skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is very true — and it's precisely why we have considered making macros callable with function syntax. But I feel like having something that looks like a function and is actually a macro is a bit of a dangerous lie, no matter how handy it sometimes is. One of our design goals is not to be too tricky — if something looks like a function call, it should be a function call. The @foo syntax for macro calls means that you know exactly what's going on. It also means you can't do stuff like try to pass a macro as an argument to a higher-order function — what does that even do? I.e. what does map(m,vec) mean where m is a macro?
Sure, and past that: this had to have been recorded in the 80's, right? Back when there were cigar-chomping execs with their feet on the desks, and when the PMRC was a force to be reckoned with (or at least to write Dead Kennedys songs about).
I also think there is a way to have the best of both worlds, but I have so far taken a rather different approach. What do you think of what I've got here?

https://github.com/andrewf/fern

It's a very much a prototype, and my ideas have evolved a lot (towards lisp), but I'm at least curious what you think of the ideas in the README.
It seems that some companies like Payvment and Tabjuice have had some success getting brands to buy in and use their platforms to sell to fans...but again it just seems like fans are not interested in buying through Facebook. It might just be an undeveloped technology, or its too soon to tell, maybe it will reemerge as something different in the coming years. Also, consumers are probably skeptical about buying through a social network for actual goods, much the same way consumers were a bit reluctant to share their credit card online in the early days of the internet.
One of the best ways to overcome the chicken-or-the-egg problem the guy is hung up on, is by using the classic bowling pin strategy. You don't need to have huge advantages in your favor to make use of that.

eBay had a severe chicken or the egg problem when it started out. So did Craigslist. Almost anything that needs buyers and sellers simultaneously has that problem (or content suppliers and content consumers). Most people overcome it by knocking down one local pin to start with, and then knocking down more pins and more pins and more pins. Groupon is another more recent example, they didn't start out in 250 cities. Amazon.com didn't start out trying to sell everything, they sold a tiny selection of books. Facebook didn't try to conquer the world on day one, they started as an extraordinarily tiny 'app' for Harvard, and once they knocked over that bowling pin....

My favorite example: Plenty of Fish, the dating site. Started by a complete nobody, with almost no money, never took venture capital, and had no famous backers. He knocked down a pin in Canada and around his general area of Canada, to get started. Then it spread across the border to America and went international. He did all of that while stacked up against extreme competition in the dating scene, with monsters like Match & eHarmony that were a million times larger - he managed to find a space he could exist in (free), and focused locally with a product that could later spread globally.

SkyChalk perhaps should have just been for San Francisco, or insert market here, but had the ability to scale once they conquered that first market and proved their product.

The creators of SkyChalk have a lot to learn yet.
They're certainly not bad (and what I subscribe to in RSS) when one considers the field.

A lot of it is very US-centric and some of the 'rumours' aren't very news-worthy (the numerous stories on dock connectors for the iPad 3 come to mind) but it's far more like a news site that works mostly on facts (well, as close to facts as rumours can come) than mere speculation and conjecture. Arn, the guy who runs it, is an MD which might explain the difference to an extent.
If you read through the comments you will find many examples of lower dosages. Sure it's not scientific, however calling it "propoganda" is ignorant. As if this poor guys is part of a government conspiracy - he's pouring his heart out, not part of a propaganda conspiracy.
Buffer's UX: "Buffer" as a Good Thing
Font using dots instead of letters - Design your own version (type a mapping)
Yes, if we engineer them that way. Next question, move on. It's sad people are still this primitive on AI philosophy. Thanks for letting me know not to read anything seriously about "The Future" by Randall Parker, I guess.
Contrary to other degrees like English, History, Law, Civil Engineering, Biology, Dentistry, Medicine and many others, in Computer Science what you learning is not necessarily augmenting previous learning, but replacing it.

What a complete load of shit. People in technology love to reinvent the wheel, mostly because they don't know someone already did that wheel about 8 times. It's very rare to find an idea that is completely new and unique.
I coded up this page in response to the comments from my HN post on Thursday - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3601687 . There was a lot of interest / critique re the mapping between letters and dots, so I resurrected this UI for experimenting into a better web form.

Thanks for the comments on Thursday - I enjoyed battling it out :)
Sorry! The only thing I can say in our defense is that this is pretty trivial compared to installing a lot of scientific computing packages. But seriously, we'd like a drag-and-drop Mac installer. Anyone want to do that? (Only half kidding.)

