skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not criicizing lua, but worth comparing to guile.

> Integration with C (and C++ for that matter)

Guile does it better. You can use shared memory threads in guile without any penalty. Atmost you have to allow for the garbage collector to run when inside FFI functions. But that is a small price to pay in case you need to use multiple parallel-concurrent threads with a single heap.

Guile was built with FFI in mind and has an impressive history. Just take a look at guile gnome bindings.

> Speed and Simplicity

Guile 2 is extremely fast. Not as fast as LuaJIT, but it no reason it won't get there. As for simplicity, take a look at the partial evaluator in trunk of guile 2.

> Education

Guile is good old scheme.

> Functional

Can't get more functional than scheme :)

> Everything is a Table

Well, almost everything is a pair in guile. Vectors and hash-tables are trivially available. Though I recommend to sticking to functional programming in scheme style.

> Consistent

As before, can't get more consistent than scheme.

> Portable

Guile is available on n900. So there.

To continue, guile has continuations (delimited or otherwise), and macros (hygienic or otherwise), both of which are effectively missing in lua.

And guile offers all of this while supporting native threading with a single heap. Sweeet.
This article is a reaction to a media feeding frenzy around Apple's supposed abuses of Chinese workers. Your view that the media treats Apple with kid gloves is out of date.
The Brainstorming Process Is B.S. But Can We Rework It?
Please explain "hedge with derivatives"

(Edit 1)

My issue with what you say : I believe options (the derivatives I assume you're talking about) don't start trading till a while after the stock starts trading.

Furthermore, even if they started trading when the stock starts trading, why do you think you have positive expected value to buy the stock and also buy puts? Why not just buy calls?

If either one of these is positive expected value, why do options market makers sell them at the price they do?

Additionally, your talk about the valuation seems trite : you're more likely to make money if you buy at a $50B valuation than if you buy at a $75B valuation is supposed to be informative?

(Edit 2)

Yes, I see your explanation, but you're (again) not really saying anything.
Advice sometimes isn't worth the (web) paper it's printed on.

But take a long, hard look at the clients you are most successful with. Identify the larger market that fits that criteria. Then, how are you going to compete with the people already in that space?

I think of it the same whether doing a startup, consulting, or pivoting a business.
For us, Stripe is lacking a marketplace feature.

We use this feature to sell someone else's widgets on our website. The money is collected into a FDIC insured bank account for the seller, that we can create with an API call. Money goes immediately into that account as soon as it comes in. We take our cut, wepay takes theirs and the money is deposited. The seller can then xfer the money into their own bank account. We also use an iframe based form for collecting the payment information. This way, it integrates cleanly into our website and we don't have to manage any of that process.

This is a feature that PayPal has, but they have a horrible API and even worse documentation. WePay's is simple, clean and full of awesome. They also have a nice staging system that identically mirrors their production system, so it makes it easy to do development and testing.
By the looks of it (from the perspective of people not involved in the support industry), you appear to have a problem with the company for making a name change, which seems petty (going by the comments here, and my own thoughts after reading your post). If you were to have outlined the product differences before/ after, and why the changes made rendered the product inferior, you would probably have more support.

As it stands, to me at least, it looks like you were simply looking for an excuse, and a re-branding simply provided what you thought was an adequate excuse (and the HN community disagrees).

I think it is important to keep in mind that Salesforce is a ~$15B company, and sending 20 customers their way probably doesn't constitute a strategic partner to an organization of that size.
"I'd suggest a sophisticated investor would hedge with derivatives in anticipation of the substantial downside risk."

I see. I know what some of those words mean. Man, actually I dont know what the hell you are saying. Why is it that the finance sector uses a language of its own? I understand each sector has their own quirks and logisms, but finance is the worst, for something that is kind of simple. If have money, you can buy things and sell things. How come you have all these fancy words to mean what exacly?
Well, it would appear that this is indeed "bad ass js". I can't for the life of me think of a way to use this, but it is very, very bad ass.
I don't know why iOS users are in this thread complaining. This is barely indicative of anything, except that developers don't have unlimited promo codes in the App Store so iOS isn't eligible for this style of promotion.

Last time I looked all of those titles are available on the App Store right now, and they have all been on sale for a dollar at one point or another. They were still published on iOS before any other mobile platform. Most of them I already own and don't even have on my phone anymore. They have been available in the App Store for well over a year, some for over two years.

