skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey guys

This seems like it would be perfect stuff for an educational lightning talk

If any of you are in the SF Bay Area, please consider doing a ~5 min presentation on your lisp-in-x implementation at the lisp meetup "revival" this saturday at the blackbox mansion in Atherton

...free beer... ;-)

http://www.meetup.com/balisp/events/48872022/
http://balisp.org/
My initial reaction was DON'T BE EVIL.
But after some thought and some reading, I realize that technology advances and we don't know what the results and consequences will be until quite a bit of time has passed.
I really want to trust Google, so please don't be evil.
This seems like a possible security hole. I wonder what will happen if you forge the HTTP header to pretend your someone else.
Case Study: When to Drop an Unprofitable Customer
These are the questions I am asking myself.

At one end, there is the market will solve it approach, and if it isn't broke, why fix it?

After reading your comment, the most I could suggest would be game companies having to show the general rate of growth players could be expected (average, maximal).
I got bit by this reputation thing just this morning. I'd sent out a link to a .exe for a dead simple app (open serial port, tx commands, rx replies, output to screen) and sure enough, someone tried to download it and got blocked by Norton. I sent it in as a FP, not in the hopes they'll do anything about my little .exe, but just to make more work for them.
Interesting story; definitely differs from the conventional wisdom regarding building it yourself. Reuse of a previously built codebase is something I can approve of... especially if your competitors are constantly reinventing the wheel.
Why oh why does it use document.write?

https://github.com/enyojs/enyo/blob/master/source/dom/Contro...
Lisp (including full lexical closures) in 50 lines of Python:

http://www.flownet.com/ron/lisp/l.py
I agree. I was just chatting with some Software Engineers work mates and we are all at a loss to know why the Whine-o-sphere are up in arms about this.

How hard is clicking the option to exclude SPYW results? If you had no opt-out I'd think they had a tiny shred of an issue, but given that you can opt out, this whole issue is a giant WTF???? for me.
Which class are functions in C? It was my impression that the only thing missing were anonymous functions, but there are pointers to functions if I'm not mistaken.
Great advice. Thanks for taking the time to write it out.
I was a bit hasty, here is the complete version:

(loop (print (eval (read))))
Just in case I was misleading people, from here: http://www.von-thadden.de/Joachim/WineTools/

E. g. the EULA for IE6 states:

"NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A VALID EULA FOR ANY
"OS PRODUCT" (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION,
MICROSOFT WINDOWS 98, MICROSOFT WINDOWS NT 4.0,
MICROSOFT WINDOWS 2000, MICROSOFT MILLENNIUM
EDITION, MICROSOFT WINDOWS XP, OR ANY OTHER
MICROSOFT OPERATING SYSTEM THAT IS A SUCCESSOR
TO ANY OF THE FOREGOING OPERATING SYSTEMS) YOU
ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO INSTALL, COPY, OR OTHERWISE
USE THE OS COMPONENTS AND YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS
UNDER THIS SUPPLEMENTAL EULA."
Solid. Thanks.
I'll look into that for the Win7 partition on my old laptop, thanks.

I do run ClamAV on my linux big box, just in case I'm passing on any Windows virii, this might be voodoo
shameless promotion:

if you are in the sf bay area & interested in lisp/smalltalk/fp and/or parallel/distributed computing please considering giving a ~5 minute educational lightning talk at the lisp meetup "revival" this saturday at the blackbox startup mansion in atherton

http://www.meetup.com/balisp/events/48872022/
http://balisp.org/

ahem cough cough ...free beer...
VCs give money to people in a different position. I can't think of a single start up that went in to an angel round with 20,000 employees.
For now the best description is basically '3d printing = computer building things using small Lego's.' You can create just about any shape, but the strength and texture options are limited because it's a sculpture made out of whatever building material and bonding agent the printer uses.

PS: Still waiting for replicators, but it's going to take a while.
Show HN: Instant documentation site for Github projects
Got $150 million? Get ready to slingshot around the moon
Did you actually read it?

