skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hince my reference to good enough and rubber wall of Lisp. Lisp is not one thing. Its a collection of collections of things capable of being indefinitely morphed by itself. ANSI C is bad enough without those kinds of problems.

Incidentally I have written several efficient and effective parsers and compilers in both Pascal and ANSI C. I found them quite good enough. I have a hard time seeing Lisp as little more than a big brother to Forth. I see both of them as wonderful solutions to the wrong problems. At least to probelms I don't have nor want to solve.
Do what you love and figure out how to make money follow.
If you only focus on doing what you love then there's no guarantee money
will follow. However if you are able to connect with others who appreciate
what you love to do enough to sponsor your doing it, then there will be the
potential for money to follow. It is also necessary to balance time
between attending to the things that can generate this potential and the
things necessary to make that distibution channel sufficiently
efficient. Ignoring your channel just means your potential for money goes to waste
or ends up making someone else wealthy instead of you.
Hmm, the conditions Obama is putting on the banks seem to say the direction is ... nationalization. This is the correct decision. It is unfortunate that the US government doesn't already own all the banks that it ... uh, paid for.

I know there's a lot of resistance to nationalization. But think about it, "private enterprise" when it is large organizations operating with other (tax-paying) people's money and no constraints are going to be even less efficient that the big, bad bureaucratic government, which at least has a semblance of controls on it.
T-Mobile G2 by HTC spotted in wild: no QWERTY, coming May | Android Community
Title should read:

Death Cab Video Taken Down From Youtube, Causing Embedded Youtube Video on Death Cab's Site to be Taken Down as Well

But that's not as sexy or concise. The RIAA and most big labels are such close minded bureaucrats, I wouldn't have been surprised either way.
"Excel at what you do" is not passion. It is admirable to do the current job the best you can, but I think a discontent with the current job has fueled many entrepreneurs.
This also happens with wisdom; I had a teacher who said that the minute someone said he was wise, he stopped being wise. I don't think creativity or wisdom are like amplitudes in quantum mechanics, though; observing character traits does not destroy them. Rather, I think this is a reflection of the lake Wobegon effect: most everyone thinks he is at a higher percentile than he actually is. Most people think they are above average. The really capable people realize this and figure that they have to say they're in the bottom percentiles in order to fill in those gaps. So that's how you get B performers who think they are A performers, C performers who think they are B performers, and A performers who think they are F performers.

I don't try to be modest or arrogant. I prefer to try to be correct. If I'm good at something, I might miss out on opportunities if I think I'm bad at said thing. For example, I might take too much shit at work and not realize I can call the shots because they need me there.

I see no reason why a young man can't be wiser than an old man. Sure, an old man has lived longer, but the young man might have more experience if he's lived better and faced the truth more often. So I think I'm wiser than most people. Reality bears this out: I think there's going to be a housing bust, and then there's housing bust (I thought this was going to happen early 2006). I take Robert Schiller's word for it when he says this is going to be the worst depression since that Great one, and then it happens (early 2007). I could go on, but the point is, would I be better off by saying I'm a fool? I could have made a lot of money off these this crisis if I trusted my gut.

There are also things I know I suck at. I'm terrible at holding my tongue (4 percentile, I'm guessing). I ramble. I'm also really clumsy in a few kinds of social environments, particularly pregames.

If you have nagging doubts about your creativity, ignore them and look at your work. Is it creative? There's really no need to be bashful, at least in private.
Ask HN: Custom logging for web applications
I have an application (written in Django) that needs to log lots of data (visitor stats from a Flash app, a url is pinged whenever users do certain things). I've rolled by own logging system along with a library for extracting statistics from the logged data based on the map/reduce pattern. However, I'm having performance problems with my initial quick and dirty implementation (in the stats generation, not in the logging bit yet). This seems like a problem that must have been solved plenty of times before. What do people use for this sort of stuff?
More like it's an international price-fixing scam waiting to get slapped with an anti-trust lawsuit by the FCC under President Obama.

