skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://futurehosting.com/

They're a US company but you can get a VPS in London through them. A basic VPS can be had for like $10/month if they have a sale on.
OK, I made answer checking a little less exactly after seeing what people were actually putting in for answers. I've also added the direct message response when you submit.

I'm open to other ideas if anyone else has any.
Ah. Letter to "the economist" in which the author demonstrates no knowledge whatsoever about the meaning of the term "terminal velocity" and refers to headless corpses as "dilapidated".

Now that's what I call a primary source! I'm so glad he wrote in to clear things up for everyone.
So, it would be ironic if, after the investigation, they determine that some guy who was Twittering during take off interfered with the planes systems and caused the crash.
Xandros Insecure At Heart
Ditto. And in the business world, like it or not, desktop applications are often still a factor. The promise of building Silverlight web pages in C# and being able to reuse them in a WPF desktop application is exciting.
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scheme and common lisp?
I don't mean to be pedantic, but the 'Java is slow' thing simply isn't true anymore. It certainly used to be slow back in the day, but it's actually pretty good these days.

From what I've heard, programmers at Google put it in the same ballpark as C++.

This brings me to another point.. the choice of programming language often has more to do with image and branding as opposed to actual technical merit.

That's why we keep hearing the same old mantras:

Java -> uncool and slow

C/C++ -> fast

PHP -> hack

Ruby -> cool but slow

Cobol -> for dinosaurs

.. even after the problems are fixed, the image remains. It's pretty hard to change people's perceptions.
If you could recommend only one book (on graphic design)
I am going to get through Warren Buffett's biography, The Snowball.
In the situations you described, there are a couple of ways to respond:

1) Do the work. It's easy, so you'll do it quickly and get a high grade. Then you can ask for more challenging work (or just do something more interesting).

2) Don't do the work. Instead, complain about the inanity of the class and the idiocy of the teacher. You'll get a bad grade, and a bad reputation, too.

There are times to recognize busywork for what it is and eliminate it (i.e. where you benefit other people by eliminating it), and times to just suck it up and do it (i.e. where you can't change it and/or don't benefit enough other people by trying). Part of the art of being successful is knowing how to discriminate between the two scenarios, and how to respond accordingly (i.e. diplomatically).

The problem with student complaints about high school curricula, is that they clearly land in category two. Your bad experience with 9th grade geometry doesn't mean that the learning 9th grade geometry is wrong -- it means that you had a bad 9th grad geometry teacher, or that you brushed him the wrong way, or some combination of the two. And in that situation, you can suck it up, and do the work you need to do to get an A, or you can complain and get a bad grade.

Life is full of these situations. Complaining about the unfairness of the situation is not the correct response.
What I've found is that you actually want restrictive when you're doing maintenance. You want to know as much as possible about the code you're changing. You want to know exactly what's in that instance variable.

When you're doing prototyping, you want to delay that decision as long as you can, so you are making the most informed decision possible. And nothing informs your decisions like the act of developing and getting feedback from users.

Optional static typing gives you the best of both worlds. But I don't know how you'd get the equivalent with Design By Contract/Unit Testing. Both of those feel a little unnatural to me. I'd rather just tinker, and not have to set up extra stuff before or after I code.
4 Stages Of Twitter Users
Actually, I did at one point diagram all of the states of X across time, so it was an array. (There was also iteration in a loop involved.) I think this only confused him even more, though.
Pictorial: Google Holiday Season Doodles Through Time
Creating user incentives
You can on OSX right now do:

$ sudo port install fsharp

And get it, but the power of F# comes in part from its integration with .NET; OCaml has been around on OSX for years.
Tom’s Twelve Laws of Life at Connecting With NLP
Because it has to complete with English which is already a world language(at least in the business world)
everyone will be cutting back...why?

firstly, the climate permits it. i assume now that any company holds a latent 10% rif in good times, just waiting for a bad market so it can lose the 10% to throw the market a bone

secondly, consumer/business software and the web are exiting the innovation phase and entering the cost phase. yeah this will get all the yc types in a tizzy, but its true. the consumer web has been "built" as far as 99% of users are concerned, and most of the major platforms have evolved to the stage where large headcounts are not needed. business software hasn't changed substantially in years. the winners have been picked and now that margins are shrinking, the way to a better top line is most easily achieved by moving the bottom line.

oh well the fun had to end at some point. between moore's law making any idiot a passable coder, oodles of great free and open code, and winner-take-all economics, my opinion is that coding won't be a desirable job within a decade...even in startup land it is about the gimmick more than the code these days
cool! i think this will do it!
You realize that at this point, the best candidate programming language for 100 year language is probably COBOL, followed after a good ways behind it by C.

