skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The topic of libraries comes up frequently when Lisp is mentioned.

If a certain task or problem arises that isn't directly related to or
considered one of the main problems that you're trying to solve with
your program, you would consider the use of a library to accomplish
that task. If there is such a library available, go ahead and use
it. If there isn't, Lisp programmers can spend a short amount of time
implementing only what they need without generalizing the task.

This isn't quite re-inventing the wheel since you have a unique set of
constraints, and it's certainly not as onerous a task as writing a
generalized library. There are those (Edi Weitz for example) who do
tend to implement complete libraries, and the Lisp community is of
course grateful for that.

Libraries and frameworks can be useful, but they also have the effect
of levelling the playing field. Lisp empowers the programmer to
`discover' a natural solution to their problem in a unique way.
Zork in PHP
I'll back this up. There are two common types of people in college: the people who are there entirely for the social aspect, and the people who are there entirely to further their career. Much more uncommon is the student who's actually interested in learning for learning's sake: the student who should make up the majority of college studentry is the rarest.

I think that's the point that the blog is trying to make: college has become something of less value, even in the minds of the people who attend it. No longer is it some special thing, even though it should be a special thing. Now it's just an extra 4 or 6 years applied to the end of your existing 13 years in school. Some people apply to college just to go through the motions, and attend it in the same way, and I hate that. College has turned into another mandatory for most people.

I'm not saying there's no purpose to college - my first semester was all mandatory know-nothing classes, but this coming semester I'm in an advanced design course, an upper-level coding class, and I'm taking "intro to religion" for fun - but at the same time, there's a very important point being made with this blog, and that's "Only go to college if you really want to get something out of it." Otherwise, there are other more satisfying routes available.
Why would John August need a few grand from pg? That wouldn't fund anything in terms of making a TV program. For hackers it's worth more than a few grand because of connections and advice, but pg is nobody in Hollywood and his name attached would be worthless.
Govtrack founder launches Planet Open Government Open Source Hacking
I think there are a couple of relevant points that were not mentioned in the article:

1) The only reason those ads could sell is because of the brand that Fog Creek had already created. That brand requires an entire company to maintain.

2) The job board produced 1 million in revenue for Fog Creek. Since Fog Creek had existing revenues, a better way to quantify that is to say that revenue increased by X percent. So rather than say that an employee brought in an extra million, it's more accurate to say that he/she made an X percent increase in revenue.

With this logic, Here's a compensation idea - give the employee the same percentage increase that the incremental revenue represents. If you increase company revenue by 10%, you get a 10% raise.
I agree, why this footage and why now?

Unless it's mandatory to, verbally or with text, say what the footage shown is about there is no way to know what is going on. Context is important especially with highly emotional footage of the Israel/Gaza conflict, a good example is the video seen on Liveleak of a Hamas military parade where a truck carrying rockets exploded, it was said to be an attack by Israel but in fact was later found out to be an accident by Hamas.

Giving support to Creative Commons licensing is nice to see but not for spiteful reasons.
Or the build off the mistakes of earlier philosophers. It's a philosophical question itself whether philosophy always progresses, and therefore we can ignore the earliest philosophers. I am of the opinion, like one of the other commentators, that Thomas Aquinas is one of the greatest philosophers, and modern philosophy has become seriously fubar.
Official Google Blog: Make over your site using the wisdom of the crowd
I did something similar cost-saving wise at my first job, but the managers didn't have a clue because I had to go around them to get it done in the first place. I did get promoted, mostly because most everyone liked me. Why did they like me? The process improvements I made saved them hours a week.
I stopped using it because nearly everyone I knew switched to AIM which I also did eventually.

As common as IM is now, I recall being amazed at the concept of not having to sit on IRC all day to talk to my friends.

And just to brag, my number was 522621
Two things killed ICQ

1) Usability - when you do a product for the masses usability and simlicity matters a lot.

2) Marketing - when you're up against Microsoft and AOL you are in trouble unless you have an excellent product (see point 1)

There's a good lesson to be learnt here for entrepreneurs.
I would fund a show that shows only clips from Japanese game-shows in the US.
You know, for a lot of students nowadays "high school math" means calculus. And as far as I was aware that's still considered fairly advanced.
"tried harder to succeed on its merits than Microsoft has."

The flaw in that argument is that it presumes that Microsoft's success was based on Microsoft's success.

