skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe this should be a separate 'Ask HN', but...

Previously over the last 6 years I've coded in PERL, PHP, JAVA, and C#.

I'm currently 'retraining' myself over to Python for scripting and web programming (django).

I plan to stick with Java and C# for the time (our shop is about 50/50 split over SOA boundaries). And I want to keep fresh in these as my bread winner languages until I get out on my own. (Not to mention with the advent of Jython/IronPython, and Clojure it might not be bad to really dig some heels into the JVM/CLR idea.)

BUT, after I finishing working through AIAMA in Python. I want to get to work on picking up a lisp dialect and work through SICP. So I was curious, what would be a better angle of attack: Scheme, CL, or Clojure. I'm drawn to the idea of Scheme as it's been painted as a simple language to explore 'deep CS' concepts. But, Clojure sticks with the JVM/CLR strategry.

Would I be missing out if I didn't start with CL? (it sounds like the Latin of programming languages)

Are Lisp dialects (at least those mentioned above) more similar than different; or, How difficult is it to switch dialects?

Is Clojure specifically a bad choice for working through SICP?
My real-time operating system
For me, it's a combination of these things:

* word of mouth/referrals from happy clients

* people finding my site online, which is so horribly outdated that I've had people ask if I'm still in business, yet people still hire me through it (I am updating it in the next 2-3 months, but I'm kind of scared I won't be able to handle the increase in workload)

* networking

* running an open source project

I've been incredibly lucky though, I never thought to ask for referrals since I was young and thought that was a no-no or something, but they came in anyway (which is a good sign :).

I also haven't really had time to do much online promotion, but having an open source project to show quality of work and to drive people to use my project and (just often enough) my services probably helps make up for my lack of online promo efforts.

As for networking, I never really tried to sell, I just go out and meet people. I often forget to bring cards or to even mention what I do (even though I do talk too much ;). I heard someone recently explain that networking isn't about marketing directly, but rather about getting your name out there and just being a real human being. The network of your network are who you'll sell to because the people who think you're alright will refer you naturally, or something like that.

The above has kept me more than busy for years now, and since I'm also working on a startup I've had to limit what projects I can take on since otherwise I'd have no time for my own...
If the maximum GC time is less than the minimum response time, nothing.
If not, the system is non-compliant and can fail.
Pick ruby if: you want to program on the web.

I prefer python as a language, but rails has two things no other web-framework has, IMHO - A culture of TDD (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=445627), and the easiest way to do simple AJAX out of the box with rjs (http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/Protot...) Just not worrying about string escaping is huge.
Basic SEO Information | SEO Definitions
Today every Business is mainly dependent on Internet marketing, everyone thinks to improve their website ranking to top this competitive world. This is possible only with SEO. Here are some of the basic things every internet marketer needs to know..
Have you never created something before and then later thought of something to add?
I wrote a toy operating system for school that I recently(ish) released to the world. It comes with source code and design documents so I thought it might be interesting for people to poke around in.
The downmodded poster is civilly proposing that we essentially outlaw speculative public investments — those in companies that don't yet have significant revenue. Under the policy suggested (price to yearly revenue of no more than 8×), the Industrial Revolution would not have happened, nor would the semiconductor revolution or the software industry. Furthermore, their policy would periodically prohibit trading in any companies that had large revenue volatility — except at fire-sale prices.

You can make an argument that these are desirable social aims, or at least they are drawbacks that are worth the costs, but the poster has not attempted to make such a case. Consequently others assume that they don't know what they're talking about, or that they're deliberately proposing a dumb idea in order to get reactions ("trolling").
You mean Mb/s ;)
he's self-serving.
Most submissions are probably good but I guess only a small percentage of users click the new link, and then they can only read a small percentage of submissions and up vote only an even smaller percentage of those. It would be easy for a great submission to fall through the cracks.
And what logic and evidence exactly are you referring to?
Does news.YC use hardlinks or virtual links in its HTML? If it's virtual links, I bet enough of us would be happy to point a domain at news.yc to throw off websense and the like.
Love it or hate it, Javascript:

* Is the language having the most important performance gains lately.

* Growing support from both corporate (Yahoo, Apple, Google) and free software (Mozilla) camps.

* Gains market with HTML 5 (just the canvas element alone makes a huge difference for JS based software.)

* Better frameworks for both UI and client-server software.

It's funny how things turn.
I wrote a C++ class (compatible with STL's vector class), and it had an internal reference counter. If the counter went to 0, it would de-allocate the memory and shut the vector down. It works pretty well, and avoids the need for a garbage collector.