I'd be absolutely shocked if this continues until 2013.
Yeah, the conondrum of how to sum up the relevance of an article in a headline. I didn't mean to deceive, merely to give an edge to original titel.
> and real estate is especially disreputable because of that industry's exploitation of status-driven and simian emotions.

Then sales of art, clothing, jewelry, and pleasure vehicles must be beyond mention.

Thanks for the interesting perspective. As a peasant, I've always blamed the political class for the sins of "politically-skilled corporate bureaucrats".

Then again, I think that construction of a factory, house, or hotel is a higher calling than construction of a church.
In general I don't like public transit. But in many places you can get around without neither public transport nor your own car. Walking, bicycles, taxis, planes.
I don't know if nobody reads. Nobody reads modern books, perhaps.

It's tough to say something meaningful in a medium that's existed for centuries. You know? So much has already been done that now the medium is shrinking. The people who do remain are less likely to be as talented, because the really talented people have moved on to other things.

Television, for instance. The last 10 years has seen better TV shows than ever existed in the past. The best-written thing I've come across in the last two years was The Wire. I'd compare the quality of writing in that to anything up-to-and-including Shakespeare. And it did stuff that you couldn't have done in a novel. Or in a movie, for that matter.

Mind you, my all-time-favorite novel was published in 2006. And Mark Z Danielewski is still innovating within the form: his House of Leaves is a classic, and it was written just 8 years ago. But those writers are rarer. There's less to be done within the form of pure prose than there was even 40 years ago.
I think the vast majority of our society would function just fine if ~10% of the populace worked a 40 hour week. EX: When you go to fill up your tank you don't need anyone inside that store, a few vending machines for snacks and drinks would work just fine.

As a thought experiment labor costs go up 10fold which jobs stop happening and which ones become more automated. You could dramatically reduce the distance the average trucker drives by using trains. Small farms suck from a labor standpoint. There is little reason a person needs to make the coffee at Starbucks. Romba style machines can clean vacuum. Bathrooms can be designed and built to be automatically cleaned. etc.

IMO, low skilled human labor is still cheep, but a change in the cost of human labor would soon see a huge shift.
Understanding Lisp by looking at the source for Jscheme
Trying to learn lisp I finally found a way to make a mental model of how a lisp system works macros and all by looking at the source for Jscheme and this nice intro to it. There's so much talk about cons this and cons that, reading this language implementation just makes it so much simpler to get.
London is a tough city to live in. I've been here 10 years now, and whilst it's true that you can subsist on little money, the quality of life is low and the stress levels are high. I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone who cares about living standards (although it's most probably the only place in the UK to get any kind of funding, not that I'd know because I'm not working for a start up).
"Must have advanced knowledge of Web 3.0"
Where, out of curiosity, do you find short stories to read? Any sources you find particularly good?
Yeah, but Matt always tries to provoke argument. It's what's put him at the center of so many interesting debates.
Even if you are a mercenary type, and you're motivated entirely by money, how can you do better than starting a startup? Getting a job making $200K/year is hard; most entry-level investment bankers are smart and work ninety hours a week, and they still fell short of $200K even before the crash. And $200K/year is still much less than you'd expect to get out of a successful startup.
I think the cost of SMS messages are a large part of their value. You can send a message to any phone yet you don't see SMS spam.
As someone whose work life involves a lot of C# development I can honestly say it's a great little language that would get used much more if it's name wasn't tied to Microsoft. Beyond that there's no doubt the Mono project has done some impressive things.

That said, I wouldn't do this on a commercial project. Because when a bug does come up you just have too many layers to contend with. Is it a bug in my code, in the Unity Framework, in Mono, in the device or what? This is a particularly significant problem when dealing with Open Source projects with very little in the area of support mechanisms and Apple which seems to think far too much of itself to offer decent developer support.

