skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Esperanto isn't too much of a failure; at least, it's the most successful a conlang has been -- a couple dozen have learned Elvish or Klingon; a couple hundred thousand have learned Esperanto.

And yes, there has been a long and somewhat-pointless philosophical struggle by people who take language as more important, and those who take technology as more important. I remember discussing this with a Swedish man who insisted that we thought of everything in language, and I was insisting instead that I think in thought, which does not necessarily map to language. What finally seemed to make him uncertain about his own hard-line position was to just say, "look, I sometimes have the experience that I don't know how to put my thoughts in words. And I at least appear to be monolingual. It sounds like you're saying that this should be literally impossible. My thoughts are always in English, how could I ever have problems encoding them into English?"

Stephen Pinker's works have indirectly shown me one useful thing about these philosophical discussions: it helps to have an idea of Gödel/Turing-completeness[1] in your philosophy of language. The problem with the radical biological innatists[2] and the radical linguistic relativists[3] is that it seems hard to describe how languages evolve under either account. If our languages and proto-languages are in some sense Gödel-complete and can describe anything which is describable, then linguistic evolution just consists of building new language constructs which can more efficiently describe the new technologies -- and these in turn help us in thinking about our new technologies and making even newer technologies. You can also get a good distance in understanding how children acquire language; it's fundamentally similar to the bootstrapping process which gets a computer from being offline to running a modern operating system; a small set of built-in intuitions can construct a model for the entire rest of any logical system.

[1] Gödel's completeness theorem, as distinct from his more famous incompleteness theorem, says that a couple basic laws of logic are all you ever need, and any other logical system can be emulated by just constructing new objects whenever the axioms of the basic system call for them.

[2] something like, "all the concepts which you find meaningful are somehow indirectly encoded in the genome, your words name just those concepts meaningful to you."

[3] something like, "if your language doesn't have a word for X, then you just cannot think about X, full stop."
Electronic trading network. I think the proper abbreviation is ETS.
> But there’s only one good, legitimate reason, and I think you know what it is: it’s to change the world.

I think this is going overboard. It's perfectly reasonable for someone to want to start his/her own company for less noble reasons than "changing the world." This advises people to not give it a shot at all. Would I like to change the world? Yes, I would. Do I reasonably expect that it will happen? No, I'm more realistic than that. While I'm still young and don't have much tying me down, though, I want to give it a shot. I'd much rather try, fail, and then have to go back to the workforce than wind up staying the workforce my whole life regretting not trying to start my own thing. I suppose you could make the argument that any successful company will have to add value to the world in some way, and adding value to the world changes it, but that isn't the way the statement reads.
Can it be used like the invisible scanner for Yahoo Messenger? (see who's invisible)
"A lot of people think that they want to be an entrepreneur because it’s a good way to make money. It just isn’t, that’s just wrong. Depending on how you count, 95% to 99% of companies fail."

Excuse me. It is a way to make money. That figure assumes the definition of entrepreneur is only startups as discussed in places like HN, Techcrunch etc.

Not only is the figure of 95% or 99% wrong with respect to "entrepreneurs" (unless of course you increase the time to, say, 100 years at which case it may be true across the board) but its like saying "don't apply to Harvard or YC because the chance...". It doesn't take into account any particular persons idea or qualifications to be a success.

But most importantly, the definition of being an entrepreneur also includes running a small restaurant or opening a physical warehouse and selling exercise equipment or starting a website to sell new and used office desks or a million other ideas that will never make it to HN or TC that can make you a good living.
From wikipedia: "Popularity is the quality of being well-liked or common, or having a high social status."

I doubt that Scala is less liked than COBOL, however, due to the age of COBOL, it is very likely that COBOL is more common. Don't really see the point of the article. Either it states obvious news or it kinda claims that of all programmers out there, most will choose COBOL over Scala (which I doubt heavily and there is no data to back that up - but that is probably the more interesting question on popularity).