It uses constructors and destructors to achieve this.
I'd friend you to find out if it wasn't against Facebook etiquette (is it? I think it is).
Huh! I didn't know that. I always assumed its focus on college would have kept it much more local.
I'm well known for jumping about a foot in the air when tapped on the shoulder. I despise workspaces where people can walk in behind me. (Hello cubicle!) When I'm in the flow though...

Aggh, I'm getting paranoid just thinking about someone walking in behind me now. Working when nobody else is around and no phones can ring is the best kind of work.
In the case of dangling pointers, garbage collection just converts a potential heap corruption bug into a probable memory leak instead. Not really an obvious win. At least in C you have to be conscious of memory management in order to successfully write programs that don't crash.
From about 8AM to 11PM with meal breaks on the Empire Builder between Chicago and Seattle. Unfortunately, that's only four days a year for me. The lack of Internet is both a curse and a blessing. I can only do certain types of work without the Internet.

Normally, I work in the afternoon in my home office with no one around.
Awesome move by Amazon.

Make themselves look better in the consumer's eyes, but us business-savvy folk know just how smart this is.

Finding out what people really want - that they don't sell, or how much they should be charging for items compared to other retailers.
Have you never seen a feature implemented that was (a) kind of obvious, and (b) a long time coming?

I can appreciate that not everyone thinks this was an obvious idea. I'd appreciate it even more if you can respect that I think it was fairly obvious. Thanks.
What about circular references?
You might be able to use twitter as your sms bridge. Also, I don't think carriers change to email out sms. Most carriers let you send an sms by emailing: http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/939/sms_email_cingular_nextel...
But, it is obviously self-explanatory.
What do you mean final post???
The "scripting" category with Perl, Python, and Ruby.
<enter> works now btw :D
Ask HN: What do you want to be able to customize?
In the future I plan to let people put code in their profiles to customize various aspects of HN for themselves. What would you like to be able to customize?

(Note: This may not happen especially soon, and at first the options will be very limited.)
craigslist, confidence, and flexibility
Extremely basic article, written in poor English, fails to explain the real reasons GC isn't used in the places where it isn't used, full of vague pronouncements ("it makes execution flow very un-predictable and hence GC becomes almost mandatory").

And it misses the big advantages of garbage collection: by allowing you to handle arbitrary-sized data structures as easily as if they were integers, it makes your programs easier to understand — not just easier to read!

Not worth reading.
He could double them again if he stopped asking for superfluous and lengthy information such as an address just to receive a quote...
* Ranking algorithm

* Following users' submissions/comments

* Filtering submissions

* Ignoring users' submissions/comments
The first link points to a comment about being productive while riding Caltrain...
http://www.appvee.com/t/wikime
http://www.148apps.com/reviews/wikime/

This is an iphone app that may have some similar features you are talking about.
Clojure is what you'll want to be using if you ever start doing "real programming" in a useful, expressive Lisp. Don't start with it, though.

In the following order:

1) Learn Scheme and get through SICP. Wind up with
enough of an appreciation of Scheme that you could
write real programs in it, given enough patience.
2) Attempt to learn Common Lisp.
3) Become frustrated and give up on Common Lisp.
4) Learn Clojure instead, and become overjoyed at the
real work you can get done.

I'm mostly joking about steps 2 and 3. They're based on my own experience with CL (and Elisp) and might not apply to you. Going from Scheme to Clojure will be a bit of a shock, though, because the former is absolutely as sparse as possible with lexical punctuation, and the latter is totally littered with it (particularly stuff that's borrowed from Perl and Ruby). If you've written enough Perl, though, you might not care.

By the way: Scheme is Latin, and CL is Ancient Greek. ;)
virtual community legend?
Old news, no?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=434523
Agreed with the first - to some degree. But I can too easily envision a company spending millions on some technology and never benefitting from it before it's undercut by a swarm of small companies.
Even at current exchange rates, that's a lot of money.
Luxury safaris in Botswana 
If you are looking for something a little different this site features some great safari itineraries in both luxury tents and lodges but also offers beach stays in Kenya, Mozambique and Zanzibar. Much of the beach accommodation is in unusual tree houses and beach huts.
It's not really the infrastructure they're worried about, it's their users' trust. Can you imagine the hell there would be if some disgruntled Google employee ran off with the business strategy, clickthrough data, and credit card numbers of every Adwords customer?
...in many parts of the world you've got to factor bribes into your financials...

In most parts, and not just to do business.
But can the peripheral device read data from it's mediocre SD card at anywhere near that rate?
What about a non-profit which works like a VC? Plug:

http://www.acumenfund.org/

(only "like a VC" by the same loose metaphor)
A big reason my site got this nice writeup is because of the "review my stuff" posts here: http://www.louisgray.com/live/2009/01/our-doings-you-upload-...

