skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I haven't tried the Chrome(or Firefox) extension(s), just the bookmarklet javascript that Pocket provides here: http://getpocket.com/welcome?b=Bookmarklet

I'll have to give the extensions a try when I get a chance.
Ads, if I ignore you will you go away?
This is a very interesting thought exercise on "what if you could send modern programming languages back to the 1980s?" http://prog21.dadgum.com/6.html

It would be interesting to analyze early Apple ][ game images and see which didn't use assembly. Wizardry was a notable example for using USCD Pascal, essentially running in a VM. Infocom games of course used Z-code. Applesoft BASIC was fine for some text adventures (Eamon for example).

There were also programs like Microsoft's TASC that compiled Applesoft to binary, much of the speedup gained by converting floating point values to integer.

The SWEET16 interpreter was also built-in to ROM, but I don't know if any titles used it.

But almost every game relied on some kind of special graphics technique to wow the player, and that usually meant at least one neato routine hand-optimized in assembly. Drawing a sprite to the Apple's frame buffer was actually much more complex than blasting RGB values like we do today.
I understand the classpath exception. But if you look at the opening slides showing evidence Oracle will be presenting [1] (whether taken out of context or not), it specifically states from a Google email:

"… and as far as GPL-ing the VM, everything that is linked with the VM would get infected. The problem with GPL in embedded systems is that it’s viral, and there is no way (for example) OEMs or Carriers to differentiate by adding proprietary works. We are building a platform where the entire purpose is to let people differentiate on top of it."

So classpath exception aside (and the first OpenJDK release was after Android was started, but before the above quoted email was sent), they were still afraid of infecting their developers.

[1] - http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/opening-slides-1...

Edit: fixed wording
Offer HN: YC Interview Advice
The 7-10 days before your YC interview should be some of the most productive in your life. Myself and Aleem (cofounders of Streak.com) are offering advice to interviewees on how to best make use of this time to maximize your chances.

Founders who get an interview aren't allowed to be public about it, so send an email to ycinterview@streak.com and we'll setup a call.
I personally don't care that a company is looking out for it's "best interests"* internally. I am happy that Google is effectively defending the Java community from Oracle (since Oracle doesn't wish to be it's steward.)

* If this move is actually in their best interest, and what best interest IS I have no idea. But it's their perception.

You could check out http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Main_Page
Not sure if they are still running these days, but they have the goals you seek in mind.
I really have to say I strongly disagree with Kenneth Ballenegger's characterization at the beginning of the second paragraph of the developer who was "forced to rename his open source project." Clicking on the link provided, that's clearly not what happened, unless you call him having a chat over Twitter with a friend of his "being forced." Reading over the guy's account, he was glad to do it, and felt like it was a great step to take. Talking as though it was some sort of situation where people ganged up on him to force him to take down something he worked hard on is more than a little misleading. Here, read it yourself and let me know if you think it sounds like he was "forced":

https://github.com/whit537/assertEquals/blob/master/ANNOUNCE...

That mischaracterization aside, though:

I disagree with almost everything in this article, although I think I see where he's coming from. Yes, for us guys in tech, it can sometimes seem a bit scary watching how much damage it can do when a company gets hammered for sexism on Twitter. I think a lot of us get a sort of fear of that happening to us, and can get a bit defensive when we're told that we've done or said something sexist, racist, or otherwise bigoted. And because we are generally blind to the ways our privilege assists us every day, we tend to feel as though we're the ones being attacked, completely missing the fact that sexism still hurts women and holds them back.

>>We cannot beat sexism until gender is no longer an issue.

This point doesn't make much sense to me at all. I think this is supposed to mean that sexism is a problem when and only when people 'make gender an issue' - and to imply that discussing sexism makes everything worse because it naturally 'makes gender an issue.' The question here is natural - an 'issue' to whom? The whole point is supposed to be that sexism is an issue women in tech have to face even if we men have the privilege of completely ignoring it if we want. It wasn't an 'issue' in 1950 that women were forbidden from holding any authority in the office; it was just a fact of life.