What about Lisp? I don't believe it's gaining new programmers at a fast enough rate to be a sustainable community in the long term.
save two years off your life by taking the GED and attending community college for credit if your parents will let you. when your friends are graduating high school and becoming freshmen at universities, you'll be a transferring junior.
the lower division stuff at college is what high school courses should be.
It's certainly not the only reason, but the same syntax with different semantics could get very confusing.

I think the different syntaxes help you (or at least me) switch contexts and remember what language I'm using.
The best way is not to, I assure you.
The article failed to mention that Siemens' auditors, KPMG, were also implicated and that they are being dropped by Siemens.
FORTRAN too.

All the kids who might've gone into Lisp are going into Python instead and asking the legitimate question, what can Lisp do that this can't? There's a lot of hand-waving from the Lisp community about this and that, but a lack of concrete example. On the academic high ground, there's Haskell and OCaml - both communities are actively working on "batteries included" distributions to bring their languages to the masses. The Lisp community took too much for granted for too long, they have become overtaken by events on both sides. It's not that Lisp will ever "die"... It'll just become irrelevant by the next generation.
"even in startup land it is about the gimmick more than the code these days"

It was never about the code. It has always been about the idea. The code is just a way of expressing one's ideas. Some people are more expressive, some have better ideas - we need both to succeed. Your comment on moore's law making any idiot a passable coder seems to miss the point - we've increased the number of people who can reasonably express their idea.

And even the high-end coders are able to take advantage of amazing opportunities, particularly in parallel processing on platforms like AWS - solving problems and expressing their ideas in ways they had only dreamed of trying.

I can only imagine that those of us with ideas we hope to try out will continue to delight in moore's law, great free and open code, and yes, winner-take-all economics where we'll compete based on our ideas.
It seems to me like innovation is happening faster and faster.
Isn't scheme a subset of common lisp (at least loosely speaking)?
$700, 2br rooms to share (Female Only) (shared rooms/new york)
maybe the Web Green (aka "show me the money") will come
>firstly, the climate permits it. i assume now that any company holds a latent 10% rif in good times, just waiting for a bad market so it can lose the 10% to throw the market a bone

With you so far. Although they'd have done better to perhaps cut that fluff earlier on, I guess there were appearances of stability to be kept up.

> secondly, consumer/business software and the web are exiting the innovation phase and entering the cost phase.

Wait, really? Software companies have been exiting the innovative phase and entering the cost phase all along. That companies are doing this now does not indicate to me that there is no more innovating to be done. All that this implies is that it is less likely to be these companies doing that innovating.

> between moore's law making any idiot a passable coder, oodles of great free and open code, and winner-take-all economics, my opinion is that coding won't be a desirable job within a decade

Sorry if I'm wrong, but this seems more than a bit trollish. There is more to passable code than just raw performance. And all that free code just means that we don't have to solve those problems again, leaving the door open to solve different, and probably more difficult, problems. To say that coding won't be a desirable job within a decade is to imply there are really only a handful more problems to be solved before we are all done, or have only problems that can't be solved with the help of computers. This claim seems bogus.
USA to get first hydrokinetic power station
Fear Kills Startups, Dead
an idea for my startup and some courage to quit my job
A lot of java software implementations are still very very slow. Try restarting a tomcat servlet container (web server) for some java web project and then try the same with some apache or django dev server. One takes 10 seconds, the other is done in a blink in of an eye. Look at eclipse/netbeans vs. xcode, swing applications vs. wxwidgets applications and so on. Java very bad start up times still makes it effectively slow.
We have programming languages because people make them. The only way to have only 3 or 4 is to eradicate all but those and stop people from making more. However if we did that, I have a feeling we would now choose 1 or 2 that wouldn't exist if someone had done the same thing a decade ago.
> In some important cases, languages already have common syntax (such as mathematical operators

Except that they don't. Almost everyone agrees about the relative precedence and associativity of the two argument forms of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, but that's about it.

And then there are the folks who think that multiplication is denoted by a space. They call themselves mathematicians. Don't they know that space is concatenation or ignored?

> One reason is the inherent complexity of a parser for a full programming language.

For some full programming languages maybe. Other languages are so easy to parse that they added support for roman numerals, turing-complete read macros, and other things.

> It turns out that it's fairly easy to confuse a parser, because they're just not as good as human beings at correctly interpreting the "intent" of a statement.

It turns out that people aren't all that good either - they're subject to a 7+/-2 rule. Plus, very few people can reliably remember 10 levels of operator precedence.

> Most languages don't have a reason for being unless they introduce a bunch of unique constructs; and they're lucky if their own constructs can be parsed unambiguously.

