functions be first class.
I mean on some pages of the site it says that However, I am not sure how well they crack down on apps like this. If it becomes too much of a concern, I will take the advertisement out.

I just wanted to build something that will be useful without being rude on their site resources. For their site, the requests that come in are just like from any other client. This app do not put any extra burden on the site like crawling and such. Having said that, I agree that this a gray area.
Python. Faster.
Thanks zrgiu, do you have any recommendations from where you got the app themes or any designer recommendation who is not going to cost me a fortune?
Definitely a problem for the bookstore's business model, however I don't see how this is different than going to your local public library seeing a book you like and buying it on amazon later, in fact most public libraries will get a book for you ( and you can borrow it! ) for no or very little charge.
> Can you tell us why?

Part of it is, from personal experience, the fact paying for something introduces a high mental barrier it's hard to overcome if you view yourself as not having a stable income. The stereotypical school kid, in other words, whether elementary, high school, or, for some people, college. (This is also a reason micro-payments fail: They can't be micro enough to eliminate that psychological barrier.)

> should

'Should'? You're trying to derive an 'ought' from an 'is' and you can't do that in the general case. You certainly can't do it in this case.
That's an interesting generalization there. In my time I've encountered many kinds of programmers. Some could create amazing things despite their tool or language. Likewise, there were many who created amazing things with the help of their favorite tools or langauges. It's not wrong to have a favorite tool. It's natural. However, it might not be a great idea to think solely in terms of the tool; limitations and all. This is the spirit of the question.
Agile? You're probably doing it wrong. Really.
I ask this question as well. I work mostly with PHP developers and it's telling most of them don't have an answer or only say "consistent function argument order".

If you claim to have 7+ years using a language, surely there's a list of things you could add to make it better.

I think it's standard in the PHP ecosystem though.
"Focus on the user and all else will follow" is still number one at http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/tenthings.html
...and wages around the world balance out giving everyone a fair crack of the whip. Whenever someone suggests raising taxes on the rich, the answer is always "we can't do that because they'll just take their money/jobs and leave". Workers around the world will only get a fair deal when that is possible for them too.

You're right that in the short-run, US workers will suffer but in the long run, everyone wins because it means that when setting policy, governments would have to consider the possibility that workers (as well as employers) might be able to find a better deal elsewhere. That's what I like about the US federal system. This would just be rolling it out across the whole world.
Another great resource for this is Chris Anderson's http://diydrones.com/

Great resource for UAVs, FPV flying and aerial photography.
Ask HN: any open source projects looking for design help?
I've recently launched a design community that helps startups find designers (http://folyo.me). Since every designer on the site has to be approved by me, I go through a lot of design portfolios. And I've noticed that a lot of young designers don't feature any real-world projects, only fake redesigns or school projects.

So my goal here is to compile a list of open source projects actively looking for design help.

This way the next time I come across a talented designer fresh out of design school looking to hone their skills on an actual project, I'll refer them here and hopefully they'll end up finding a good match.
Why You Should Never Search For Free WordPress Themes
Assuming arbitrary code can brick it, yes. That is my impression. That's still not "remote" though.
Shopping Carts Will Track Consumers' Every Move
Well, as a nineteen-year old (quite soon to be 20) I can say that I don't care much for the Facebook ticker (the "share everything" list), nor do my friends seem to.

I agree with this article, but I may not represent the "average" Facebook-visitor, considering I barely read my friends updates, create updates of my own or play Facebook-games. (I visit for two groups which I participate actively in)

Sharing everything takes the value out of it, and I think most people, 20-year olds or not, would agree. Perhaps that's why I've stopped checking what my friends are saying, my interests are already way too specialised for me to have any interest in what they blast out to everyone.
In human genetics, studies will meta-analyze each of the ~million SNPs tested across each study, rather than just picking the "candidate" SNPs that came to attention because of their association signal in any particular study. So the file drawer problem is still relevant, but the risk is greatly mitigated.
The first thing I'd change about Java is to do away with checked exceptions. Yours would be a close second, though.
I don't think so, its just that you'd have to obtain parental consent 100% of the time. Data gathering is baked into providing an email service, that part of COPPA seems logical enough to me. The issue of targeted ads vs untargeted ads vs no ads doesn't appear to have anything to do with anything, other than what you'd notify the parents you are doing, and what you are asking their consent of.
I'd take python and make all the people who write libraries for it write proper documentation.
What we need is a healthy culture of interaction between "junior" and "senior".