What really bothers me about this standard of victory over sexism - 'when gender is no longer an issue' - is that it sounds distinctly like a request that people please shut up about it already. Particularly when coupled with the next sentence...

>>Keeping up the current level of discourse is making things worse.

... which, by the way, seems demonstrably wrong to me. Does anybody care to cite any statistics about women in tech right now? Women in business? I wonder if there's any metric by which the current discourse is actually making things worse. Sure, it's not fun to have to confront privilege and deal with inequality; but it makes us all better human beings, and that's the point.
> OpenJDK is gonna be all there is (sadly)

Not sad at all. A hostile move by Oracle may be all that's needed to drive a lot more effort into improving it. And the best feature is that it's absolutely Oracle-proof.
Not to mention the integration between the debugger and Seaside...
I always get a few jaw drops when I fix code and the page comes up once I press "Proceed".
Why has Silicon Valley proved difficult to copy?
If you go up a bit it actually has most English language Amiga and Commodore related magazines as well...
Light Table Is On Kickstarter
The all-new Read It Later: Pocket
Maybe Playboy decided they wanted to publish a Kamasutra app?
Was just reading your website and saw the Joe Vs. The Volcano clip. That's one of my favorite movies and I've never met anyone else that has even heard of it, much less quotes from it. We might have to be friends.
History's 10 Most Influential Robots
As clever as they may be, they are not always right.
Open-source Hardware Movement Seeks Legitimacy | PCWorld
I hate when pledges don't include the lower rewards. How can I get a t-shirt and a license?
Continuous deployment with Heroku
Better content and conversation? Yes

Better aesthetic and worse content and conversation? No
A few recent vets have indicated the issues with having rollups of previous tiers

See http://zefrank.tumblr.com/post/20122841731/kickstarter-post-...

"Be careful with waterfalling rewards (having each category include all previous ones) — We had t-shirts in too many tiers; and they ended up being one of the most expensive rewards"
>Admirable principle, are you actually consistent with it?

Are you searching for a way to make an ad hominem here, or just fishing for a contradiction? Either way, this seems like a backwards to make the argument. If you believe that the principle behind affirmative action would lead to absurdities if applied consistently, why not just come out and say so?

>What if you think it's not worth your while because it's being promoted through ineffective, destructive methods?

The statement was about whether the goal was worthwhile, not the means.
How to Get on The Front Page of Hacker News
Ask HN: Review My Product - DropClock.com
After the initial launch of DropClock.com we got contacted by an influential blogger who wanted his own "DropClock.com" site. We morphed it into something bigger to accommodate his needs and hopefully other bloggers out there. Any website owner can quickly get their own Ebay.com or Etsy.com type site setup that works with their "Main" blogging site.

If you have any feedback regarding the business model of this please let me know.
There's simple a column for each quarter (ex: 2012 Q3) going about 3 quarters into the future. The only things on this board are big strategic projects.
I'm thinking I'll probably have to accept the same. I can't rightly argue against it unless I can offer up an alternative, and the need for change is significant enough.

I'd feel a lot better about it if it were at least acknowledged as such by the class it promotes, though.
Does anyone else find it awkward to back a project where the person running the project has never backed another project? I'm stoked about this project, It's just a feeling I've noticed consistently when looking at Kickstarter campaigns.
What a joke about Nasrallah "secret location": he had live high bandwith feed broadcast from there, would it be so hard to determine where it was?
In the last few hours the author has updated the repository to make it more obvious what the license is and placed this text in README.mkd:

We extracted and posted the 6502 code because it was a
piece of computer history that could be of interest to
others, and because if we hadn't, it might have been lost
for all time. We did this for fun, not profit. As the
author and copyright holder of this source code, I
personally have no problem with anyone studying it,
modifying it, attempting to run it, etc. Please understand
that this does NOT constitute a grant of rights of any
kind in Prince of Persia, which is an ongoing Ubisoft game
franchise. Ubisoft alone has the right to make and
distribute Prince of Persia games.
Here's a duplication of the comment I made on the site. I speak as if I'm speaking directly to the author.