The part I copied here for your viewing convenience is not "speculation" nor "hyperbole" or "opinion", it discusses the best example given so far by Googlers about the benefits of SPYW: that when you know someone who wrote a book about something, and you search about that something, then posts by this person, relevant to your search, pop up!

And this is the best case scenario.
This is the thing I hate about github.

Hacked up code is all fine and good, but what I'm looking for are the tools that are necessary to make it easy to consume the code:

* Stable, versioned releases, with sufficient API (if not ABI) compatibility across releases.

* Accurate and complete API documentation (with bonus points for higher-level integration documentation.

* A bug tracking system

* Mailing lists.

These are all historically accepted best-practices that have (and continue) to serve the OSS community well, but they're also practices that are strongly and innately de-emphasized by github's "code first" UX.

If github (and git) were facilitating the production of marvelous new libraries and software that we'd never seen before, then maybe I'd acquiesce that it's worthwhile to abandon the best practices above.

That, however, has not been my experience. Most of the code is poorly maintained, often abandon-ware, and with unclear lineage. It's unknown which of the 50 forks is the best one to use at any given time, and what the ongoing costs will be to track unstable development branches directly, since there are no releases.
Sadly, this glosses over the actual acquisition process and details.
I actually think your point is a good one. As for ge experience argument - it's hard to evaluate, so I don't think that's the main reason.

A major reason is simply risk aversion. Years of experience is an indicator (a misleading IMHO) of safety, if the guy you hired who has 10 years of experience screws up, you can explain it away by attributing it to bad luck. If the guy ou hired with little experience screws up then it's his fault and your fault for hiring him.

A lot of it has to do with how we explain success and failure.
There's https://github.com/mvanveen/freedom.txt - but putting IPs in there is still a horrible idea.
Laptop stands
3213123 484
ok, when you get to the TB of storage part, things get cheaper running in house, but couple of notes:

1: the dell at $7k does not include power, and your 12 2Tb drives gives you 20Tb usuable with RAID6 (loosing 2 drives). if you loose more than 2 disks, you are screwed... so, you need to back that up somewhere...
2: you need someone to manage that machine also...
3: ESXi, for what you would need here (8gb ram or so) is free, unless you want support....

i think in all fairness, that depending on the amount of storage you need or want, its swings and round-a-bouts... i like the idea, but i would also like the idea of having a box in house with a lot of storage (like the big dell) and only select some parts for off site backup... this is what i do... most of my stuff is stored locally (RAID 1, Thecus NAS, Drobo) and only important stuff (music and videos i bought, photos i took, etc) is backed up to the "cloud"...
I needed it for one of my projects and so I whipped up this simple documentation generator. It takes your README.md and turns it into an easier to navigate documentation site. Meant to be used on a gh-pages branch.

There's still much to do. This is an MVP.
The inside story of a small startup acquisition
iPhone store is DRM. It helps the customer in a way by preventing apps from breaking the phone. I don't like it personally but I have a higher knowledge level of technology than most people.

DRM is useful mostly to people who can't figure out anything in a technology product. They are more likely to break their products without it than with it. The big thing though is I wished companies offered an option to those who are willing to risk it all vs fighting them.
The Importance of Recording Ideas
I was excited about this a while back, but with Backbone and Ember (Synapse, Handlebars, etc, too), I'm not so sure Enyo is that awesome anymore.

(I'm confused at the comments here lamenting the lack of a UI side of Enyo. I thought that UI elements were a decent part of Enyo?)
I didn't realize the organization had a plan to shephard quirky links indefinitely
So the google github account was started just a few days ago and is completely empty right now...and yet Githire ranks it as the "Top 1%" by estimated experience.

http://githire.com/profiles/google

That's some predictive algorithm it's got going
> DRM period isn't a waste of money. DRM as it's commonly practiced is.