Can you believe the site they describe is the same one people tore apart here two years ago?
Feel this groove: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTBDsGzm1IU

My gf sent it to me a while back. It's a Swollen Members song called "Deep End" talking about rappers who like to work at night cuz "that's when the tracks come out right..."

Good song...
The service is Search & RSS aggregation across multiple platforms (i.e. google, blogsearch & twitter). Once these are aggregated the tool also allows you to share a link, subscribe via RSS or email and embed a widget on your website.

The problem that it solves is "searching a term or topic across multiple sites is difficult and time consuming, and there's no easy way for me to aggregate and share this"

Your present tools aren't good enough because they don't aggregate search (e.g. google shows 1 list of search results across all sites) and this makes it time consuming to do the kind of web, blog and social search needed today. They also don't allow you to easily subscribe, share and widgetize up-to-date search results.

We're working on the homepage copy to make this clearer to new users, and this might include a demo video.

Any more feedback on this is much appreciated :-)
* Spacing between items. Vertical screen real estate is important.

* Show up and down votes. Provides information on contentious comments.

* Ability to mix brand-new and front-page items on the same page. For better scanning of new content.

* With the ability to show up and down votes comes the ability to quantify the contentiousness of entire threads. Show us the aggregate "variability" of voting in the title of a thread.

* Get people to vote more.

* Let us develop our own ranking metrics.

* More stories per page.
Sony has lost what made it special
This is a really really good site. For many reasons, first, it's works very well for FREE. I use it all the time.

The way it work is, you post your link and then remote browsers get the url and shortly thereafter, they take a full length screen shot of your web page.

Paying gets priority placement, but even with sites that require javascript, if the page has JS in the onload, then that will run before the screen grab if there's enough time.
I saw a ~7x jump in online enquiries when I added a simple contact form to the bottom of every single page of the e-commerce store I've been building. We went from about 2-3 online enquiries per week to 2-3 per day.

I actually tried to use Wufoo because I like their back end and had heard great things, but for my UI I need to precisely control the form code on my site, and Wufoo insists on embedding an iFrame (you can't use your own arbitrary form code to submit to their servers). So, I handle the submission with my own code.
Their ocr engine and ability to search text in images is also pretty impressive
I want feeds and an API in s-expression format.
Looks like fun! What kind of drivers does it have? And what license?
I was at one point #2 in karma score and have never been able to downmod submissions.

There's a karma threshold for downmodding comments.
Their plan of getting users to translate their site worked like gangbusters. They had first mover advantage in much of the world.

Also, I just don't think MySpace's anything-goes design (aesthetically and functionally) works anywhere else in the world.
It's also illegal for a US, Canadian or European company to offer bribes to government officials abroad.

A recent crackdown cost Siemens $1.6 billion, as bribes were apart of their standard system of doing business. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/business/worldbusiness/21s...
That's exactly how I discovered the über-early cycle... I stayed up later and later, one day 8am arrived and I wasn't even slightly tired. I knew I couldn't sustain that sleep cycle (waking at 4pm feels grim) so I pushed my sleep cycle forward, living 26-hour days.

I'm drifting forward (woke up at 7am today), I may be cursed with an inability to sustain a healthy rhythm at one specific time. Not sure yet.
Kickfire: Data Analytics for the Masses
Many apps are great when you assume that they will be universally used.

I guess I fall in your second category: "not feasible, too large in scope". But you know that someone, someday, will come up with something that will kind of remind you of this idea.
All he needs is a single form that sends an email upon submission. It should cost him less than the equivalent of $10/month to learn how to do this himself.
Violates the EULAs of most of these programs. Someone should get it taken down if we have any respect for copyright law.
Hmm, I should just restate my point rather than try to repurpose it from elsewhere.

TDD has enabled me to work in far smaller chunks than before. The ripples of this one fact are transformational, and so I place more emphasis on unit-test support than most aspects of a language/tool.
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6sktz/a/c04r6i5

There.
Online Web Notes - UberNote: Google Notebook Import Tool Complete
Solid quarter for Google
'The problem that it solves is "searching a term or topic across multiple sites is difficult and time consuming, and there's no easy way for me to aggregate and share this"'

I use Google to search for topics across sites. I'm not trying to be difficult, but I'd continue to refine your pitch until it makes crystal-clear sense in one sentence.
I thought I was the only startup hacker / YC news reader in Winchester! We just moved here and despite the homogeneity, it's a great town that is walkable and has train service.
Feeds of what?
I'd argue that Silicon Valley is already doing this, on a larger scale, completely decentralized and free-form.

If you got laid off and are even remotely curious about startups, there are at least two meetings a day you can attend to brainstorm with fellow entrepreneurs.