---

> it’s possible to read it without parsing.

Yes, it's possible to perform lexical analysis without parsing too.

> the front end of every interpreter and compiler looks pretty much the same: [diagram]

You forgot the step where lexical analysis occurs. This is akin to what Lisp's READ does. Except the output isn't a stream of tokens, it's a tree of tokens. So, actually, even superficially, Lisp and $OTHER_LANGUAGE front-ends are not all that different.

> it knows nothing about the contents of the expression. All it knows is the macro definition of for.

This is because the `for`-statement is akin to a special form in Lisp. When Scheme encounters IF, and assuming it doesn't get transformed into a COND, then what does it do? It does not pass the arguments to some IF macro. IF is fundamental.

> What should the expander do when it sees: quux (mumble, flarg) [1, 2, 3] { foo: 3 } grunch /wibble/i

It expands it. The expander should not see a stream of characters, as you show in that example, it should see a tree. The expander does not care what the original stream of characters was, nor should it.

READ isn't the point. READ is a way of turning a stream of characters into a data structure. The only time an expander cares about the stream is when it's a reader macro, like in Common Lisp. Otherwise, once the stream has been converted into some tree-like structure, syntax is gone. It just so happens we can convert the tree back into syntax in a standard way (most of the time, at least).

This is what makes Lisp/Scheme different from C. Macros in C operate on streams of characters, and do string insertion and deletion. This isn't true with Lisp, which does node insertion/deletion/manipulation on a tree. In other words, Lisp makes changes to structure/semantics, not syntax.

> If you’ve ever wondered why Lisp weirdos are so inexplicably attached to their parentheses, this is what it’s all about. Parentheses make it unambiguous for the expander to understand what the arguments to a macro are, because it’s always clear where the arguments begin and end.

No, it's not that Lisp weirdos are attached to parentheses. They're attached to regularity. As said above, the expander doesn't give a single flying fsck about parentheses. An expander could expand DOTIMES[{x, 5}, SETQ[a, a+5]] just as well as it could (DOTIMES (X 5) (SETQ a (+ a 5)). In fact, Lisp started as this first syntax (to a degree), and it worked fine. See the book Anatomy of Lisp, which is written entirely using this syntax.

The field of lexical analysis and parsing is well developed. Lexers and parsers can amazingly be written in a way that things aren't ambiguities to the computer. Maybe to the human, but not the computer.

In conclusion, I do think homoiconicity is the point: that the language's representation as a data structure is accessible and transformable. The stream of characters used to represent this structure does not matter at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDLXPpooA18

It's interesting they cut out all the translations.

I also wondered whether it was done in fact via a live video link. If Israel found out about it, it wouldn't take them long to trace the position and assassinate Nasrallah with an air strike. It would be much more practical to just send him the questions and then watch the answers and nod approvingly...
This was the thing I was worried about. Both in terms of the cost in time, shipping, and materials. That being said, if people really want t-shirts we'll find another, better way to make that happen :D
Bryan Cantrill (formerly Sun, then worked for Oracle, now working elsewhere) talks about Oracle in his interesting talk here: http://smartos.org/2011/12/15/fork-yeah-the-rise-and-develop...

He compares Oracle to a lawnmower - if you stick your hand in a mower, it will cut your hand off.

Oracle is simple in the way that a mower is simple - a mower cuts what is put in front of the blade. Oracle wants money from whoever they can get it from.
Not sure how the phone selection is where you live at. But android is huge in the pre-pay market at where I live. Samsung has some extremely low end stuff that is so bizarre that you never read about on blogs, but they exist. There are also the less known chinese brands that are slowly building a brand by selling very low end android stuff as well. It's very easy to buy an unlocked android smartphone for less than $100, and customers looking for those usually are not looking for brand name in the first place.