Not necessarily disagreeing, but DRM would always be a waste of money if it wasn't for the anti-circumvention laws that prevent disseminating DRM work-arounds.

The law serves to raise the bar on just how annoying DRM has to be before most people are willing to work around it.
All the details you could want are in that podcast except the actual purchase price and there are enough clues to have a good guess.
We recently integrated Yelp into Zero-Click. You can check it out here: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=black+lab+bistro. Also get's handled on mobile.
thanks, that's what i need i think
Is it really true that there hasn't been co-mingling of user data between properties already? It seems hard to believe that most user data didn't at least "leak" into their advertising businesses, which presumably is where you'd be worried about it going.
A lot of people here are running away from what Wheaton is actually saying and this is all he's saying:

"Hollywood’s refusal to adapt to changing times is what’s costing the studios money. That’s it."
> is there a topic which xkcd hadn't nailed already?

Try and find something about the financing of the costs of German reunification.
Nokia Lumia Sales Figures Touch 1.3 Million Units In 1.5 Months
How is your Prog different from lisp? This is what I see...

Prog : which (1..10) > 5

LISP : (remove-if #'(lambda (n) (<= n 5)) '(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10))

Prog : each (1..5) 2

LISP : (mapcar #'(lambda (n) (expt n 2)) '(1 2 3 4 5))
Lessons Learned as Chargify Turns 3
Man, I've been searching for this (but I live in Europe, so across country borders, there is no hope unfortunately).

Instead what USPS could do is actually scan all this stuff and email me a PDF. 80% of the snail mail I receive I don't need to have physically anyways. For those pieces that need physical delivery -> check a checkbox and USPS could send it to my current address. (Notice how that also solves the addressing indirection?)
Ask HN: What should I do with InsidePinterest.com?
I recently purchased http://insidepinterest.com, been hearing all of the buzz lately about Pinterest. Seems that only women understand it but you never know, maybe it will actually be the next big thing.

It seems like a huge commitment so I'm not 100% sure if I want to go through with this. Any thoughts or ideas? Thanks in advance.
Airline Fees Disclosure takes effect
A reply-all debacle occurred where I was a consultant a couple years back (at a quasi-government corporation with 5000 employees).

In this case, "Should we really expect..." is like saying "should we really expect people to read a dozen emails before sending 5000?" Yea, I think so.

One of our consultants wrote off a sarcastic reply-all email in response detailing what the reply all button actually did as if explaining to 5 year olds. The client demanded that this person be fired.
Either way, it's a surprise coming from someone with a professed focus on design.
More sensationalist BS by those who would see themselves profit from the fall of the leader. These changes are all about improving relevance of search results and thus improving the user experience!
It's a paper about an abstract mathematical topic. Just be glad that the whole thing doesn't consist mostly of equations.
Thank you all for your thoughtful comments. You've hit the heart of the challenge in any kind of science writing: Trying not to frighten off those unfamiliar with a field and therefore using metaphors, such as bubble wrap, while at least touching on some common ground for those who are (Hamming distances).

My respectful suggestion for those truly interested in following up is to contact either Leonard or Amit directly. Of necessity, any math that is translated into prose is going to be imprecise, and thus, unsatisfying.

To answer a few of the specific questions that were brought up:

Yes, it is essentially an existence proof. At least for now.
Yes, that paper is a good starting point. Also take a look at Amit's work.
Yes, buses inside chips is something they think it could be useful for.
(Sigh) I wish there were a better introduction to tree codes at a lay level. Believe me, I tried very hard to find one. FWIW, both scientists vetted the explanations.
Facebook reportedly suspends share trading ahead of IPO
You can use function pointers. Functions in C are not first class (they are not a type) but you can emulate higher order functions crudely using function pointers.

It gets ugly pretty quick though.
> I'm not sure where coercion comes into it.

Sometimes you find yourself in a moral quandary through no fault of your own.

But if you're going to say, "I wont do evil" (whatever it is that you actually mean by "evil"), it would be wise not to put yourself in a position where you're either forced to do evil, or worse, can't tell if what you're doing is evil or not.

