skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, the better way to rebut this claim of ineffectiveness in the market would have been to say "which Lisp?"

The fact is that Lisp has spawned a great number of descendants. So to compare modern Java to some ancient version of Lisp from the 70s would be no more relevant than comparing modern Java to C++98.

But even that has it's problems for the Lisp fans, because if you aggregate all the work being done in various dialects of Lisp, it is still no more than a pimple on the ass of the donkey that is Java.

----

Your rebuttal fails specifically because the claim is not that work cannot be done in Lisp, but rather that for various reasons hardly any work is actually being done in Lisp. You're trying to disprove the strawman that no work is being in Lisp, congratulations your tilting at windmills was successful, but that was not the claim that was being made.

----

The question of why Lisp is not more popular is actually really interesting. Let me advance one theory - that Lisp programs devolve too easily into domain specific languages, and that impedes the transmission of ideas to other programmers. E.g. if I write some awesome Lisp code to solve problem X, it is hard for you to figure out what is going on until you understand what is going on - a chicken and egg type problem.

Whereas languages which remain mired in the foul stench of their own syntax and keywords are easier to understand because if I know the language (Java or COBOL or VB or C++ or whatever) then I am already halfway towards understanding the solution because the language it is expressed in is relatively static.

E.g. worse is better
There are many different types of such systems available on the internet. If you need it to get sign-ups for a website that will be launching, you can use http://launchrock.com. If you have a wordpress blog, you can use various wordpress plugins: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/referral.
There are many general rewards scripts you could use, e.g. http://www.hotscripts.com/listing/projektirs-referral-reward.... If you want to pay cash rewards, then you should use a general affiliate script. You can look at some examples here: http://www.hotscripts.com/category/scripts/php/scripts-progr...
Timeline is not annoying. Personal past is annoying. Timeline makes it easier to dig those stuffs out of the grave.

I love timeline. It is my life-log. I don't share everything publicly. I share it with Only Me/Close Friends/Family. All my old photologs are now migrated to facebook, with very limited Visibility.

Facebook photo management tools still suck. You could easily take a copy of your data from facebook (https://www.facebook.com/settings -> Download a copy of your data), but there is no easy way to delete them.
I'm not sure a compulsory licensing scheme would necessarily work but there ought to be some framework whereas the claim of infringement is related to actual availability. So if a studio fails to make its content legally available online, it should have no standing if it is made available in some other way until the studio decides to make the content available. Otherwise, one could demonstrate that their failure to provide the content in the first place is what led to it being pirated.
I raise the point that O'Reilly may have a business conflict of interest with respect to Apple and I get downvoted? Really?
Not that I'd like to encourage it, but there could be a sudo in FTP, along the lines of WU-FTPd's infamous support for a "SITE EXEC" command.
I agree 100%. I was going to give it a shot but I won't use anything that requires a facebook login either.
I agree about Java's mediocritizing effect, and that it's beneficial if you have a team of low-skill (0.6 to 0.8, on the scale described here: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/the-trajector...) programmers. The question is: why are people hiring hundreds of weak programmers in the first place? When a team of 100 mediocrities achieves as much as a (far less costly) team of 20 good programmers in Java or (better yet) 6 good programmers in a decent language, why hire the former at all?

The Java+IDE environment seems to be designed for 0.6 to 0.8 programmers under the assumption that it's OK for them to stay at that level indefinitely. That's one thing I really dislike about the Java+IDE environment: it encourages people not to learn how things really work or to get better. It's founded on the assumption that 90% of programmers are unskilled (true) but instead of trying to improve them, it coddles them and keeps them mired in mediocrity. That whole Java+IDE setup is based on a self-fulfilling prophecy that (a) 90% of programmers are mediocre and will stay that way, (b) no one reads code, so it's okay for small programs to be inappropriately split into 10+ files, (c) programmers don't learn outside of work or want to learn new languages, (d) all code turns into shit, so there's no point in making beautiful code possible, and (e) the lifespan of a developer is 5-10 years. I don't agree with any of these.

One thing I continue to find amusing is that Clojure and Scala developers learn about Java faster, per unit time, than most Java developers. This is because, when you have a real language to work with (and a REPL) you can tackle harder and more interesting problems.

I can't prove this, but I think that anyone who is smart enough to be effective, in spite of the resistance Java throws in the way, can easily become a 1.2-1.5 programmer in a better language. The argument about "stupid" programmers who just can't grok functional programming is silly. If they can handle Java bullshit, they can learn the simpler abstractions on which decent programming is built. I definitely feel stupider when I have to use crappy languages and can't express my thoughts properly, but I hope it's pretty obvious that this "stupidity" is transient.