Reading other people's code is too hard. We go through life trying to do it as little as possible.
Interesting to contrast this story with that of the lady who designed the Nike logo;
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2004273/Woman-design...
Thanks for the response. That makes sense, obviously you can pay a lot less and get more by overclocking the CPU. Then my question is, who actually buys these chips, and for what purpose?
I recall being asked a variation: Given your two strongest languages, which features from each one do you miss when programming in the other, and why?

I find it interesting to that the question "Which features do you miss when using a language?" is not equivalent to "Which features would you add to the language?" The former feels like it speaks to my vision of my personal style, while the latter can be construed to include all of the pragmatic concerns of adoption, such as features
alleged to assist large teams of indifferent programmers or features that would break backwards compatibility.
The trouble with Penelope Trunk is that she has neuroses and disorders that make her thinking and patterns of behavior... shall we say extremely specific to her.

But then she writes and behaves as though she understands how other people can, should or do work. And it's baffling.

As a career guidance person she is a charlatan and I have been long troubled that anyone would pay attention to her advice, much less pay for it.
Guy Makes $55,000 / Year Selling Candy On The Subway
Perhaps I am trying to justify my bitterness. :)

Seriously, it's been an issue when I've been trying to collaborate with others on a side project. We had the question of what language to start with. Some of the interested contributors were Python consultants and insisted that not only was Python the best language, but that Python was the best community, and Python people were the best and most virtuous people. (It is a kind of activist do-gooder project, which is why that person thought this was relevant.)

This sort of opinion seems asinine to me now, and it hurts especially because I used to be one of those guys around 1998-2000 or so -- except, for Perl.

The question of what language to start with kind of paralyzes me now, because when I consider what we'll want a few months in, I see this field of leg-hold traps we're going to step in. In all directions. I almost wish I had less experience and foresight (or more courage, take your pick).
Oddly enough in PHP the things I find most annoying aren't the inconsistent method names or parameter order. I can live with those as the documentation is pretty good and most IDE's give me a hint as to what its expecting.

The thing I find most annoying is being unable to pop the first element off an array when its returned and that when you do things like array_map it dosn't work with a method inside the same or other classes,

EG

$this->method()[0];

array_map($this->doSomething, $array);
When my child gets a little older he is going to be 13 for a very long time, online.
We may not need a more powerful accelerator. Remember: The cosmic rays contain much more energetic particles than that can be produced in accelerators so far.

It is possible that we will discover new phenomena and new ways to test gravitational theories once we can observe gravitational waves. I expect we will detect gravitational waves in ~10 years and identify a specific source in ~20 years; sooner, if there are some powerful sources that we did not think of yet.
I worked in an independent bookstore while in college for about 3 years, shortly after the rise of Amazon as an ubiquitous force in bookselling.

The independent bookstores that are still operating today are survivors. They've somehow survived the big box retailers, the bargain booksellers, Amazon, the Amazon / eBay used book secondary market, the rise of e-readers, the decline of magazine & newspapers, and the general decline of long-form reading across the board.

I doubt indie booksellers are worried at this point. They've survived the apocalypse several times over in the last 15 years. Barnes and Noble has something to worry about, but the indies survive purely on the sense of community among avid readers and generally being a staple of intellectual pride in the neighboring community.