Entering the pre-pay smartphone market wouldn't be a new strategy that no one came up with before. This market is already competitive and completely dominated by android.
There is nothing more dangerous for a person like Ellison than being surrounded by yes-men. When you are effectively shielded from reality, it's really hard to make informed decisions.
Not trying to be an ass, but to replicate HN you would need to be a startup incubator using your HN style site to help you screen applicants. Otherwise, it's just a forum. Feel free to make a prettier forum. But I doubt it will attract the right kind of people to genuinely improve on HN.

Best of luck though.
I haven't seen this mentioned yet, but Sun in the past had sued Microsoft due to Microsoft's own JVM implementation, which they asserted was not fully compatible (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machine). Microsoft eventually settled and removed its JVM. This case seems somewhat similar.
That's awesome :) Fantastic movie. Are you on twitter or facebook or have a blog?
Ah, Russia! Land of free speech, transparency, and the rule of law.
I'm already way ahead of the curve. I've started writing my scripts without semicolons and I'm getting 100% code compression using even the most rudimentary minifiers. Get with the times, already!
By scaring everybody away from the Java ecosystem, I believe they'll lose a lot more money on the long run.
Interesting that this came out of Microsoft Research. Perhaps Microsoft was getting really annoyed with overblown estimates of losses from compromised Microsoft products.

There are political and economic forces that benefit from fanning alarmism about cybercrime, just as there are companies like MS that incur losses from such alarmism. When there's so much uncertainty about what reality looks like, either side can cite figures that support their own agenda. Kudos to the researchers for bringing some cautious sanity and objectivity to the issue, instead of just running away in the other direction.
kickstarters are not the sole way people contribute to projects and communities. ibdknox has created some very popular (in the clojure community anyway) software (noir, korma etc) that a lot of people build on top of. Surely this should count for something.
DuckDuckGo qr code generated to show a duck
How have you trained your customers to NOT expect estimates? What's your model for billing and managing budget, strictly Time and Materials, or do you valuate the Planned Deliverables?

Many thanks for a thought-provoking, and wonderfully complete, post.
WebPutty open-sourced
If it was in fact pre-recorded, they did a good job splicing it together.
one of those times when continually clicking "refresh" is fun.
My understanding is that front running has been around as long as there have been market makers - and there have been market makers as long as there have been markets.
I was hoping it'd be open sourced. On the other hand, maybe Chris will do amazing things if he has the ability to work full time on light table.
This has nothing to do with Clojure, JRuby, or Jython at all to my knowledge.

To understand why: assume Clojure is just a software running on top of Oracle's JVM. Just like Apache Tomcat.
I really want to back this but $100 is pretty steep for beta access. Even $50 is a little pricey for a tool that I like the goals of, but find it unlikely that I'll use it for a commercial product anytime soon. Any chance you could move around the reward tiers?

Maybe I'm just spoiled from spending $15-$20 on Kickstarter games and getting beta access, but as long as Light Table looks like an awesome toy instead of something I can build commercial software with it's hard to justify dropping $100 on it. That said I'll probably throw in $50.
Matt, co-founder of Flippa here.

Given the huge size of fandalism, Phil would probably be better of hiring an investment banker or business broker to sell the it (not that it's his goal here)... Flippa's specialty is under $250K, once you start approaching 7-figures, the transaction gets more complex, the buyers get bigger, and it makes sense to have a professional involved.
I am considering contributing but I don't have a sense of how long my vision needs to be. Do you have any sense of when a working alpha would ship?
Maxis Showcases SimCity's New Water System
I think the real challenge for Google would be to make it easy for the user. I have no doubt they could build some awesome filtering logic in the back. But I'm not sure they could put a super easy, non-engineer style front on it. But I agree they should try. And who knows? maybe they are working on that and want to get it rock solid before they open the flood gate. Build the filters before everyone screams "we need filters"
I'm not sure if Carrot does, but with Solr you have to specify which fields to cluster on then restart the instance. The clustering functionality is a contrib library I believe.
Doing tshirts seems like a simple way to raise cash or reward people, until you've done tshirts for the first time. Making sure you have a quality product, handling inventory and fulfillment, if you've never managed physical products before, it can be overwhelming, and I've seen that bite people in the ass.