> evil isn't always easily discernible

So you're right; it isn't always discernible, but that's no excuse for making life even more difficult for yourself.

> They said "Don't be evil," whereas you're interpreting that as [...]

Not at all. They explained what they meant by it; I think it's perfectly reasonable and understandable so that's what I will hold them to. Indeed, I think it's clear that's exactly what they wanted us to do.

> I also totally get why Google would want to add social signals: to improve search.

Yes, I understand it too, and as I said elsewhere, I do find it rather convenient. I wont pretend it doesn't improve search, because it does.

That said, I don't want Google locked in a race to the bottom with Facebook to mine our personal data. I don't think it would serve any of us very well in the long term even if it would improve our search results and Google's profits.

> what alternative does Google have?

Find other ways to improve search.
What papers do I need to get to freelance in UK?
People complained about Microsoft because they were "on top"????

WTF? Are you for real?

So, stealing competitor's products (Stacker) was fine? Retarding the performance for competitor's products was fine (Lotus 123). Forcing OEMs to bundle DOS then Windows on PCs even if they were going to be used as Linux boxes was fine? Forcing users to use IE was fine? Being a monopoly was fine? Claiming patents over Linux and refusing to name those patents (and thereby extort money from Android phone manufacturers) is fine?

Jesus, that's just off the top of my head without doing any research to remind myself of the shit that Microsoft has done over the years.

Being ignorant of Microsoft's history does not mean that it didn't happen and that some of those people who complain about it actually what they hell they're talking about.
The problem is that a results oriented / declarative language would by definition not be Turing complete. And in order for a language to be able to express any problem type, it would have to be Turing complete. SQL is an example of this -- it is declarative, but you can't write a web server or an arcade game in just SQL.
I've worked as a director of product management and as a vice president of product management, but I do have close to a decade of experience.

These positions are only partially about creativity or being entrepreneurial, even at startups. In a high-functioning organization, creativity and entrepreneurship comes from the organization as a whole - it's the job of every employee.

Mostly, these positions are about people management - building a team of great people and getting the best out of the team as a whole. This is really hard, and it takes a lot of practice. I've certainly cocked it up more than once.

Since people management is something that you learn by doing, it makes sense to hire someone who's both done the job of the type of employee they'll be managing and has a track record of managing the type of employee they'll be managing. Bringing in someone inexperienced is too much of a risk - if you fail, it's not just you that performs poorly, it's your entire team.

You simply can't relate this situation to a VC's (or more likely, an angel's) willingness to put a small amount of money on an inexperienced founder - the two situations are very different. A VC is in the business of risk - he has a large portfolio and expects most of his investments to fail. A CEO is in charge of one and only one company, and the VPs he hires are all in charge of critical functions. Often, he can't afford to have any of them fail.
Basically you're asking why someone can bare the responsibility of starting a startup but not manage an existing organization.

A startup is basically a entity catapulting itself into the unknown with the goal of eventually creating a viable business. With that in mind, it becomes more reasonable to hire someone with little experience but lots of motivation.

Coming into a corporation is an entirely different beast. There are LOTS of constraints that are built into the environment already and you must learn to identify and operate within those constraints. This ability to known boundaries, respect them, and push them occasionally is a key skill of a good executive. This same ability is hard for an inexperienced person to even fathom. For instance, a good executive knows when to make the politically correct move even though its more painful operationally but an inexperienced person may not even realize they are making a political move.

Consider a startup developer vs. a enterprise developer. A startup developer essentially starts from scratch and builds what they want. An enterprise developer must know the existing environment, know the entrenched technologies, know the involved parties, get the process owners to agree on decisions, and then make informed decisions on how to build out their requirements based on all these factors.