I agree on Java being an improvement over C++, though. C++ is a disaster.
It has more dimensions than is presented by Mike Daisey. I really is heart breaking, similar to the stores of child labour in Nike factories.

But on the flip side, you pull the industry out, and those 'poor workers' become just 'poor people with no income'. So the industry needs to be moved to more ethical standards. Apple do "seem" to be trying, with their releases of working conditions. But it's hard to tell how much of that is truth vs propaganda.

I guess raising awareness, will slowly put pressure on companies like Apple/HTC/etc to change these things.

Someone needs to think of a system that couples a profit motive to a 'people motive'...
http://zferral.com helps you implement an affiliate program.
http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2901156
You surely can't be that naive. There are numerous things a foreign company can do, such as leaving the country entirely. Threaten to withdraw unless China and Foxconn begin to take these issues more seriously. At $13 billion a quarter in profit and $100 billion in cash, it's not like Apple doesn't have a choice as to where their products are made.

Another idea is to offer financial incentives for factories that meet strict safety requirements. Offer them better terms, longer contracts, etc.
Foxconn is exploiting its workers. not Apple.
With all due respect to HN and "High-End Crusader" Burton Smith, who spoke at SIAM PP10 (PP12 is just over a week away in Savannah), this is so old news...

Microsoft lost its HPC compass last year when it fired STB president Bob Muglia for not embracing "the cloud" enough, and then it reorganized Technical Computing to push aside Kyril Faenov. Frank Chism (profiled on "Port 25") promptly left for Dell. Just last month Ryan Waite left for Amazon. The MS HPC ship is sinking, and former HPC experts at MS are stuck writing SQL queries.
I'm also very motivated after a gym session. I get up around 830am, eat breakfast, work until about 2pm...then I hit the gym until about 4 with some cardio and lifting..and then I shower, eat dinner, and get back to work.
If you have spent a decade as a manager at a BigCorp, you are probably seasoned irreversibly to never ever go back to the nerdy life you describe.

Expertise is not something you just get one day decide to be something and voila within a month of effort your are. If it were that easy, most of us would be composing symphonies or we would all be astronauts by now.It can give you a good head start but nothing much apart from that. So 'polish your coding skills' doesn't work, because its not just about coding skills. There is a whole ecosystem you need to understand and get in tune with. Writing code is something just representing solution in terms of syntax, the actual work that is symbolic notation to problem solving with tools in hand is a craft that takes ridiculous amount of time to learn.

Most managers are tuned to way of life, a spending driven lifestyle which is properly matched to their earnings. They have a home, bills to pay, kids to take care of. They are going in a stream of life, going off track from that might be impossible.

Also in our society managerial positions are considered to be positions of authority and coders et al are supposed to be both designation and pay wise inferior to them. Unless you don't care about the world. For most managers this is like going backwards in their career.
Music Production carried out effectively 
Like the topic and content of the song is a big factor for the success of the album. Music Production carried out effectively is likely to make the music album a success. The matter of the song should be powerful and effective so that listeners like it and are impressed by it. For the success of the music album the recording of the song should be of world class standards.
If apple is paying Foxconn, then they are encouraging and supporting those labor conditions. If they set deadlines for delivering the product, they are also demanding those conditions.
Another way to locate Ruby coders in Melbourne...

Github. You can even read through their code, no need to ask for samples. There are also tools out there to help you locating people in a certain region.

http://githire.com/
Creating vim macros and saving them for later
> How can I update Arch, on a semi-regular basis (at least yearly)

You can - in fact, it's best to do it more often than yearly.

> without having to worry about upgrade issues?

Compared to someone who's coming from Ubuntu, Arch isn't a distro that you can just upgrade all in one go, without thinking twice, and then forget about it. Or, to quote the Arch Wiki, pacman is not a 'fire and forget' package manager.

If your definition of 'stability' is 'I can run a full system upgrade as often as I want, without thinking about what I'm doing', then no, Arch isn't 'stable'.

If your definition of 'stability' is 'My system will run with minimal errors and above-average security as long as I carefully consider each package before I update it', then Arch is incredibly stable.

The concept of stability, in the context of a personal user, comes with an implicit assumption of how much choice will be presented to the user, which affects how much mental effort the user will have to provide. Ubuntu will make a set of choices on behalf of the user, which can result in bloated software packages, serious security concerns and bugs that persist for the six-month release cycle or longer. Arch will require the user to make some of those choices for himself or herself, which ends up by providing the user with a more modular set of packages, a much faster upgrade cycle, and a more (easily) configurable system.