Anyway, I did a bit more than a Hello World with COBOL in university. I know companies are searching like mad for COBOL programmers and you could earn a shitload of money... But I won't do that stuff for the rest of my life!
Seems unlikely to me: there are many nomadic tribes, but this linguistic particularity and these abilities in spatial orientation were only reported for this tribe (AFAIK).
Yes, worked great for me! crazy
I’ve heard it that implicit conversion is a specialization of copy construction. So you can still use explicit Foo (const Foo& other) if you wish to force all construction of Foos to use the new keyword and not to be passed by value. But I’m certainly willing to accept the suggestion that the two are distinct, in which case my understanding is that the explicit keyword blocks implicit conversion (as described in the story and in your example) and I understand that it also blocks implicit copy construction.
I don't use zsh because I don't spend a lot of my time at the shell or do anything complex with it when I am using it. Most of my time is spent in a text editor, and for the little amount of time I spend doing things on the shell, bash (or really, whatever the heck the default shell is) has worked fine for the basic tasks I need it for. I suppose it's possible that I'd like zsh more than bash even for what I'm doing now, but honestly, I don't even think about bash. It's just there, and it works enough of the time that I don't even have any complaints about it.
If you not see result after 20 sec. refresh page and request again.
Using the IP is for instance possible to locate, roughly, where the user is, that is already a big privacy concern...
The geek part of me wants to do this / see this done, the part of me that oversees a few popular content sites thinks there isn't a huge amount of benefit to it. Even for malicious purposes, Skype is a very poor option for spamming.

To creator: very impressive stuff, congrats.
> Given that you pay for the server in advance, a VPS is essentially zero risk for them. I am also surprised by this requirement.

I am still not fully convinced, but this post makes some good points.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3899929
Bitcoin ATM Software Opensourced
Thanks for the hint regarding the publication date! I have added it to the
page. Will think about a more prominent location later.

I have also thought about promoting SubC independently, but ran into the
same wall as with the promotion of the book. I have declared its existence
in comp.compilers and on reddit. That's what I have always done, but there
remains a nagging feeling that I could do more.

I have tried an ISBN and Amazon with other books, which resulted in
exactly zero sales, so I prefer to save that money.
The KISS Papers about asteroid mining:
http://www.kiss.caltech.edu/study/asteroid/20120307_IEEE_Pre...
http://www.kiss.caltech.edu/study/asteroid/asteroid_final_re...
http://www.kiss.caltech.edu/study/asteroid/20120314_ESA_ESTE...
Would love to know why your comment was being downvoted.
http://skype-open-source.blogspot.de/2012/04/skype-user-ip-a...
Yeah, I just entered a friend's skype name and it showed an IP in correct country and city
Wow.

Regarding constructed languages, I like Interlingua the best, but nobody knows it. It certainly appears to me to be both easy to learn and productive, but I'm very poor at it. I tried Esperanto a while back, but didn't like it.

Lojban, I think, is great fodder for science fiction. Unfortunately, the language was designed without any real interest in how the human brain processes language. It's full of wizzy tricks and neat stuff, and I like the idea of it, but it seems to resist being learned. When I was last looking into it ~2 years ago, there had essentially been one actual conversation in it, and there was reason to suspect the participants were talking past each other. I do think one could create an actual language from Lojban, but it would have to have a really restricted subset of the grammar.

Anyway, thanks for your insights. I often wish I had put the energy into human languages I put into programming languages.
Skype is P2P. No way to fix it, you can only hope to mitigate it.
It's likely noone will ever see this, but it looks like what they need is a PageRank equivalent. Klout is AltaVista, counting numbers of followers and retweets. What they need is to be Google, distinguishing the true power of their connections. Google's key insight was in realizing that a link from the NYT was better than a link from geocities. Klout could do something similar, building a weighted social graph with the value of a given node determined not only by the number (and directions) of its connections, but also by their importance.

Ron Conway is more important than some "social media expert", because of who takes notice when he talks. The social media expert may have 100k followers and 5k retweets for every inane tweet, but Conway's utterances filter through the Internet's data channels, finding their way to other important people, TC, Forbes, etc. It should be relatively straightforward to judge the impact a given person has, and so make their Klout score more significant.
> Prototypes are simply more complicated than classes.

Only if you try to make them act like classes.
Right. The term is “conversion constructor”, one that can be called with a single argument and is not declared “explicit”.
Tested and it's very good.

They also answer quickly and document pretty well the problem/reason.
Troll or motivation by saying "rest of you can't do what I did." Sounds like a troll.
tmux is similar to screen. I can keep opening hotkeys to open new windows to run commands in, but then I have to remember to go back to those windows to look at the results of those commands, etc.

It doesn't really help me "maximise my processor usage" I find.
Wow, time files like an arrow! It's good to hear that you liked my book
so much!
Surely these guys could get the same access to those government designs, and the market for what they want to sell is already entirely proven.
Please. Python is my favourite language, and has hardly any of the silliness of js. In python classes are still classes, methods are still methods, constructors do look like methods but are clearly a special method. Calling something from the superclass looks slightly odd, but only slightly. People know better than to monkey with object internals unless they have a good reason, in a way that doesn't seem to happen in javascript - I suspect because many perfectly sensible things in javascript look like monkeying around with object internals (foo.prototype.x = ...). Python is dynamically typed, but it gets away with it because its types are strict; if you think a is an int but it's actually a string, you'll catch it when you try and do a + 5. And even given that, python has added (weak, optional, but still there and standardized) type annotations. Code completion works, I don't know how but it does (maybe this could be done with javascript too). Modules are standard and heavily used. The language has a standard and multiple compatible implementations.