In startup circumstances naivety can be an asset, in the enterprise world naivety isn't even an acceptable excuse.

note: I am not trying to trivialize starting from scratch. Building a startup from scratch is a highly commendable skill set in and of itself, its just not relevant to the argument framed by the OP.
While Google makes the news on this, everyone loves to forget every marketing firm in the world has been collecting exactly the same data on them since the stone age.

And being able to collect the data about them to serve better results is a business decision. Some may like or dislike it's done that way but it's no different than liking/disliking any product you use now.
Amazing story - I hope the third scenario wasn't it, although the fact that she adopted the child out makes it seem plausible.
By the studio "losing," in the majority of instances it's because the studio settled. They don't want to actually have this kind of stuff exposed and proven in court.
Translating specifications from fuzzy human-friendly language into an ultra-precise implementation that runs on computer hardware is the core, irreducible complexity of software engineering. The compiler isn't going to do it for you, ever.

With DSLs and advanced programming techniques (FP, macros, AOP, well composed OOP, etc.) you can reach a state where the intention of high-level code is stated clearly, but you're never going to be saved from getting your hands dirty with the details.
I was trying to install netcat on a work windows box to transfer some files (long story). Every attempt at copying the executable out of the zip file would throw up an error about the file not existing, no explanation as to why or who was causing the error. After an hour I removed the antivirus. File copied just fine after that. I guess netcat is a 'hacker tool' and not allowed on protected windows system; too bad I had work to do.
The first Google response to the Twitter complaint suggested that they would be happy to index FB & T content if only that content were opened up to them in a way that let them do their job properly.

Do we know that Google really wants SPYW to be the walled garden that FB & T claim? Where's the evidence?
There is already a Monad based solution - its Deferreds / Promises.

However, monads don't solve this problem - they cause it, since their primary concern is correctness and not converting between monadic and non-monadic code.
If you have a pure function and need to convert it to a monadic action there will be lots of collateral damage as functions that interacted with the old function have to be converted to monadic style.
Porting an OpenGL application to the web
This looks very useful. One of my customers needs labeled images that can be used with attribution. Thanks for posting this.
I'll start OT by mentioning that the prior HN conversation I cite is apparently not yet indexed by Google -- WTF, Google, you used to be good and prompt at indexing HN content. (I subsequently found it with the HN search dialog, so good for that.)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3480712

Anyway, on the above-linked thread, there are some apparently informed comments to the effect that faxes are, well, effective. For example:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3481102

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3480952

However, I see from your profile, cjoh, that you also appear to be well-connected in this domain.

So, I'm not asking to be argumentative, but rather to refine my own and perhaps others' strategies for communicating with their Congress-persons, going forward. What works? What doesn't? And specifically why and how?

For my own part, and perhaps this is now somewhat dated, I understood -- well-written, individual -- faxes to be viewed as more akin to a letter, while arriving in a more timely fashion. That is, a constituent actually sitting down to write out a formal description of their concerns and reasoning and then taking the trouble to send it, typically (or historically?) more trouble than a "Send" button requires.

I guess fax processing may well be all-electronic, at this point, but my hope also lay a bit in perhaps generating a physical object within the office, as opposed to being just/yet one more message on a screen.

And I certainly wish to communicate more than just a "tick" and perhaps a ZIP code categorization in a phone call tally.

I'll typically write an individually addressed letter. I try not to be too long, but I may run to two -- perhaps even three -- pages to outline not just my concern by my reasoning. I try to write these in a top down, aka "newspaper", style, so that the most relevant statements and information can be gleaned in the first paragraphs, with further reasoning, detail, and documentation to follow.

Is this all for naught? Should I instead stick it in an envelop and hope that it gets through all the screening some claim is these days slowing down physical mail, in time to reach the Congress-person's office before a vote and before they are committed to a vote?

Any additional insight would be appreciated. And hopefully this is not too OT for HN.

P.S. I hope my comments on the original, announcement thread from HelloFax did not make the effort seem like a mere marketing ploy. I have no relationship with HelloFax other than being a customer and thinking that the fax campaign was a good idea.