Huh? Apart from some nastiness involving << and >> when C++ templates were introduced, how many programming languages have ambiguous parsings? (Yes, many parse things in ways that some humans find "unintuitive", but that's different.)
Korea's Twitter gets acquired by Naver
I'm reminded of an article which referenced Japanese fan-mangas. They're technically illegal in Japan, but the industry does very little to cut them down. When the author asked a lawyer in Japan why this was he was told there just weren't enough lawyers.

To that end, we should coerce the government into changing laws that structure insurance and tax systems to be simple enough to reduce the demand for finance and law...

...I just can't decide how one would go about changing the insurance system, or what would be done if the new system required fewer jobs.
There should be no such thing as a "launch day". You should start with one user before you wrote a line of code, then write a mockup and show it to the user. Keep adding code, features and users as you go.

Watch this for details: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2056...
Alan Kay, at his Turing award lecture:

A couple of years ago we started this project called Squeak,
which is simply not an attempt to give the world a free Smalltalk,
but an attempt to give the world a bootstrapping mechanism
for something much better than Smalltalk,
and when you fool around with Squeak,
please, please, think of it from that standpoint.
Think of how you can obsolete the damn thing
by using its own mechanisms for getting the next version of itself.

Ruby, if memory serves, started out as a tiny Scheme that got a whole lot of agglomerations from Perl (regexps &c) and Smalltalk (objects &c).
Remember that consulting is when you get paid by the hour, whereas software is where you get paid long after you have written the code. The former should never be the goal, only the means to reach the latter.
you.
hard to market something that is the same as everything else
"Browsers need a standard, natively supported graphics library sigh..."

High performance as well. It's pointless if it only runs smoothly on your high-end Macbook.
web 3.0 is already here...thanks to the iPhone and the Apple App Store.
Searching Through Free Classifieds
Number of newspapers generated lot of revenue for themselves through their classifieds section where people can find wanted-ads and advertisements. Since people did not have any other option they used newspaper classifieds to advertise their services and products because that is where customers turned to when they wanted something. Today that is not the case anymore, when people need something they turn to their computers with internet connection.
One possible benefit might be if you have well done banners and ads for the affiliate channels, it will get your logo and brand out on many websites. Maybe not always desirable ones but for the most part it could increase awareness in marketing as well as sales.
While you are busy writing this clueless bullshit how innovation is over how business opportunities are over, someone out there is doing their "me 2" startup you live to hate (e.g. socialmedian.com just got bought for 8 million) because you are unable to just put your money where your mouth is. Do all of us favor and spare us with your presence.
Teachers teaching well, making you realize the beauty and power of a converging series is what worked for me. If the teachers enjoys what they're teaching, it's infectious and makes you want to learn as well.
I have thought about this question a lot. You see, I am a transgender woman who was, as you can imagine, a very confused and scared young man. One thing I would tell him is that I am here for him; I will never leave him. And I understand why he is rejecting me, and I love him.
<br>
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When I started to live as a woman, I was able, for the first time in my life, to say that I love who I am, and ther person I was.
First of all congratulations and good luck..

Having read your article and responses here, I feel like this discussion resembles (opengl vs directx) || (c/c++ vs java) || (python vs perl) kind flame wars. And no, there is not a single way for enterpreneurship imho. There are at least two major ways, bootstrapping or having funded. Both have pros and cons. If you are clever and well prepared, you can be successfull either way or unseccessfull whatever you do. There is no recipe, you choose your own way according to your own circumstances and work it out..

good luck again..
Upvote for opening lines:

"The recession reached its hand into Silicon Valley's now lukewarm tub and yanked the plug. It's still draining out, and I wish it would go faster, because there are just too many fucking people in the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm talking about you, guy in your Prius taking the left hand turn on to Middlefield Road too slowly. Leave, now. And don't come back. Bonus points for wrapping your expression of environmental consciousness around a tree. Be one with nature."
Lisp is neat in that the core language has mechanisms for extension built in. Do you know if any of the other up and coming languages have this same feature or capability? Can any of the stack-based Forth-like languages? Smalltalk is probably the closest thing to Lisp in this respect, but it too has been overtaken by events.
Noticeably missing from this is Maroon, the Ultra High Level Programming Language

http://mattmaroon.com/?p=337

I guess I should have paid that guy on elance his $1,000 to code it up in C for me.
I think I can see how MapReduce could be argued to be a "game-changer" (although I'm not sure it's true), but why F#? If I understand correctly, it's basically OCaml on the CLR. So you get a Python-like brevity of code (and ease of programming? maybe it has better error messages than OCaml?} with C# performance and access to the CLR libraries. That sure sounds useful, but why is it a "game-changer"?
Erlang gets a lot of its syntax and implementation technology from Prolog, but it's true that the distinctive things about Erlang (massive shared-nothing concurrency, supervision trees, tuples, pattern-matching on binaries) have nothing in common with the distinctive things about Prolog (backtracking). They both have pattern-matching, but so do lots of other languages (even Python to a small extent).