So in the end it's a nifty proof of concept but I personally couldn't bring myself to trust it.
Absolutely agreed. Scoble's always written like Facebook is a tool for marketers. It's not. It was built for college kids. For real-life friends. It was designed to supplement your existing real-life network. And Facebook's got the right to deny you if you use it for anything else.
I agree with you on this. The fact that sending a message costs strictly more than 0 reduces noise of the communication channel. I think you can achieve the noise reduction with 1 or 2 cents per message, the rest is profit to telecom carriers.
Take advantage of the ubiquity of php4+ and write languages that compile TO php... Maybe I am crazy but it's working well for me thus far! I should be releasing a full r5 scheme implementation soon.
I found the weather even at its worst is bearable, but I grew up in Astoria on the coast. Winters are not very cold, snow is somewhat rare, but rain is a given. And besides there's so much to do there: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ4wAPL3saU ;^).
Is it really that natural to receive congrats from 99% of really unknown people?

[Internets, where are you taking us to? (And do we really want this?)]
I use PhotoBook (http://www.caffeinatedcocoa.com/photobook/index.html) to add photos I like into iPhoto. Now that '09 lets you sync automatically, it looks like perhaps that won't be needed either.
I'd be willing to accept free messaging in return for only allowing incoming messages from numbers saved in my phone (or previously sent to, so texting a shortcode for info wouldn't require adding it to the phonebook first).
I'd suggest you send all your custom stuff to syslog so that you can easily consolidate events however you like and then work with your admin to deploy whatever variant of syslog best fits your requirements. Personally I think nsyslog is good. Some others are listed here:

http://www.loganalysis.org/sections/syslog/syslog-replacemen...
Why would you need a macro? Surely a function will suffice.

Whether or not this is acceptable is a matter of taste I guess. I couldn't get on with CL either and was glad to find Clojure, which is now my language of choice.
Interesting to see how the US is a few years behind Europe (or at least Scandinavia) in the mobile space. Text messaging was all the rage here 5 or 6 years ago.
No. What that misses is that while such formats are no longer popular, we haven't lost knowledge of how to read them.

My computer can't play tapes. But if I want to read a tape, I know exactly how I would go about having a tape played.

Besides, once information becomes about the specific file type on a hard drive, no reader is necessary. An mp3 file can be read by any computer with an mp3 player.
"Compensation: no pay"

?
wasn't http://www.iqt.org/ one of Facebook's earliest investors?
I would pay to hear their definitions of Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0.

The marketers got em good.
I remember when Java first came out there were ads looking for "7 years Java experience"
Unless you work in the East Bay, Oakland is a bad place to live for a hacker, simply because the commute to other parts of the bay is very inconvenient. My advice for people who don't know the area is: don't live in the east bay unless you also work in the east bay.

Most hacker jobs are in the south bay, followed by the peninsula and the city. The commute from the east bay to the south bay is painful, much more so than from the city to the south bay.

If you work in the city, you can take BART, but the convenience of BART depends on how close you live to a station. Berkeley/Oakland residential areas are much more spread out than SF. It isn't unlikely that the station is a 30 minute walk from your house.

When I lived in the east bay and worked in SOMA I had to walk 30 minutes to BART, then BART for about 30 minutes, then another 20 minute walk on the SF side. Now I live in the city and work in the same area of SOMA and I can get there in 15 minutes on the train or a 40 minute walk. I don't even want to talk about when I lived in the east bay and had to drive to Cupertino. What a driving nightmare...

In summary, Oakland is NOT a great hacker city unless you can do your hacking on that side of the bay...
Quite true. I would argue that loving what one does is necessary to attain excellence. But it certainly is not sufficient.
Often the most difficult task, I would say.
You can send a message to any phone yet you don't see SMS spam.

I definitely get SMS spam. I think part of the profit model on SMS spam is that they are high-cost, opt-in messages (that you didn't sign up for). The senders are using a rebate style model, hoping you won't expend the effort of getting your carrier to remove the charges.