You're addressing what MS has done to maintain their dominant market position, not how they got there -- though in the beginning, MS got its start through smart business rather than technology or innovation.
I appreciate your rant and I agree with your points. I'm not saying a CS degree is the hardest thing to obtain--it certainly isn't trivial though. Please refrain from attacking an entire field because of a troll.
I love this paper, only thing that blows my mind is the two formula's he came up with to calculate correlation matrix and adjacency matrix...anyone know where I can begin to learn such things?
Ted Nelson's Xanadu is amazing in that its ideas predate the internet (timesharing systems where the "new thing" then). Unfortunately Nelson made it far too complicated and constraining for anyone to ever put to practical use[1]. In some ways I think Autodesk's funding may have hurt more than it helped because it allowed him to continue working in an environment free from the feedback of an actual user community.

Tim Berners-Lee's genius is that he took the good ideas of Xanadu and other systems that made sense in the context of the internet, released something early that his users could actually use and more often then not focused on addressing their actual concerns instead of his own imagined ones.

[1] - Xanadu Original 17 rules: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu#Original_17_rule...
Backed by Boston and Seattle VCs, Elemental Looks to Take Video by Storm
Thanks, RIAA. Instead of making it easier to buy your music when I hear it, you've chosen to make it more difficult for me to hear it at all.
Electrocution by definition is death from being shocked.

And yes, I recommended another Dell because why judge every Dell by your one experience? I've had plenty of dodgy Macbook experiences but I still recommend them.
Yeah! When I wrote the Ask HN, I totally forgot about it. But now that I remember, it hurts!
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Nortel files for bankruptcy protection — who’s next?
The iPhone Mind
That's an excellent idea - benefiting others may have made him feel better than some trivial reward for himself, and would have been something more lasting than any material object the company could have given him.
My thoughts exactly. Had you genuinely rewarded the guy without trying too hard to sink your claws in, he might very well have stayed.
No, but the experience of beautiful digitized text is. The fact that I can carry a library around, for instance. Searching. Looking up words. I have Ulysses digitized and on my Kindle and it's a thrill to really get into Joyce's language. Much easier than with the physical copy I own.
I agree for the most part, except for the statement "we know nothing." That phrase seriously annoys me, especially when it follows a good critique of non-logical "philosophy." How is it consistent to maintain "we know nothing" as a philosophical precept, unless it is a knowledge claim and therefore self contradictory?

Additionally, while philosophy is based on logic, logic is only half the picture. Logic is syntax processing, and as such does not provide the semantics of the statements being analyzed. So, there are really two aspects to philosohpy, syntax and semantics. Analytic philosophers focus on syntax and continental philosophers focus on semantics. This split is fairly recent relative to the history of philosophy, seems to have started around the time of nominalism, i.e. Ockham. Before then, you'd find both elements in philosophical texts. I.e. in Plato's dialogues there are both logical discussions and poetic myths.
The original article on Aptana: http://www.aptana.com/blog/rjohnson/activerecord_js_released...
Yeah, for sure. It's a worrying trend in my opinion, and it might be unavoidable unless a software solution is implemented. I don't want new HN members to be discouraged from contributing just because they made one mistake, and nothing would crush your morale faster than seeing all of your karma vanish just because you expressed an unpopular opinion.

Also, I really dislike the phrase "unpopular opinion". It's people's opinions! People can feel however they want. They should not be curb-stomped by the general populace just because they reject monogamy, or because they thought Hitler was an effective-but-misguided leader, or... et cetera.
Apple dismounts from high horse, approves 3rd Party Browsers
Of course, if your own datacenter is down you don't get a refund either. You might get some psychological satisfaction from firing some of your own IT people, but that's unlikely to help your business much.
I remember my number too... I once typed it in on an assignment instead of my student number. D'oh.
I tend to believe that "getting" philosophy is mostly a matter of liking it, and that's not something easily transmitted. Either you find questions like "what is morality? Could a computer have consciousness? Could I just be a brain in a vat being fed stimuli by evil scientists?" interesting, or you don't, and if you don't, I don't see how you could progress very far along the path to understanding philosophy.
> Mobile phones have a fantastic built in micropayment system - it gets added to your bill, and you probably don't even notice - there is no hurdle.

That's the innovation: When you make micropayments easy, you make it easy to sell candy.
As a German, I would not call it killed. It's very poplar here.

But I think most of my friends use things like Miranda or Gaim/Pidgin and not the bloat-client. Even the lesser tech-savy ones. They got it installed by the nerds ;)
Mine was 394868
What I learn : it's not because you're the first player in a field AND used widespead that your product will live forever.
used to?
I have a similar story. I was hired as an intern at a company that did marketing research (among other things) and, using genetic algorithms on a complex survey-design problem, managed to slash field costs by about $250k per month.

I had a middle manager who resented that I was getting time to work on the cool projects in a language he didn't understand (Java; I wasn't a real programmer yet). So he yanked me out of R&D and put me closer to the day-to-day grunt work.