Maybe it's just me but I'm not exactly getting much of a left out feeling from this bundle. On top of all that, as we are seeing it's hardly a perfect system. They have to design an updater because the Android Market can't be used to update non-Market APKs. IMO it's more trouble than it's worth.
Yes, tables are the only composite data type in Lua. But it's not fair to say that everything is a table. Compare with Smalltalk or Ruby where everything is an object, even types that are not usually viewed as composites.
I'd pay you 40,000 to do it. Just Kidding!! Doing some market research?
nice. is there any more info about your company? http://heartbyte.com is kinda minimal (even with the comments) and http://heartbyte.com/blog gives an error.

if not, can you outline what technology you're using (i see you've commented on couchdb, some time ago...)? how quickly can you provide results? what does the user interface look like from either side? (i'm a technical guy, but i bet others here would also like to know how you're funded etc...)
How about freelancers who never complete work but still get paid? it happened to me.
This Coder Dojo thing (http://coderdojo.com/) has been slowly growing momentum for a while now, but has recently had a burst of activity, with setups in SF, New York and Boston on the way.

James, at 19, seriously has to be commended for the sheer dedication he's thrown behind this endeavour. Ben has also been behind the scenes for a long time, only 18 himself.

It's inspiring, and humbling, to know these guys are putting all their energy into helping kids learn how to code.
Ok, since we clearly disagree about what he was writing, I'll point you at the copyright act:

a broadcaster has a copyright in the communication signals that it broadcasts, consisting of the sole right to do the following in relation to the communication signal or any substantial part thereof:
(a) to fix it,
As a sysadmin, let me reassure you that this is purely marketing nonsense. Careful listening to CEOs living inside their own bubble, far from reality...
So I've spent like ten minutes clicking around the OpenPhoto site, and it seems to me that they somehow forgot to mention what it is that OpenPhoto actually does.

Like, I don't need special software to store photos on S3. I don't need special software to hand links to files on S3 out to others, or display the files on my own site in galleries I build myself.

Presumably, then OpenPhoto lets me collect said photos into galleries and hosts the gallery bits? If so, why doesn't the word gallery appear anywhere on their site? Why isn't there any way to explore the galleries that they are hosting right now? Do I have to create an account to even see them? Would people I want to share with need to? Why aren't there some screenshots of what these galleries look like? Does the absence of all of this information mean that it doesn't actually handle the gallery bits? If that's the case, what does it do?

Their website is like a case-study in what not to do. It looks great, but at no point does it clearly communicate to me what it is their product does.
Megaupload case marks death of the cloud
So is playing basketball, but we can't all be Earvin Johnson.
chuck: fyi, your email address is not public. You have to copy it into the about area if you want other users to be able to see it. Other than that, AFAIK HN has no way to contact users.
While node is stabilising and getting a fair amount of production use out their, its rapid growth over the last year or more means that if you use it now you should (IMO) probably still consider yourself an early adopter at this point and expect a few problems like that.

The high-profile users of node will no doubt have someone almost dedicated to testing new versions before rolling them out to developers and test environments, and have a battery of automated testing solutions to run new versions by with existing projects before new node versions get anywhere near production. You don't say what scale you've tried with node on, so I'm assuming a relatively small scale (possibly just yourself playing) rather than your experiences being team based ones - which means you won't have the luxury of a person/team dealing with that sort of upgrade integration hassle for you so you.

I've tinkered with node myself but on a very small scale: just myself playing with a few bits thus far. I've had minimal hassle with upgrades, but as I don't have any mentionable codebase that I'm dragging with me at each upgrade a new version can just be a fresh install for me.
Follow Tablo on Twitter here:

http://twitter.com/teachontablo
> Working extremely hard to make very little, when one does not care for the work and has little practical alternative is being exploited.

Subsistence farming matches this pattern. You have to work very hard, you make very little, and you don't like the work. It doesn't make much sense to label that exploitation since no one is there to exploit you (are you exploiting yourself?). But let's roll with it.

At least with Foxconn in the picture, these folks have one alternative. Put another way, Foxconn is at least less exploitative by your definition than what is likely the main alternative for many of its workers. But I suspect that your definition is not exactly the same as what you believe exploitation really is.
so uh... why you still working here? =/
no, flickr is exactly in Y!'s core business: content driving O&O pageviews. Better yet, users often pay flickr to push this content!
Can you list what parts of the product that are different and worse than it was yesterday? I have been evaluating Assistly for the last 2 weeks for my company and today I hardly noticed any change at all. Actually I kind of prefer the more muted color scheme, the new white space in the open cases and a few other smaller things. These appear to be the biggest change.

Perhaps I am not using all the features you use to notice the difference, but the Agent and Admin sections of the site appear identical functionality-wise to me, just slightly different color scheme, visual cues and the new Desk.com logo. I did prefer the old logo though!:)

It might be helpful to elaborate on how the functionality or usability has altered today since the rebrand to give others evaluating these types of products more information.
Then don't take payment via credit card. Only accept cash transfers, cash, or bank cheques.
I first read this as any book that was sold by Amazon, but it's just the 'Amazon Press'.