I'm pretty sure Prolog is still being used, but it doesn't have the buzz of, say, Fortran or COBOL or Pascal.
Thinking back over my entire secondary education this is what I learned:

History: Very little stuck.

English: I guess I got a lot of practice writing. But at no point did we ever discuss useful things like how to write clearly and effectively. Instead we spent 5 years deconstructing literature, a process which consists of skimming over half the text and then making up flowery rubbish.

Geography: Simple physical geography. Weather, volcanoes etc

Science: Actually quite a lot. My science teachers seem to have done a fairly good job.

Maths: Nothing. Whilst I passed all my exams I didn't really understand anything and left school incapable of constructing simple proofs. I now have a masters in maths so its not like I didn't have the ability either, but most of my first year at university was spent correcting misconceptions I had gained at school.

Computing: After 7 years of school I knew roughly how a computer worked but still couldn't write a simple program.

Now that doesn't strike me as 7 years worth of education. Most of the counter-arguments on this page seem to come down to the necessity of learning things you don't want to learn. The problem is that I didn't. I, like most people, cannot be made to learn something by fear of examination. It has to be made interesting or useful otherwise I will memorise it, write it down in an exam and promptly forget it.

The problem with school education is that it's just not very efficient. I don't think that there's some grand conspiracy to keep the downtrodden masses in their place. It's just that our theories and methods of education are out of date and ineffective. Schools have worked more or less the same way since the 17th century.

Even in university I went to lectures where I spent 4 hours every morning for 6 days a week imitating a human photocopier. Mass lectures don't make sense in the modern age. It would be far more effective to just video the top lecturers and let the rest spend their time actually talking to the students, rather than at them.

I could rant as well about education being taken over by exams. How often at school did you practice working in groups, collaborating on joint essays, learning to function in a team? I would guess almost never. Because it makes it too difficult to grade an individuals contribution. Did you ever do original research or experiments? Were you given free rein to choose projects? Did you ever see an exam question that made you stop and think? It sometimes seems like the entire education system is built around the fear of cheating.

I know its easy to sit around and complain. Its certainly a popular thing to do in geek circles. But we have to recognise that there is a problem in order to fix it.

Progress is being made, slowly. The rise of open courseware means that educational materials are no longer being treated as commodities that universities have to protect and keep secret. Once its out in the open artificial selection will take hold and material will begin to improve. The best lecturers now have audiences of tens of thousands rather than just a single room.
Security surveillance systems
I really don't see the flying cars of the future powered by either FORTRAN or COBOL or even a descendent thereof - these are most likely not the hundred-year language, although they'll probably still be processing pay packets for Acme Corp another 100 years beyond that ;)

I see Py3k as proof positive that Guido et. al. intend to create something enduring, and I'm also reasonably excited about F# and the ML family in general. Clojure seems to have reinvigorated interest in Lisps also, but with the benefit of one of the larger available libraries. Should be an interesting decade in language development.
Since you can write down all abstract syntax trees using the same syntax, and you can convert most languages into an abstract syntax tree (all the popular ones), it would be easy enough to write down most languages using the same syntax.

The real question would be whether that AST syntax would be better than the language's own syntax. I'm guessing it would be harder to read, since a good syntax for an AST would describe only the semantics of the tree, making it harder to pick out the structure of the language itself.
All practical Lisps (including Schemes) already have those data structures. In fact, many of them are required even by R5RS.
Ask HN: Cocoa Touch & iPhone Dev Step by Step Tutorials
Could you guys point to some good iPhone programming resources ? I have literally Zero Mac Development experience. (However, I do have a C,C++ background)
Not a particularly cohesive or amusing rant.
To be fair, you didn't address any of his points.
Not that this helps the original poster, but Slicehost is pretty much pay-as-you-go as well now that they don't charge the first 3 months up front. They still charge a full month at a time, but if for example you create a slice for just a couple minutes, they automatically pro-rate it and refund the unused time.

Coupled with their API that lets you instantiate new slices just like EC2 instances, they're definitely the closest thing to EC2 I've seen going.
Meant to add that I wonder if there will be any plans, now that they're a part of Rackspace, to expand to multiple geographic locations...
Yes, but we're interested in how it differs from "web 2.0"
I can live with differences in language syntax since in many cases there are semantic reasons behind them. The thing that really gets on my nerves are minor differences in the representations of common data structures (lists, tables, dictionaries, etc).