Three months later I was looking for jobs elsewhere, and a month after that I was fired for interviewing. I got two weeks' severance... and they're still making $250k+ from my work.
So many people remember their ICQ number, it's frightening. Do they remember their phone number at that time?
There is nothing like it on a sunday morning. Specially if you have a nice view (which I do not have).
DABlog 10 things to be aware of in moving to Ruby 1.9
Excellent, and the file is already live on Google's CDN:

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.0/jquery.min...
Your syntax/semantics distinction between analytic and continental philosophy is not how I think most philosophers would characterize it.

Here's a nice writeup from the Philosophical Gourmet Report:

"Analytic" philosophy today names a style of doing philosophy, not a philosophical program or a set of substantive views. Analytic philosophers, crudely speaking, aim for argumentative clarity and precision; draw freely on the tools of logic; and often identify, professionally and intellectually, more closely with the sciences and mathematics, than with the humanities. (It is fair to say that "clarity" is, regrettably, becoming less and less a distinguishing feature of "analytic" philosophy.) The foundational figures of this tradition are philosophers like Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, the young Ludwig Wittgenstein and G.E. Moore; other canonical figures include Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Kripke, Rawls, Dummett, and Strawson.[1]

"Continental" philosophy, by contrast, demarcates a group of French and German philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries. The geographical label is misleading: Carnap, Frege, and Wittgenstein were all products of the European Continent, but are not "Continental" philosophers. The foundational figure of this tradition is Hegel; other canonical figures include the other post-Kantian German Idealists (e.g., Fichte, Schelling), Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Gadamer, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, and Foucault. Continental philosophy is sometimes distinguished by its style (more literary, less analytical, less reliance on formal logic), its concerns (more interested in actual political and cultural issues and, loosely speaking, the human situation and its "meaning"), and some of its substantive commitments (more self-conscious about the relation of philosophy to its historical situation).
Ask HN for help: please upvote this new member's comment back up to -2
I thought the numbers were one of the things that made it fun. Having a low ICQ number showed you were an early adopter, much like having a short URL or twitter name.
If that's what I think it is, it's more than GWT - it's trying to blend the boundary between client and server. I think it's a bad idea as outlined here:

http://www.erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2008-May/03...
The default audible keyboard...
Noah did a great job here, but I think Joel may be overstating the magnitude of his contribution.

I could start a blog and add a job postings section. No problem. But I would not be able to fill it with postings at $350 a pop. Is this because I don't have Noah's ideas and programming skills, or is it because I don't have a blog that reaches thousands and thousands of talented developers?
I work for a university in the US now. We get 2 weeks of vacation time, 5 days of personal time (sick + ???), and the university shuts down for almost 2 weeks at the end of each year. On the whole, it's far better than most employers I've had. However, being a parent with a child in daycare causes the problem that I have to burn through my personal days when she's sick so that I have nothing left over when I'm sick - so, it's off to work I go.
I don't know how to say this entirely politely: where do you get off?

The sheer hatred for this device staggers me. It's become a joke! People who've never used one call it ugly. They call it a waste. It's become a joke of the industry, and I have no clue why. It's selling well, isn't it? It's just selling to a niche audience of people who actually read things. So I guess the joke has to do with the implied functionality, like your wonderful joke implies.

I am an astute reader. I own a Kindle to go with my miniature library. I enjoy cuddling up with my Kindle just as much as I would with any other book. The screen is gorgeous. The device is gorgeous. I've never understood the mockery. No, it doesn't feel "high tech" and gleaming, it feels very down-to-earth. It feels like a book ought to feel.

Now, I'm the sort of person who likes Shakespeare. And it's much easier to have The Complete Shakespeare on a Kindle than it is to have it in a backpack. I also have The Complete Asimov, and I'm considering The Complete Sherlock Holmes.

The Kindle got me into reading P. G. Wodehouse for the first time, because his stuff was free on Gutenberg. I managed to find a complete archive of Diana Wynne Jones stories: they're for teens rather than adults, but they're still very well-written and they're childhood favorites and I like that I can find them and read them when I couldn't purchase half of them physically on Amazon.

When I got to a meet-up an hour early, I had my Kindle, and I could go and search for half a dozen novels and read excerpts from each one. It's like window shopping but you can do it anywhere.

Not to mention the free wireless Internet I get everywhere, the NowNow asking feature (which I've used several times to get quick feedback on projects), and the music player, which I've loaded with Bach, and which isn't a brilliant player but which makes for pleasant background music while I read. I value my Kindle more than I value my iPod.