While it might be somewhat of a big deal for the authors involved, it probably won't be much of an issue for anyone else.
It will be interesting to see how id (or Carmack himself) will react to eventual pull requests. As far as I know the code has been frozen once released as Free Software on id FTP server.
Linked to in the comments: Some session notes.

http://vitalyper.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/clojure-conj-2011-...
Is there an alternative to bits?
This is why I never rely on "the cloud" as my sole backup source. The same thing happened to me with that free live drive reseller floating around a couple of months back.

One day I got a message that my account was closed and I could no longer get to my data. I used it as my 4th or 5th extra backup.
It also has the same pronunciation as 'tableau' in French which means blackboard.
Agreed, one should never start work with a new client without an advance. It doesn't need to be big, but get the client to put some skin in the game.

Also, regular progress payments are essential. You don't want to be in the hole 10k to someone when negotiating further work.

http://jamespmcgrath.com/progress-payments-based-on-mileston...
The problem that Apple is experiencing is the exposure of the tension between its marketing and its image, and reality.

The author of the article says, "That’s what being poor means, having to work extremely hard to make very little. Yes, that is a harsh thing to say but then reality can indeed be harsh."

No one would deny that reality can be harsh. At the same time, you can't deny that Apple - and, of course, the other electronics companies - does not truthfully convey that reality to its customers. Doing so would not be in Apple's best interest. However, if this boycott succeeds, it would demonstrate that having this tension between reality and image is also not in Apple's best interest.

The article also makes the standard corporatist argument that the behaviour of corporations is outside of their control, because they are subject to market forces.

This tact ignores the human factor. Apple is made up of humans. It is not humanly impossible to demand that a supplier adhere to higher standards than are prevalent in the rest of China.

Setting that aside, let's examine the issue purely from the standpoint of the marketplace, but rather than looking at the Chinese labour marketplace, let's look at the American consumer goods marketplace.

Humans respond to a variety of different factors when making purchasing decisions. It is not just about price and quality, but can also be about morality and emotion. In this instance, Apple's customers may be persuaded to boycott Apple because of these subjective factors.

That may seem unfair to some, but isn't that just a risk of globalization? After all, a global company must deal with market forces everywhere it operates: both market forces affecting who makes its products, and market forces affecting who purchases them.

Apple will be forced to balance these market forces, and when it does so, it may result in lower profit margins but better working conditions at its suppliers' factories.
Really like who?
I don't know...a site with underage highschool girls in questionable poses just seems like a bad idea to me.
Yeah, let's make an "infographic" comparing percentage of Chinese and German assembly line workers jumping out of windows or getting sick from toxic work environments, then we can talk.
I've had a different experience using their Ruby SDK and have not found it as friendly for developers. Their API is decently documented but their implementation for paying is dependent on redirects and URL callbacks. The ruby SDK provides little more than a wrapper for passing and retrieving JSON. Some may prefer this but I felt that I was reinventing the wheel.

I am staying with them for one project because of some services they have that no one else offers.

I am rooting for WePay but they need to work more on their SDKs to be developer friendly.
We also use 'tableau' to say 'blackboard':

"Aymeric, au tableau!" would say my teacher when he wanted me to go in front of the blackboard to do an exercise.
Reverse engineering with Phineas and Ferb
That's creating a false dichotomy, though. Just because a sweatshop may be better than backbreaking farm work, doesn't mean we can't care about what is happening in sweatshops.

Also, it's "Daisey".
I pretty much agree with you that their landing page is a bit of a mess.

Though, I probably should have given this link instead: http://openphoto.me/

My understanding is that the OpenPhoto Project is the open source project, and that site is aimed at developers. OpenPhoto.me is at least partly aimed at users. It explains it a little better.

I will also take this opportunity to plug a piece I wrote for the Atlantic tech blog that explains a bit more about OpenPhoto: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/the-st...
If you are looking to just host your own and don't feel the need to directly interact in a community, OpenPhoto looks really interesting: http://theopenphotoproject.org/.

I've thought about rolling my own and using it as an opportunity to learn rails, because these things are so simple to do nowadays, but OpenPhoto looks like an interesting offering.
You can indeed by clicking the disclosure triangle to the left of the charity slider. Perhaps it is too small?
After integrating both, this is right on the money. WePay is great for what it offers on a basic level. Stripe is better with integrating with a site and its features.
With Wakemate gone, consider Sleep Cycle for iPhone instead
Contrary to that headline it's actually more of a counter-censorship measure:

http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...

By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers. Content removed due to a specific country's law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD.