If you have a local bookseller on your block, who is still operating it means they are a warrior and a survivor. I'd take a bet they're more worried about the economy and inflation than technology-based disruption at this point...
While I appreciate the attempt, this was pretty shoddy data analysis. First, Crunchbase's data is pretty bad. I saw a spreadsheet floated around some time ago that had a lot more YC companies listed on it (~200) so this is def not comprehensive. I'd imagine their TechStars data is even less complete given they tend to cover TS less than YC.

In terms of the analysis, some attempt to normalize the data would have been good.

Also, time-series figures would be more interesting as it would help show which program might be gaining or losing momentum.

In general, the idea of total funding being the best metric is laughable given how a few outliers skew the data.

It would have been interesting to see how quickly companies raise after the programs conclude. In a sense, analyzing by vintage/class would be more useful.

And then to conclude with the following "Y Combinator beat TechStars in many of these metrics, but none of these numbers translate to which (if either) is the best fit for your startup. That’s for you and them to figure out."

If your going to do some data analysis, try to make it actionable/useful and stand by it or take an opinion vs just a shallow attempt at data analysis which you neuter with caveats.
Certainly. I would never accuse Google of consistency in presentation. Consistency is usually very far down the list of things-that-matter when it comes to business; I suspect they're much more motivated by convincing people to use their products.

If they weren't, we would all be complaining about some other company running one of the world's most popular email services instead.
Haskell could really need a better record syntax. I really don't know how that should be designed though...
HP Kicks webOS To The Kerb
JavaScript.

Kill the "new" operator. Make prototypes less magical (i.e. use something like `Object.create` to construct).

Secondarily, kill getters and setters. (That includes `Array#length`.) I want code and data, not code, data, and code which pretends it's data.

I don't mind the JavaScript syntax much (`function () {` isn't that difficult to type or scan through after you've dealt with it for a while). I'm fine with the small core object and function set. I'm fine with the DOM (except the getters/setters part). I'm okay with `Object.prototype.hasOwnProperty.call`; that can be swept away into a function. Just don't make me write code which looks like statically-typed classical OO spaghetti. I want dynamic prototypal functional spaghetti. =]
Its very easy, simply jump onto Amazon's ec2 free instance and setup a webserver/webmail vm

it will cost you very little and you will not have to deal with crap like that, alternatively you can have a chat to your friendly domain hosting company, I am sure they will have something that will fit your needs.
Yeah, just found that one few days back. Me and my friends were discussing all the useful appliances for RC Drones. (E.g. aerial recon during a zombie hollocaust) Maybe I'll have some time in the future to start my own project. Diydrones shows some real supercool stuff that is actually affordable!
I used to think, "Here's a library with a README on the side to get you started." Now I think, "Here's an essay with a library on the side to get you started."
What a great, simple (not to diminish in any way), hack.

Why did Amazon allow a call that always runs as root?

Is it necessity, oversight, or something else?
>> Judging by his username, I'm guessing crimewriter95 is 16 years old. I wouldn't be surprised if most of those million videos were uploaded by people under 21.

That's a pretty lame assumption.
I'd add "with" statements. No more:

Closeable dbConnection;
try {
dbConnection = CloseableFactory.getConnection();
doWork(dbConnection);
} catch (CloseableException ex) {
// log it or whatever
} finally {
// the really annoying, stupid, crufty boilerplate bullshit
try {
if (dbConnection != null)
dbConnection.close();
} catch (CloseableException ex) {
// it's probably already closed
}
}

Instead, it'd just be

with (Closeable dbConn = CloseableFactory.getConnection()) {
doWork(dbConn);
}

(Assuming the "with" statement eats errors relating to the instantiation/closing of the Closeable, anyway). Bliss. And I know there's stuff like Google Guava's Closeables.closeQuietly(conn);, but still, a with statement would be awesome.
It really feels like stone age.

There are 13 year old kids out there who can write a web and mail server, yet could get into trouble for using them.
What's wrong with `data Foo = Bar | Baz { a :: Int }` ? I'm not a day-to-day Haskeller, but I find the record syntax very nice and succinct.
Everyone asks why I still run a mail client when I could just use webmail.