Thought: if "prototypal inheritance" really is more powerful/useful/etc., why don't we see efforts to implement it in languages with traditional classes? I've seen dozens of attempts at implementing "traditional" inheritance in javascript, but none goingin the other direction.
Anybody using this? How does it compare to others (e.g. Backbone?)
Hanging Baskets for Home and Garden Decor
Are there really no JavaScript-capable IDEs out there that support code completion, jump to definition, re-factoring, etc? I don't see anything in the language that would preclude such features.
Ah, that makes sense. Though technically you don't have to use the new keyword unless you want a heap allocated instance, something like

HandleTheFoo(Foo(5));

or even

HandleTheFoo(Foo(otherFoo));

is perfectly cromulent with the constructor being marked explicit. But that is just me engaging in terminological quibbling, I get what you meant/said in spirit and don't disagree that people asking questions they don't have a deep understanding of themselves can only lead to fail.
I might have to try it out - it looks more refined than Herzog was :)
Don't remember. I know it wasn't Michael Bolton because he is banned by the Geneva convention
Do you feel the same way about learning to speak foreign languages and play musical instruments? Is it obnoxious for a person to teach introductory French night classes, when fluency will take years and may never be possible for the students given their other commitments? What if it is not even likely that they will ever have French-language conversations "of value"? Does the very act of proposing learning this new skill insult French speakers everywhere?

I keep encountering this attitude among programmers, that the idea of "learning" is something that is the completion of a journey of worthiness. It's extremely disappointing.
Here [1] is an interesting paper regarding P2P networks and privacy --- "Exploiting P2P Communications to Invade Users’ Privacy"

[1] http://cis.poly.edu/~ross/papers/skypeIMC2011.pdf
I actually would definitely let JavaScript land my plane, assuming it had undergone substantial code review, had exceptional test coverage, and was interfacing with a reliable and sane API (I would definitely not let the DOM land my plane). In other words, under the same conditions as I would want for any other language.
Before you write a patch, write an email
Global Accessibility Awareness Day is May 9
We are launching the first ever Global Accessibility Awareness Day on May 9th.

The idea behind it is to have people who surf the web with assistive devices, show developers and UX/UI people what it is like to navigate the web for them.

You have to understand that there is a problem before you can fix it.

Besides changing the world, an added benefit is that your SEO is likely to be considerably improved.
Thanks, got mine. It said "handle taken" in red text briefly before I signed up, but I ended up with the handle that I wanted.
I've been hearing this argument a lot lately. Are you suggesting that if I wanted to learn to code it would take me decades to be able to build anything of value? To me learning to code is just like learning any other skill. Sure you wont be good at it the first few months you start but that is what practice is for. I don't see why in a year or two you wouldn't be able to build something of value. If it really took 10 years to be able to build anything useful I doubt there would be that many coders. I can't really think of any skill that takes 10 years to become good at.
Thanks! “Given enough eyeballs, all essay problems are shallow."
How about instead of relying on shady 'hat tricks' (no matter the shade of color), you instead refer to Google's documentation and follow their guidelines?

Complaining won't help you. Another idea: make your own search engine and quit bothering people.
> Not only is the figure of 95% or 99% wrong with respect to "entrepreneurs"

I believe he's quoting numbers from Shikhar Ghosh at HBS. Here's one article that google brought up with a little more detail about how "failure" is defined:

The statistics are disheartening no matter how an entrepreneur defines failure. If failure means liquidating all assets, with investors losing most or all the money they put into the company, then the failure rate for start-ups is 30 to 40 percent, according to Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School who has held top executive positions at some eight technology-based start-ups. If failure refers to failing to see the projected return on investment, then the failure rate is 70 to 80 percent. And if failure is defined as declaring a projection and then falling short of meeting it, then the failure rate is a whopping 90 to 95 percent.

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6591.html
If they have a revolutionary technology and they can really show that these billions will provide the most competitive way of Space travel. There are a dozen companies and well funded government agencies who have the money and could provide most of the infrastructure they need.

Why is nobody interested?
If there are big reservations, why do they start with satellite launches? Why not start by making more powerful engines than Rolls Royce, and sell these to all the candidates who are interested.