And then of course I get random, wrong number SMSs, which still cost me.
I miss the: "Being a social media expert is a pre".
So here's the problem as I see it. It's very easy to send SMS via email because most carriers provide an email gateway for their SMS services. However, people use SMS by phone number. The use-by-number paradigm is one that is hard to break, because that is the one thing the carriers won't open up. SMS is tucked into a small portion of the cell signal, which is why the character limit is around 180 characters.

It's easy to write a 3rd party solution for smart phones, say like an IM or twitter client. But how do you open access to the hundreds of millions of people with regular phones. I think if someone can figure that out, you have a business model
I'm another hacker in Philly. There seem to be a few of us... we should have a hacker news meetup here.
Twitter Posting IRC Bot Using Python and Twisted
Or if what you love isn't very lucrative, make lots of money by whatever means necessary (within reason) to allow you to do what you love later.

The problem with that is if you take a long time to make enough money to do that, you've just wasted all that time doing something you don't love.
It's been 5-10 years behind in terms of technology for years.
I simply could not believe the first time I went over, and people were talking about their pagers. (In the UK, pagers died out in the 80s).
They said that about records how long ago? And yet every generation, new bands see fit to release records of their stuff.
I hope SMS dies a swift, painful death. I have gmail access on my (non-iphone/android/blackberry/etc) phone. I just wish it had SMS style notification for new messages. Maybe a notification whitelist or something would be nice. How does blackberry handle this?
In what way is it a price fixing scam??? In the same way your electricity supply is a price fixing scam?

Please don't believe the idiotic articles claiming that sending an SMS costs the mobile companies nothing...
The subtext: Perks -> Lots of time for unsupervised web surfing ;)
And especially since people just learning the language aren't going to know how yet.
Text messaging was all the rage here 5 or 6 years ago.

What are they using now? Or have people simply stopped texting?
Care to summarize a bit to inform us, since you didn't give a link or provide any other information?
I think a transition model can be envisaged where the smartphone client or mobile website interacts with the legacy SMS system. As more smartphones access the dedicated client (maybe with an open push notification technology) or the mobile website, the mobile messaging platform will slowly substitute the original proprietary SMS model.
That's what happened to PayPal which started by piggy-backing on credit cards and now makes money on paypal-to-paypal money transfers.
If all the phone carriers get together and say, "Hey Bob -- if you keep the price of your SMS at 10c, I promise to keep the price of SMS at 10c. We agree to not compete on SMS pricing. That way we can make lots of moola on something that costs both of us nothing."
"previous marketing experience": make up a good enough definition and you've got the job.
Great concept, I hope it grows teeth.

I'm curious if they are going to allow general web applications to draw data continually.
Same thing with .NET. When I see these things I wonder, is it that recruiters really have no clue of what they are asking or are they doing it to "catch" the kind of people who like to bluff/lie on their resume?
We're only doing Web 4.0 development now. 3.0 was so --- outre.
As someone whose work life involves a lot of development of C# development tools, I can honestly say that these concerns apply to our team at Microsoft just as much as they apply to Mono. The only difference is that when someone asks us a question about some bugs or our direction or policies, we have to ignore it to appease the lawyers. This is a risk you run if you write any software at all, no matter the vendor.

EDIT: Although, if you are writing a commercial, big budget game, our game development support staff is incredible. So if you want that, then yeah, you'd have to use one of our official products. My comment was about if you didn't intend to go that big publisher route. I was talking mostly about small ISVs.
Web 1.0: Regular website

Web 2.0: Regular website with social functions

Web 3.0: Regular website with social functions and iPhone etc capability

Web 4.0: Virtual Reality

Web 5.0: Virtual Reality with iPhone capability
I too was a SAP consultant! Yeah it sux big time. I saved my money, got a biz started in my spare time and jumped ship when I had a nest egg and the beginnings of a business. I'm not a millionaire ... yet. But Much HAPPIER!