Stepping back a bit, this is one of the reasons why having an entirely web-based experience is appealing — then you can let people use a known-good setup without needing to mess around with installing a fairly extensive amount of software just to get basic things to work. Then there's also the general appeal of doing big data work a la Google docs or Gmail. The trick is getting the user experience to be good enough on the web.
Ask HN: Moving from tech leader to operations/product management?
My careers is taking an interesting turn. I am the most senior tech manager (Director of Technology) at the company I work with and one of the more skilled hackers. However I've had an interest in how companies get things done. I've recently been put in a position to work on the company's overall process for working projects and building products and to effectively product management a couple of those products. It makes sense since I have some human skills and know the company inside and out. My questions, is this wise? Is someone without an MBA going to make it far down the road to Director of Operations/COO? Have you ever been in a similar situation and what did you do?
Yeah, I don't take antibiotics when they are prescribed most of the time over here.

But doctors in the US are also far more into defensive C sections. You can avoid the issue in Indonesia by doing a little research about the doctor ahead of time.
I feel like V8 faces a harder problem and has solved it ingeniously. Not to knock HotSpot, which is excellent and keeps getting better — it just seems like making the JVM go fast is not as hard as making something like JavaScript go fast. It's a tough comparison; kind of apples to oranges.
This is the second person from IMSA I have seen on Hacker News' front page in the past 24 hours.

http://roshfu.com/2012/02/17/did-you-hear-we-got-osama.html

Titans!
He does not have dual citizenship in the us or anywhere else. No idea where you got that or the bit about the FBI.

He is an Iranian citizen who lived in Canada until he returned to visit his dying father and was arrested.
Good job the doctor running my treatment stays up to date with modern techniques instead of bemoaning the age of her qualification.

The degree should teach you the techniques to manage your own learning. It is a piece of paper that certifies you can work by yourself or in groups on non trivial tasks, with insight and advice from a more experiences peer.

The majority of my lecturers at university were behind the latest technology, so how could they teach them.
This too. It's much too easy to lift source from somewhere else, or hire somebody from India to write code on your behalf.

I generally don't trust anything that I can't verify firsthand. Stated experience gets a guy in the door for the interview, but their performance during the interview is all that matters to me.
Testing CoffeeScript for Rails with Jasmine
The problem is that Facebook is a pain to navigate. If I wanted to shop for something online, the last place that I would go to would be Facebook - and even if I did choose to go to Facebook I wouldn't even know where to go or what to click on. A lot of those company pages have a spammy feel to them and when you like a brand they pollute your news feed.

The Facebook design has zero familiarity to it. I have been using the site for over 5 years now, at least once a week, and yet I have zero familiarity with the product. When I click on a link in Facebook, I have no idea what is really going to happen. I have written blog posts and popular guides on Facebook yet when I am helping others secure their accounts I find myself just clicking and guessing. It would definitely be in the top 5 products that I have used in the last 5 years yet it is the only popular product that I can't navigate blindly.

The menu's are starting to remind me of the toolbar hell of later Microsoft Office versions (a reason why a lot of power users are hesitant to upgrade Office).

I think Facebook really need to streamline their design, separate brands from real friends in the news feed and sit down and work out how they can expose deeper functionality of the platform to users without just throwing dozens of links into the interface. When you have personal pictures from friends mixed in with brand messages users are more likely to feel that their privacy is being violated.

Edit: to add, this is why I think Facebook isn't as secure in popularity as many analysts would have you believe. Pinterest is an example of a real threat to Facebook - a site that was designed with social and e-commerce ingrained in the product with an easy to use interface. That is a billion-dollar opportunity to Facebook is about to miss out on.

Edit 2: My attempt to shop on Facebook:

https://img.skitch.com/20120219-nd4peencu2b7kf9534juhb1ytc.j...

vs my attempt on Pinterest:

https://img.skitch.com/20120219-fjyq53h693eb4fnfitamgsmuc5.j...
In the UK, if you work for a company with 250 or more employees, you are also entitled to request time off work to train (including degree study): http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/Timeoffandh...
Try clicking the "random" link a bunch of times to got a feel for the possible variations.
Very useful, thanks. It would be quicker (and a bit less jarring) if instead of going to a new page with the listing details, the row you clicked on just expanded with the details inline.
Moochers Against Welfare
Tidy-url
I wrote a (batshit crazy) Python library to do exactly what you're talking about. It converts Python ASTs into S-expressions (just Python lists) and allows you to apply 'macros' to methods just by decorators.
ShopSavvy gets serious about BigData
I would rather go with 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 from http://opendns.com
It's been discussed, and would be satisfying to have an `Iterable` abstract type and ensure that every object implements `Iterable` satisfies contract of having appropriate `start`, `done` and `next` methods, but that requires two features we don't have yet: multiple inheritance of abstract types, and some way of specifying an interface. There's been some discussion of this, and I believe we have the way multiple inheritance could work mostly worked out; enforcement of interface implementation, not so much. However, it's a pretty massive undertaking to add it to the language. Quick teaser: generic functions and final concrete types actually make multiple dispatch work a lot better than it does with single dispatch and the "bag of named methods inside an object" model of traditional OO.