So after a local authority demands that a blog post be removed, it will still be available at *.blogspot.com
The first one was a bit harsh. Cutting back on latest tech news is something i would never consider.
But the other tips are good. Will try that. Thanks :)
LESS.app For Mac OS X
FFI is extremely cool and impressive, no doubt, but a major downside of it is that you give up memory safety. Once you import it your Lua program can SEGV the interpreter and read/write arbitrary memory in your process. Freedom from memory errors is a major motivation for using high-level languages, so this should not be given up lightly. Also, from a security standpoint it means your Lua is less sandboxed.
Appengine 1.6.2 released
It'd be really interesting to see more game development companies from the 80's and 90's release the source code for old abandonware. I was hoping to see Commander Keen (one of my favorite old games from my youth) on this list, but apparently it's still closed source.
Oh that makes a lot more sense. I assumed that the original link was the user site, and wondered why there was so little content aimed at explaining the end-user experience, interesting as the dev details were.

Thanks!
Experimental backup and restore looks great. Waiting for an API so this can be cron'd
feed subscription is broken.
an effective boycott of Apple products harms Chinese workers

The very threat of a boycott will put yet more pressure on Apple to at least appear to improve the conditions while still employing factory workers.
Does anyone know how good is Lua's support for async IO? Especially the handling of large amount of connections and the memory footprint for each connection?
Sounds like you have an idea for a startup. :)
Scripting-language-wars infographic: php, ruby, python.
Javascript development tools - resources
I am sick and tired of hearing how the suicides are no big deal because they are less than the national average.

1) You don't know the non-jumping suicide rate. There could be plenty of workers who take their lives privately in their dormitories.

2) Jumping off a roof of your workplace is a VERY different type of suicide then swallowing a bunch of pills. It's making a statement about who the employer is and what they have driven the employee to do. There would be a national alarm if we had 18 blue-collar workers jump off the roofs of a GM plant.
I'm running ubuntu 11.10 + ZFS for Linux. Works great.

http://zfsonlinux.org/
Twitter bootstrap 2.0-wip branch examples are now responsive beautiful
I thought that too, but while learning it I realized pretty quickly that to learn Clojure you first have to learn Java. For people with Java experience and time it probably isn't a problem, but for a non Java programmer with little time...
There are front-end people who are crazy about CSS, HTML5, and JQuery. I haven’t met too many lovers of Javascript, but I know they’re out there too

I could be said to be one of those lovers of JavaScript or more appropriately I love disconnected clients communicating with services. I like an architecture that makes back-ends plug-ins to my workflow. I also can look past a lot of JavaScript shortcomings due to it having partial Lisp roots, which I prefer. I have not done PHP development in a long time, but it just never was appealing to me.

That is the beauty of having different languages, different people think differently and we find community with people that think like we do in our languages. That being said, I appreciate what the PHP community has contributed, one would be hard pressed to argue that PHP has not contributed some of the best CMS's available in the market. When I have to go back to building out pure content based sites, I always reach for a PHP CMS and for that I am thankful to the PHP community.
I am always curious why companies like this want to IPO. Do they really need the cash in order to further grow their company?

Or is it solely for compensation of their founders & employees?
Launch Center
I never thought about that, I took for granted my Java knowledge, thanks for the insight.
So we've finally come full circle. Wasn't Dropbox created because the founders were sick of emailing themselves files? IRONY!
We have some rough edges on our web presence to be sure. This may help a bit on the UI front: http://heartbyte.com/s/hn

As for the tech, given the requests we need to handle from our distributed queue, we do clustered stream processing in near realtime. Our broadcast customers want a line on their screen within a second or two.

And for now we are bootstrapped.
I was suggesting an investor could use call-options and put-options to hedge against up or down price movement from the IPO price.

Options are derivatives which gives the owner the right, but not the obligation, to sell or buy a stock. If an investor holds both, in equal (or sometimes unequal amounts), they can (usually) make money from price movement upwards or downwards.

If I was going to buy the stock on opening day or buy options, I might wait until closer to the offer day, or before opening bell, and look at the long-short spread (how many shares are being bid and offered and at what price). This can give a good indication if the price will rise or fall on opening day.

For further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_(finance)
Tried all the games on my Touchpad running ICS (Cyanogenmod 9 Alpha 0.5) and they all ran flawlessly (except for the video playback in Anomaly but that's a known issue). Great stuff!
I think Mike Daisy should spend some time in rural China with the relatives of Foxconn employees who do backbreaking farm work. But who would go to see that show without "Steve Jobs" in the title?

I was thinking about this. I wouldn't be surprised if Mike Daisey would do just that. He's a pretty unconventional documentarian. At this point, people probably would go see the show (or listen to the This American Life show, as I did). Seriously, you should suggest this to him, it would make for a good story.
> I understand that you consider your app distribution needs special, but each time a large, active and popular company/developer does this, it hurts the platform as a whole.

They are special. :)
Teaching with authenticity and authority