The economy is not looking good right now. So I suggest hanging in there and saving as much as you can. You might even get retrenched and get some severence money to top up your savings.

Of course, if you're happy with you big spender lifestyle, then that the Faustian Deal you've made.

God Bless!
Interestingly, I had never noticed the similarity of TDD and GTD -- David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology, where you basically break up abstract problems and needs into physical tasks that can be checked off a to-do list.

The question is, can you integrate RSpec with OmniFocus?
Some carriers open the ability to send an email to phonenumber@carrierNetwork. The trick is that it's difficult to tell which network a stranger has come from if you don't use the existing infrastructure that operators have developed (carrier-specific SMS gateways and inter-carrier SMS gateways).

Carriers have a very effective lock, but the OP is right -- this is something that is ripe for new solutions as smart-phones become more ubiquitous. This doesn't address the issue for millions of other subscribers that can only use phones (mostly Nokia) that can never have 3rd party apps installed.
the MYSQL escaping seems broken:

http://www.listable.org/mysql/random-stuff
that's why they raised it from 10 to 20 cents over the last few years
Excelling in your field gets noticed. It did when I was a d*mn good dishwasher. Had I chosen to, that could easily had been my ticket into a some kind of catering career. I prioritized college, though, so now I'm just a mediocre procrastinator :)
The Blackberry handles this with their own proprietary, parallel push infrastructure called BEZ (sp?) servers. This is a separate data network that RIM maintains, which has allowed them to be dependent only on the basic radio and IP connectivity that carriers provide.

Bottom-line: RIM takes care of managing the higher-level application logic (i.e. event triggers) and application data, and use wireless carriers as dumb bit pipes. It's an extremely capital intensive, but so far successful model and has remained one of their competitive edges in the wireless market.
A % is not really a good idea here

60% of France online means that the French online presence can grow to ~167% of what it is. 2% of India online means Indian presence on the internet can grow to ~5000%. That's a big difference.

So it really depends what you are looking for... and he has the raw numbers, also... As a matter of fact, I think he implied that he added the percentage column precisely to see how much room for growth there is.
"bug" or, if you prefer, there are "bugs" and there are "quirks". I can't say that I've ever found a full on bug in the .net framework but I have encountered several quirks that had us baffled but which were solved in 5 minutes with a quick call to Microsoft.

Bottom Line: Our contract with them cost us $2500 and no matter what the problem has been (be it code, OS, whatever) they've fixed it.

When we looked at Mono we found only one viable service vendor and that was Novell. Their contract was prohibitively expensive (I think it was like $11,000) and their support stopped at Mono. Meaning to use this solution you'd have to have their support, plus a linux vendor support contract, plus Unity support, etc ...
Wikipedia considers limiting user edits
I worked on "Web 3.0" for over one year, and I'm still not sure what it was all about ;-)
Some plans charge 1000 times as much per byte for text as for voice. I would say the difference between zero and non-zero is just noise.
This is where, for all its mistakes, perl5 has won big - the core language itself provides basically an OO construction kit, and so over the years CPAN has iterated repeatedly towards better object systems.

The latest, Moose, which is rapidly taking over the perl world, comes close to providing a superset of the features available in competing languages - and with the advent of the Devel::Declare syntax creation system we're able to add new keywords to support this, resulting in the MooseX::Declare system.

While people often complain that perl5 should have these things out of the box, I think it contributes to the longevity of the language to be able to provide them externally on a solid core - if somebody comes up with a better set of ideas, new code can switch to using those, and current code will be unaffected - as we're currently seeing with projects using Moose for new code without having to touch any of their existing classes.
That's collusion and it's illegal. They just watch each other. If verizon doesn't move, Sprint doesn't either. That's also the way airlines match prices.
Web marketing phrasology has broken the threshold and commenced 3.0!

When Web 2.0 companies just don't seem to cut it go Web 3.0!

Stellar!
The second part is actually "This is a knife!" Because he's holding it. Sorry.