So far we haven't actually felt a "pressing need" for multiple inheritance or interfaces, and we tend to take a pressing-need approach to language features. If you can live without a feature for a while, then maybe you really didn't need it in the first place. But we'll have to see what happens when other people are starting to try to use if for things.

Aren't compound types inherently concrete? The compoundness describes the implementation of the type, implying that it must have an implementation, hence must be concrete.
yes. i think the warm fuzzy feeling is how the body internally represents the vague and unspecific expectation of 'social' reward from doing something that benefits others

the sense of something being a 'good deed' comes from expecting harmony and general social cooperation (reciprocity) and since the cause effect is so disconnected and complex - it's too difficult to grasp with reason (for some people) and just has to be felt in this way. (?)

also the neurological 'mirroring' and empathy

.. anyways. people who want and use the library should pay for it. people who don't should not pay. isn't this fair?
Yeah, this is what happened here. It's an issue that makes me angry and I said something I shouldn't have. Do I get an "I derailed a thread on Hacker News" t-shirt? Definitely something I'll try not to do again.
A Definitive Guide To Landing Page Optimization
(+ 1 2 3) =

add 1 and 2 and 3

The syntax is a bit terse but if you teach people a good way to read it it becomes much more readable than
1+2+3

The only reason we prefer that way is that we are thought that syntax when we do math in school, I have found it much easier to teach people lisp who have no or very little formal education in math.
Made a donation as a thank you for making my zte blade usable till I can afford an upgrade. Hope they keep up the good work.
Social Media Text Analytics and US Politics | Scoop.it
Stanford technology entrepreneurship class on hold
I think there is something useful to extract from this. One would be the importance of your sociability. Who you know is important in everything from finding good hackers for partners, to knowing someone who knows someone for whatever. You don't have to be a tech celeb to achieve this, but it is something that cannot be accomplished overnight.

That extra free hour might be better spent being socially active vs me writing responses to responses on HN.
Are you really able to read this? :D
I haven't been in a similar situation, but from my experience jumping jobs quite a few times in the tech space, degrees don't matter as much as experience.

If you've been at the company for a long while like it sounds and you know what would be good for the company as far as product development goes, I'd say moving into a role where you can actually optimize those processes is a great position for you to be in! Good luck in your new role..
.. and a really great reason for using open source programs
I have a completely clean environment without Growl installed at all. Apps that use Growl still notify me, I just don't have a way to change the frequency or anything like that unless they give me a preferences menu inside of the app.
Computational and Data Journalism | Scoop.it
If Al-Qaeda really wants to piss off the USA they should just open a censorship free anti-takedown compliant web hosting company. They could run it as a non-profit putting most of the profits back into expanding their business and attracting more clients. LOL
Two different shows, one is about showcasing techniques in extreme situation and feature an ex british special forces with a heavy background in adventuring while the other is about putting one guy alone in a survival situation for a few days featuring a regular guy who has personal interest in survival.

Though they're not with him, Les stroud also has a support crew and a way to contact them in case of life-threatening emergency.
In your example you say "Once in memory, this structure can be easily outputted as CSS." I think you may be underestimating how hard this will be. CSS may look like it's just a bunch of maps, but there is more to it than that. Consider something funky like:

#id > p a.red:visited {
background: url(foo.png) white;
margin: 0 3px 5em 80% ! important;
}

There's a lot going on here. CSS isn't just key/value maps.

Also, I don't think you want a data language to be Turing-complete. PostScript was Turing-complete but PDF is not; this makes PDF easier to deal with because it's easier to analyze and there's no risk of it getting into an infinite loop.
If you view a computer science degree, as teaching you particular sub-technologies (eg: CORBA, HTTP, etc), then sure, it is inevitable that one thinks of a CS degree as a time-limited paper slip.

This is the very definition of vocational training.

But there is so much more to computer science, and technology than vocational training. I hate to say it, but your math classes and algorithm analysis classes? They were some of the most important classes you took. Even classes like compilers are not invalid, even though we dont quite build compilers in the same way as the dragon book says we should. But some things are the same, and the nature of them does not change as fast as people think. For example, parsing has a number of approaches, but they are all inter-related, and learning about one in depth lets you understand why that approach is not ideal or what kinds of tradeoffs one is making.

Another example... as much as operating systems have evolved, many aspects of them just .. have... not ... changed. EG: IPC in modern Unix systems. Pretty much all the same as 1995 (the first year I coded sockets).