So, you who would mock the Kindle, try planning out a 7-hour train ride when you read books often at the rate of one every 90 minutes. Try figuring out a better way to store 200 books in a dorm room without cluttering everything to hell. Try making a physical device that does as much, as unintrusively and as beautifully as the Kindle does. Then mock it. But I don't hear the Kindle users complaining, and isn't that the important thing? The fact that the people who actually use the Kindle enjoy their product a lot?
Thomas Harriot: A Telescopic Astronomer Before Galileo
10 lessons learned in 10 years(!) making one animated short film
Kleiner Perkins reaches out to new investors: "Unheard of"
?

Apparently I was the only one interested in PG's anti-spam strategy... Sorry for asking such a stupid question.
Advanced languages like Haskell will never reach Prime Time in the sense of the term because they're too challenging. Similar to the "Python Paradox," except that Python's easy to learn. There's a strange appeal (that we all still can relate to) that's led people to prefer simple junk like ColdFusion to better-designed, more useful languages over the years.
Of course he created value. The value of markets is to reduce the risk of individual transactions (or to amplify it, if you want to increase your risk and improve your gains).
This guy was taking a lot of risk while accumulating positions against the global market. He could lose all his investment if things were different. This allowed others players in the market to "hedge" their risk -- clearly, they didn't think this meltdown would happen.
If everyone that still remember their number would do a "forget password" and add their account to Pidjin (or whatever), maybe they could find long forgotten friends. The problem is that they will see the last cool name they gave to themselves (something like ---~~~ dARk eviL MaGICian ~~~---)
Yeah, it made it fun for the early adopters, and less fun for everyone else. That's not much of a strategy, considering how few early adopters there are.
Perhaps this would help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation

I have only just skimmed the paper so far and can't really comment more on it right now.

In case anyone else is interested, this is the link to the paper:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0901.1392v1
That actually sounds like a really fair deal. Part of the reward is the knowledge that Fog Creek really wants him to stay.

Every performance-based reward I've gotten from Yahoo has been in the form of a retention bonus. "You did really great on that project. Here's a pile of stocks/cash that you'll get in 12/18/24 months if you're still around."

A retention bonus provides a fair monetary award, while at the same time building the intrinsic motivation that comes from knowing your employer likes what you're doing. Rather than eroding the intrinsic motivation, a delayed extrinsic motivator can actually increase it.
The one thing not mentioned is that the million dollars didn't come just from the product. It came from the brand recognition Fog Creek has and the fact that it had the community. What were the things that attracted the community and enticed people to post the ads in the first place? That had the most value.

Edit: Whoops, just saw johnrob noticed this too.
Please help that guy out by upvoting him. He just joined the site, and his only crime is expressing an unpopular opinion -- NOT trolling. If I joined HN and was immediately sodomized like he was, I'd give up. Who's to say that this guy won't someday reach 2600 karma? He certainly has the potential to do that, just like everyone else. But not if we scare him off.
Yeah, fun for the million or so first users, not so much for the next 2 billion.

I specifically remember hating those numbers (because I always forgot mine) and being spitefully relieved to switch to MSN Messenger when that came out.
The author pretty much nails why we use paper and what will be needed to get rid of it.

To me, the main thing is instant-on. I want to be able to grab my reader and start jotting notes or reading a page with zero noticeable delay. Once I can do that, I'll stop buying packs of little cardboard-backed pads of paper.
I'm about as INTJ as they come, and the phrase that has saved my relationship is "Please let me have 2 minutes to think about this". My wife knows me well enough by now to know that I'm not trying to get out of anything, that I really need a moment to ponder the situation.
> Maybe if the Chicago tribune hadn't cut so much, they would have broken the Blagojevich story instead of the FBI?

The Trib did break the Blago story - the FBI wanted to keep it under wraps for a while because they didn't have all the goods. The Trib wanted to sell papers today.

The Trib has had decades to address Chicago corruption. They didn't do it when they had lots more resources, so it's silly to think that they'd do it now if they still had those resources.
He doesn't take into account the misguided financial policy of the Federal Reserve as well as deregulation measures.

Perhaps the SEC needs to act more like the FDA. Before new financial instruments are allowed to be sold to the public, they need to be vetted and understood.

Drugs are complex and drug makers would love to release their drugs early in order to make a profit. However, as a society, we realize that would be detrimental.

Regulation of financial instruments perhaps would stifle financial "innovation", however, it would hopefully help prevent the spread of toxic instruments as well.
I agree, arguably betting real money that the system was going to meltdown was the absolute best way to tell others he thought the system was fucked.

Its not like anyone would have listened to him if he played the whistle blower roll. The recent Madoff debacle is proof of that.