For example, there was a bug in X that affected pretty much every distro a few weeks ago, allowing the screen lock to be bypassed trivially. If I remember correctly, Arch had that fixed within a few hours (the advantages of rolling-release). I'm not sure when (or even if) Ubuntu fixed that bug, but it ends up taking much longer, because they have to provide official support for those packages, and something as widespread as X needs to be tested against a variety of configurations before releasing a patch. With Arch, I can decide if the patch is important enough to update now, or if I should wait, and I can make a reasonable judgement as to whether it s compatible with my system -- something Ubuntu users will have a harder time doing, because they didn't go through the process of building their operating system from scratch when they installed it, so they may not understand it under the surface as well.

To put it another way, using a rolling-release system like Arch is no less stable than a fixed-release cycle, because nobody is forcing you to upgrade a package when it comes out.

(The other difference is that Arch provides community support, whereas Ubuntu provides corporate support, but at that point you're starting to compare apples and oranges).
Iframe shop spins hijacked traffic
It breaks down by studio: Disney, Paramount, and Columbia are purchase-only while Warner, Universal, and Fox are generally anti-Internet. Movies that are available for streaming/rental are indies.
Of course it makes sense, Baseball and Football are both sports, why not compare them? Because as different sports it isn't really relevant. Are you going to say that cricket is better than tennis because they can hit the ball further? It's a stupid argument. Just because two things belong in the same broad category doesn't mean that you can meaningfully compare them.

It is especially specious to bash Java for not being a functional language, because it doesn't try to do that. Java is heavily OO, not functional. So let's say that functional languages are 'better'. Let's just take that as a given. Why then would you single out Java and not mention any of the other languages that are also not functional? Why not bash Smalltalk, or Objective-C?

To single out Java simply underscores the irrelevance of the comparison.

Hence, rather than compare teams from two different sports, you should compare teams from the same sport. Likewise, if you want to make the claim that Common Lisp is the ultimate functional programming language, you should compare it to another functional programming language, not an OO language, or something like Prolog or COBOL.
> This is the norm in China because the Chinese government itself encourages, supports and even demands this kind of labor conditions.

No it's not the norm, and the government doesn't encourage and definitely doesn't demand these conditions.

It does support them, but in an apathetic "how the hell do we even try to stop this" kind of way. Not a "Yeah I want those workers to suffer" kind of way.

The chinese govt is not a 2 dimensional evil monster that The West paint it to be. It is like most govts with a left and right wing, and (shock-horror) even debate!
The difference between Mao Zedong, Chou Enlai, and Deng XiaoPing is evidence of this segregation.
In this case, its certainly would suffer
We did an L1 and it was straightforward. You need to be trading for one year in the uk.
On top of this, users have also been trained to ignore anything that looks like a banner or ad. Sometimes giant text just looks like something meant to be ignored.
create an API and then....write hand-coded SQL in the implementation ? The notion that Django is better than SQLAlchemy only because it's so limited, and therefore you won't accidentally write inefficient code sounds very strange. Profiling a SQLAlchemy application is very straightforward (watch the SQL at all times when testing), and should be done throughout every stage of development. There's no "surprise at the most inconvenient time" if you're paying appropriate attention up to that point.

SQLAlchemy is tailored for performance above all, in that it allows the database to be used in its natural mode of set-based thinking. You can write real queries, and keep decisions the database is capable of making on the database side. The naive system of "row by agonizing row" programming, where you load everything into memory in order to reason about your data, is not really how relational databases are supposed to be used. You need a tool that works along with the relational paradigm in order to work that way, or else it's back to hand-written SQL strings. And it is absolutely false that a large scale application written out as hundreds of hardcoded SQL strings is easier to manage or expand upon than one that makes good use of an abstraction layer.

Also your example about len(zoo.animals) applies to any ORM. Django, Storm, Hibernate, Active Record, all have lazy evaluated collections. At least with SQLAlchemy and Hibernate, "zoo.animals" is only evaluated once, and not on each access.
Wow, that sure is a generous offer. I've started watching the Stanford iOS class on iTunes U, however I've found that it relies on a bit of OO knowledge. I've quite a lot of experience with Python/Django and Web dev, so I'm familiar with how to 'program', but not experienced with the OO concepts that iOS dev relies on.

Does anyone know of a similar set of high quality screencasts for teaching iOS? Looked at what's on Mobiletuts plus, but they are from 2010/iOS 4 http://mobile.tutsplus.com/category/tutorials/iphone/?tag=ba... . Are there any out there up to date for iOS 5?
Share the Wealth: if you can see it, you deserve the money
The fact is the iPhone is easier and more fun to use than Android phones and Blackberries.
The claim has been made that it is easier to move from a formal education in maths to functional programs.