This is pretty much the general education vs vocational argument all over again.
Click to go back on the old version
Learn How To Be Your Own Boss
> I can't believe this option is enabled by default

Because it's the platform default. That's how it should be.

> It provides zero functionality over "non-native" (??) fullscreen

Wrong. It puts you in another "Space".

You can argue that you like OS X's fullscreen feature, but VLC implements it just how it sould be.
For sho. Took a little time, but there are only 26 letters so it's easier than you'd think.
After first Anon hack, PR firm failed to update other .gov websites
I think you either misread, or I was unclear -- we're in agreement.

Company network with company devices: sniffing traffic is fine, insofar as it's done by configuring the devices with a private CA.

Company network with personal devices (including visitor's devices): silently MITMing SSL using forged certificates and a real CA is not fine. They can either forbid the use of personal devices, or request that I install their internal CA.
You know those cardboard compacter/bailer units in the back of Home Depots and such? The shelving crew puts their cardboard into them, it gets crushed and comes out in neat, baled bundles.

I saw a truck version of one of them. It drives to your location and you or they bale your cardboard.

It had a Facebook "Like Us" sticker on the side.

Seriously? For something you'll probably only need once, and probably didn't even know existed before you needed it?
It's called Street Cred. Fake had plenty, you have none.
For the record "ease of use" was not why we switched to wget — there was (for a while) a dependency that could only be downloaded using wget's recursive downloading. That's not the case anymore, however, so we should really switch back to curl.
How can people say things like this? Do you seriously believe that if Santorum were to be elected, the US would begin to participate in religion fueled executions? Or more importantly, do you think Santorum supports these actions?
I've had the idea in the back of my head for a while now to build a new facade UI for HN that completely hides the surface evidence of the entire karma system, which has come to be used in an increasingly childish and reflexive manner.
We're GitHub hosted so hopefully this doesn't take GitHub down! (j/k)
>.. anyways. people who want and use the library should pay for it. people who don't should not pay. isn't this fair?

People who want and use the roads should pay for them. People who don't shouldn't be allowed to drive or walk anywhere. Isn't that fair?

People who want and use the police department should pay for it. People who don't should have no protection. Isn't that fair?

People who want and use the fire department should pay for it. People who don't should have to stand by and watch their house burn to the ground. Isn't that fair?
Investing yourself in the topsoil of shiny new technologies instead of sending roots down deep will set you up for rapid obsolesence. My CS program taught the latter, and it's served me well for almost a decade.
That's actually not true at all. They'll rush ECG procedures if you're currently exhibiting symptoms at that moment. Yes, if I were rushed to the hospital, I could probably get one. Somethings tells me that by then, it's probably too late.
I think that Like Us sticker on your mop has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with the mop company employee who implemented it and their relationship to their boss. "We're on Facebook!"
Why then has math (which is read and written only by humans) used infix notation for hundreds of years, whereas prefix/postfix notation were only developed in the 20th century and today are used only by Computer Scientists?

You don't have to know an entire operator precedence table to read and write idiomatic infix-notation code. Precedence is defined such that common expressions evaluate as people intuitively expect (a notable counterexample is "x & y == z" in C). Parentheses are always available to clarify more complicated expressions.
Facts: a few companies have failed to monetize facebook store fronts, so they quit investing resources in them.

Conclusion: Facebook isn't a commerce platform that can succeed.

Facebook works for commerce. Most people just haven't figured out how yet.
I read all posts that reach 100 karma points.
http://talkfast.org/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-overlo...
In DC we're currently trying to convince the library system to open up their meeting spaces for entrepreneurship / tech meetups. If it works, hopefully it could be replicated to other cities and be a positive part of the entrepreneurship ecosystem.

Below is a talk about transforming part of the MLK library, DC's central library, into a meetup space, FWIW.
http://www.robertvesco.com/2012/02/entrepreneurship-public-p...
It's a misconception that every employer who asks for a Github ID as part of a job application process is looking to use it as a way to screen applicants. For us, it's just a shortcut to see whether someone can code. If they don't have a Github (or bitbucket, or technical blog, or whatever else is Googleable or that a candidate wants to provide us), it just means that I have to spend extra time during the phone screen or in-person interview on their coding abilities.
It's the premise that exposing ourselves to communities based on idea dissemination (HN, Twitter, etc) maximizes our serendipity. Reading X article may set you on a path that leads to an opportunity you never could have predicted.

As with all things, moderation is critical. On one extreme, you're just gorging articles and reading about ideas. But you don't do anything about them, you just keep on reading. On the other extreme, you shut out the world and live in your head. There is the chance that you'll "create your own opportunity" (to use the phrase of the author) but you limit your chances by not interacting with others.

Read something, see if you can act on it. If not, move along. There's no reason to take either extreme.