This is why. They just don't get it.
Knowledge is like music
I will take on the challenge of Lisp then.

First it needs to have a much bigger standard library, much like Java.

Second it needs a really effective foreign function interface possibly one which allows direct call to C++. This enables the programmer to take advantage of all the libraries written in C or C++ without having to write C or C++. In particular it allows using wxWidgets, gtk, qt and native win32/64.

Finally I would fix the output of the compiler (having an image is nice, combining it with the compiler to produce an executable makes sense) since (at least for SBCL) the output is 50mb for Hello World (granted, it doesn't grow much after that).
If type hinting (and checked at parse/compile time) was in Python it would solve my biggest complaints with the language. Yes I know you can write unit tests to do it but frankly that's busy work I shouldn't have to worry about.
list($firstElement) = $this->method();
array_map(array($this, 'doSomething'), $array);

Yes, neither is intuitive. And the syntax sucks. And it's not as easy to read (except sometimes where a method returns a tuple; `list` is wonderful there!). But it's certainly possible...
This has been covered on HN before, the solution is pretty simple: just use a (free) Google Apps account instead and create accounts for your children. You will be responsible for complying with COPPA yourself instead of Google.

All you need is a domain name, but it's a good idea to have that anyways in case you ever want to leave. I use this solution with my kids and it works great because it also allows me to control access to certain services and reset passwords for them, etc.
One thing to remember is that contracts depend on trust. Not only between you and the party signing, But also between you and your lawyer.

To succeed, the service would have to be trustworthy enough that I wouldn't feel the need to have a lawyer "double-check" the contract first. You could argue that just having a lawyer proofread the document would be far less costly though I guess.

It will take a lot of trust to get a service to the levels of trust required for some contracts. One mistake and you could be screwed.
It isn't an intentional workaround, and is an artifact of typing the least amount of markup possible to make something render.

We'll fix that, thanks!
Great post, and thanks for the read.

I'm about 6 months (daily-->hourly page refreshes) into HN and I've read some of the most incredible articles here. I feel the same way you feel, and agree on your point of "few people are remembered for being well read.....start shipping...".

With that boost of morale, my decisions to put a lot of things I've read here into practice seem all the more rational.
Here in Durham the University and cathedral libraries are open to local residents to use. I'd recommend visiting the cathedral one if you're ever here, it's an amazing place to study.
She's a sociopath who seems pathologically opposed to objecting to any aspect of culture, or asking men to do anything. Given that the behaviors she is working around actively hurt men, there are responses other than "you should stay at home with your kids while pretending to work until your company fires you" that would be win-wins.
The problems she sees can not be solved by any change in individual women's behavior; that way lies madness. It is going to require a systematic cultural change in the behavior, assumptions and attitudes of people with institutional power, most of them men. The "you must homeschool" is a good example of this: improving public schools is a valid alternative that would help everyone, not just children of women like her.

The life that is left for men in her world sounds incredibly un-appealing. I am a sperm donor, a potential source of income as I pay her to produce children for me, or on the non-romantic side, I'm someone to trick into doing most of the work in a start up while she takes credit. Regardless, I am expected to work jobs that consume my entire life, prevent me from having a relationship with my children and my wife's goal is not to have an equal or communicative relationship with me: she's just trying to keep me happy so we'll both be in our kids lives. That makes it my responsibility to be happy, and if I'm not it is a world-ending failure on my part. Have we seen Mad Men? The lesson from that show for me was "Holy Crap, that sucked!"

Humans are social creatures; any effective change will not be the product of individual behavior in isolation from all others. She takes as given: "nothing can change except my behavior" and then optimized under a set of terrible circumstances. Unfortunately her optimizations make her life better at the cost of making other people's lives worse.
My favorites were C, Postscript, NewtonScript, and Objective-C. Objective-C improved C. A compiled F-Script with some way to drop back down to C would be great. NewtonScript needs a new implementation and a switch from the Pascal-like syntax.