E.g. if you've been dealing with things like f(x)->g(x) in math class for a couple of years, then a functional language is a more natural fit.

This is why the iconic learning lisp examples are calculating numbers from something like the fibonacci sequence or factorials, rather than something that is actually useful in the real world. (Which is not to say that fibonacci numbers and factorials aren't useful, but rather that those problems are well and truly thoroughly solved already)
Quora

What is the definition of "successful" for the purposes of this thread? I hear wildly differing accounts of whether Quora is successful or not, and I'm curious to hear from other HN participants whether or not they think Quora is a successful startup as they define success.
Rock climbing is another thing that is hugely motivating to get more fit and it can be a very regular thing to do if you have a climbing gym nearby that you can go after work.

climbing tends to attract the people that like to solve puzzles because each route is a physical puzzle in how you should contort your body best to get up it. When is the best time to rest on a route if you can? where should take a stance to clip the next quickdraw? am I going to fall and is it going to be a safe fall? is my leg behind the rope and is that going to flip me upside down? You think about everything and nothing all at once. It's amazing.

It also has a very social aspect to it as well because you see the same people over and over again at the gym or local crag and there is a lot of downtime while you are resting. Bouldering is especially communal as people tend to shout out encouragement and help you figure things out if you want it.

Give it a go and you will probably like it.

edit: if you are interested go to http://www.reddit.com/r/climbing for more info.
Whether iBooks is a good thing or a bad thing is beside the point. All I'm trying to do is point out the possibility that O'Reilly be could biased against Apple due to his business concerns as a book publisher.
I went from drinking four liters of mountain dew, 6 cups of coffee and taking 500 mg No-Doze caffeine pills to nothing.

It is possible that lower carb may have had something to do with it. One thing I did notice though is that in compensation I was eating a LOT more candy at first. I'd eat gummi worms and haribo gummi bears by the kilo. The local gas station started giving me discounts on swedish fish! Luckily I eased off that after about a month, and now I eat very little to almost no candy.

One thing I would note is that it has changed how I taste sugar. A lot of sugary drinks such as juice (even natural sugars) will quickly taste too sweet. I also find it harder to eat candy because it just has this disgustingly sweet taste to it. The other thing is that with drinking water with my meals instead of soda I am finding that a lot of foods are over salted, and could do with half the salt and still taste just as great. My personal believe is that people want taste even after making their taste buds taste something really sweet like soda.
Have a look down on the right hand side. You can already create a link that has the form prepopulated. It rook me ages to find and I've been using this site for a long time.
Obviously don't know much about your situation, but this might have a lot to do with your diet & pre/post/peri workout nutrition. You should never feel exhausted and drained after a workout, but should feel invigorated and alert. Maybe something worth investigating more.
From now on I am Android only. Because they're manufactured in American.

Oh wait, everything is manufactured in China. And Apple is in the spotlight because they make a lot more... Wait, if Android is winning, than there is more phones, and therefore more workings making Android phones?

Time O'Reilly, jackass.
> "We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job".

That's a typical politically correct answer from Jobs. I work at Apple and I can tell you from the inside that back then (and today), the intent is both "Let's make a great product" and "Let's kill the competition" (used to be Microsoft, now it's both Microsoft and Google).

How successful you think the iPhone would be today without Android?

The answer: it would probably have a 95% monopoly, instead of a distant 20% third place.

Apple did quite well, but make no mistake: they would have done spectacularly better without Android.
Let's find applicable ones that work for our research, instead of always saying "double blind" without thinking about it.
like what we need is yet another convoluted home screen shenanigans.

just focus on getting regular gnome/kde/whateverwm on those things and be done with it.

most devices lack drivers even when proprietary.

the touchpad has a chip for hdmi from the usb port that webos doesn't have code to use
Not only those giant piles of Android phones, also Google's cheap farms of Linux servers, so they are customly made rigs, but where do the components come from? Are they assembled by the same line workers making every other lowly PCs?
Although a site like SuperUser or Quora (http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-blogging-software-out-...) might be better suited for this question, I'll weigh in and say your wife should try Squarespace.com and WordPress.com and see which one better suits her liking. If WordPress feels more right, then she has a plethora of options before her (from Tumblr to self-hosted WordPress). If Squarespace feels better, she should just stick with that.
The Legal Fight Over Karaoke is Getting Loud
Interview with Facebook's Andrei Alexandrescu
This is all too true. I have seen exactly this go on where there is a young(ish) PM and at least one developer who is much older. The older dev really should be the one leading the project but they don't have any interest in managing as they prefer to just be a developer. The older dev has been around the block a few times and sees the shortcomings of a project and points this out but, just as you say, they are cast aside only to be proven right.