I have a concept for a better Operating System, i need a big chunk of OS sales. I need Billions to have something comparable to Microsoft. Btw it's a British operating system, the government should give me the money.
7kb minified? For star ratings?
New social network links ex-terrorists and victims
The title is incomplete, on his lectures page it is titled "the trouble with javascript (and why it's worth it)"

http://www.moock.org/lectures/
Thanks for the kind words. And the reminder about stack variables!!!

I wasn’t trying to suggest that Ted didn’t have deep knowledge of C++, as we can see his fictional knowledge is far better than my distant memories. I was trying to suggest that he was engaging in copy-and-paste interviewing, and that it’s a bad idea for all of the same reasons copy-and-paste coding is a bad idea :-)
Exactly. I don't know why I've been hearing this so much lately. I've been researching about learning to use 3D software (3dsmax) and I get the same responses that I hear about learning to code: "oh it is very difficult and it will takes at least 5-10 years to be able to build anything of quality" Personally, I think if it takes you 10 years to become decent at anything, then you are doing it wrong.
To avoid confusion, blizzard recently added something called EPM (effective actions per minute). Those are the one who counts. APM can be spammed or increased a lot by, for example, selecting all the larva in all your hatcheries and making units pressing one key. Pro players have a constant ~200 APM, not only for those moments.
I agree with the others: you'll be fine. And if not, feel free to apply to our company :-)
"I think you know what it is: it’s to change the world"

This is such hogwash and brainwashing. People have to earn money and make a living. Nothing wrong with that at all. And if you want to change the world you have a better chance after earning a load of money.

There are people who have gone into medicine to make money (and not better the world and save lives) and are great physicians and provide a service. And they live in big houses have expensive things and enjoy themselves. That's fine. Nothing to apologize about. Same with entrepreneurship or any pursuit (education).
The Arabic in the header image is backwards, and the letters aren't connected (they should be).

I'm guessing Photoshop was used to make the image - PS doesn't have Arabic support unless you buy the Middle Eastern edition, which I consider a massive oversight.

It should look like this:
http://www.muhammadspeaks.com/essalamoualeikoum-peacebeuntoy...
To everyone who suggested a blog: thank you! However, this is not really
something I am into. I tried it, but found it rather exhausting, so you could
see in my articles that I was not having fun. To be honest, that entire blog
and forum culture is rather confusing to me.

I would rather pay some money for marketing than doing it myself, but my
budget is limited, I have no idea where to start, and I do not know if it
makes sense at all. What do you think? What about reddit ad campaigns,
for instance?
Don't forget that "hosted in Germany" is a quality mark with which you can advertise. Especially International Customers don't like the idea of their data being stored in a country where the Patriot Act is a present reality.
One of the more interesting asides here is PGs idea that our society is starting to reflect a power-law distribution. Not sure what he was thinking about specifically, but it certainly seems to be true in terms of wealth these days.

How does a society deal with that for the long-term?
Personally, I'd kill to be able to write this badly. Not a human you understand, but something. Maybe a bush-fly.
Nice post. I tell engineers itching for promotion a similar story. Once you are demonstrating you can be promoted you have to ask do you want to be. The standards of evaluating your work change between code monkey and senior code monkey.

As it is with startups, as you grow the expectations of what you can do also go up. So doing just as well as before when you heard feedback like "cool, innovative" becomes "is that all they do?" as Scott Mcnealy told promoted folks at Sun, "one step up, one step closer to the door."
Oh, I am so burned out from that word. Everybody wants a piece of the community and tries to be authentic by adopting its lingo. But it feels so goddamned forced.
I think it would get burned up on reentry.
> As it comes from a Scheme background, Guile provides
> the immutable data types we need.

Scheme does not provide any immutable data types beyond numbers or symbols, either. Procedures like `set-car!`, `vector-set!`, and `string-set!` all modify their operands. In fact, in R5RS, there's no real way to introduce truly disjoint types (you can, however, simulate them as in SRFI-9 which is being incorporated in R7RS), so it'll be a little difficult to even introduce new types let alone interoperable new types.

> One of the Summer of Code projects for this year is
> to allow for pluggable backends in the ClojureScript
> compiler, with Lua as a proof of concept.

Compound data types in Lua are similarly mutable (perhaps even more so because mutation of tables is acceptable practice in Lua). There will be difficulties targeting ClojureScript to Lua, too.

> Of course, with a compiler that targets Emacs Lisp,
> you can work around this by implementing your own
> immutable types. But this makes any form of interop
> much more cumbersome... you have to choose between
> getting equality right and seamless interop.

It's just a fact of life that when introducing a radically different paradigm to any language platform, interop is going to have seams.

[EDIT - formatting]