I pre-sold tshirts to fund a music news website about ten years ago. I only sold about 35 shirts, but given that I was in school and working two part time jobs in addition to keeping my site going as a hobby, I found even fulfilling just those 35 shirts to be way more work than I really wanted, and I haven't bothered selling shirts since.

Although after everything was mailed off, I did make enough to cover hosting for pretty decent amount of time.
So what I hear you saying is that Semicolon is webscale.
I don't think balance and passion are mutually exclusive. That would be conflating passion and obsession.
It is - look at the questions at the bottom.
You're going to need way more than that for all their subdomains, CDN, CDN's subdomains, etc. Not to mention having to keep it all up to date in case they roll out a new domain.

That said, I use the same technique. :)
What? Why not Apache 2.4? That's the current stable version.
So the product will be open source, but you need a license to download it? So its open source, but not "free". Are there any well known licenses that support this?

I take it that it also means that the license will not allow for you to copy / redistribute Light Table? Does it still really qualify as open source then?

Will they allow for contributors to the core of the product and if so, what rights do contributors need to sign away?

That said, I think its an awesome project!
A PM can often estimate delivery timetables by analyzing historical lead time. For example, if it normally takes 10 days for a 2-star card to move from Next Up to LaunchPad, then you can guess when it will get shipped. Pad it a little, and make sure you give yourself time to get it IN to the next up column, and you're good.
ahem

Will it be open source?

I'm a firm believer in open source software and open
source technologies. I can guarantee you that Light Table
will be built on top of the technologies that are freely
available to us today. As such, I believe it only fair
that the core of Light Table be open sourced once it is
launched, while some of the plugins may remained closed
source. At some level, this is an experiment in how open
source and business can mix - it will be educational for
us all.
how are you doing entity extraction?
Although a good little starting point, this just helps you break even when considering your advertising expense. Are there other expenses? Do you hope for any actual _profit_??
Why rely on jitter to fix bottlenecks? Why not sample the bottleneck and do an action based on feedback? e.g. update:

if (resource_busy)
retry when resource free

where retry is a random time based upon statistics of past usage. I don't like arbitrary random solutions when measurement will work much better.
Oh for sure, I was just curious about people and the platform. It's the only listed metric below a creators name, so if you didn't know who he was, it would be hard to verify. That being said, I've already donated to this.
Woaha, that's a see-to-believe it. From $800 to $2 000+ in the time it took me to skim a couple of HN comments.
A path exists from the Semicolon language to Robert Klein's aphorism that "a sigmoidoscopy is just a semicolonoscopy". Someone please do that.
Who's going to write 'Privilege 101' for HN?

touches nose

[don't make me do it, 'cause I'll do it if you make me.]
I'm confused. The web page didn't auto-start midi music and there were way less animated cartoon animal gifs than expected!

Anyway, good job for what it is, and kudos for releasing source!
(makes you do it)
Assuming no HFTs, maybe Alice could set min_price=9.9$, and still sell for $10.05 in the better scenario? It seems that HFT's kill alice's sell spread option, forcing her to sell at min_price?
I’d like to know what he plans to do with $200,000. Is he staffing up a company?
I wonder what would have happened if IBM won the bidding war for Sun instead of Oracle.
Looking at the shopping cart [0] it looks like august 2012 for earliest testing, october 2012 for pre-beta and december 2012 for betas. All estimated dates, naturally.

0: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/306316578/light-table/pl...
That's not a patent, it's an unreviewed patent application.
I might have overlooked it, but it doesn't seem to say which OS Light Table will run on?

I would back it up for Linux, for example, but a Windows version wouldn't be useful for me.
From the pledge section:

$50 gets you access in May 2013
$100 gets you access in December 2012
$200 gets you access in October 2012
$500 gets you access in August 2012
$1000+ gets you access in May
Sounds practical