Office space and access to computers are not the issue (it's nice because it's a way for people to meet in person, which is a great boost to the entrepreneur spirit). Connecting with the existing entrepreneurs and joining one of the many projects is the key.
After reading this, it sounds like tonchidot from TC50 (to a certain degree).
ML deserves mention here. It's not quite a functional strait-jacket, and was a source of many Haskell ideas, e.g. pattern matching.

Oddly enough, I tend to think of Ocaml as a "functional C". You can do low-level imperative stuff with it, if you wish, but you usually end up abstracting the unimportant details out and going functional quickly.
Actually point in case, it was Paul who submitted his story about "Communicating with code" which currently has about 120 upvotes. Paul is pretty well known in this community but no-one has a problem with him self-submitting.
The Wired White House: A Pictorial Evolution of the POTUS Web Site
What will change everything?
Linus shaving Bdale Garbee's beard: Photos
You no longer need an undergraduate degree from Stanford to do a symsys masters:

http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_static?page=msinfo.html
I wholeheartedly support the idea of people self promoting if the articles are of relevance to HN readers.

If I find the article is interesting, I really couldn't care less who submitted it, I'll upvote it anyway. The only time I actually look at the usernames is in the comments anyway.
Show up and down votes. Provides information on contentious comments.

Agreed. And the further suggestion of showing contentiousness of entire threads would be informative (and help participants trying to avoid contentiousness learn how to avoid it).
Try "I really bombed my recital." Guess how the filters & risk-averse low-level analysts take that one.
Through trial and error I've figured out what times of the day I'm 'switched on' - for example, I'm not a morning person so I leave all the mindless stuff for mornings (answering emails etc).

My best time of day to code is around 2pm - 9pm actually, I find I get more done during those times. I find that I read better later in the evenings and that I'm more of a cheerful person from late mornings to early afternoon - which is when I do most of my phonecalls.
I always liked the slashdot-style friend/foe designations. Maybe automatically weigh friend's and foe's comments and submissions?
Humm... they lost their exclusive contract?

http://xkcd.com/533/
Ability to style the page so that it's readable on an iPhone (without zooming and panning)
I'd like to be able to filter submissions, in particular to be able to block specific sites. As in, no TechCrunch links (hypothetically speaking ;)).
It was fun! Well, fun modulo writing and debugging all the code in three months.

As for drivers, the OS really only interfaces with 8250 UARTs; both the VT100 terminal and the Marklin digital interface for the trains were connected via RS-232 serial ports. There is also, embedded in the kernel, a micro VGA driver for displaying debug messages.

I don't exactly have a specific open source license in mind. Right now I suppose you could say it's public domain. I'd be happy for it to stay that way, unless somebody would like to convince me otherwise?
That is the programmer way of looking at the world, particularly the not-paid-well-enough programmer way of looking at the world.

You would, naturally, get the submission form right the first time:

1) you know that if you use an HTML hidden element with a hard coded email address you'll be a spam proxy within 2 weeks

2) you can configure sendmail on your server of choice

3) you actually know what a server is

4) you don't freeze up when I say the words "parse the query parameters"

5) you sanitized all that untrusted input to the form before you ran it through your mailing script so that it is impossible to overload the title and then inject arbitrary mail headers to CC the message to an unbounded recipient list

Now what is your level of confidence that someone making, oh, the princely sum of $20 an hour can learn all of the above before hour number six, when starting from the point "I can't program and know nothing about email or security"?
It'd be nice if stories we've read leave the HN front page. display: hidden's fine, just less visual parsing.
I need to speak up for my local restaurants in the areas you just mentioned....Great spots in Arlington where I live, not as many options as the squares in Cambridge but there's some great eats.
Dawdle (http://www.dawdle.com) depends on freelance contractors for all non-essential tasks. It's all about that warm fuzzy feeling.

So, OK, pay attention. I'm going to tell you how to get jobs.

1) IT'S NOT ABOUT PRICE. Seriously. If it was about price, I'd go to eLance.

2) Tell me your rates up front. Period. If http://www.flingmedia.com can, you can too. If you don't, I won't trust you. You have no idea how many prospects you lose by not doing this. If you don't do this, you depend on referrals. REFERRALS WHO WILL TELL THE CLIENT WHAT YOU COST.

3) Please, for the love of God, have your portfolio up on your site, and make the links be target=_blank.

4) Blog. Twitter. I will judge you by the quality of your posts and the number of followers. Deal with it. It's like SAT scores; you can be smart and get a shitty score, but you can't be dumb and get a high one.

5) Contribute to FOSS projects. It shows an ability to work with others under others' terms. Guess what? You work for my company and you're supplementing my employees' work. If you can't get along with others, you're useless to me.
s{
var blacklist = GM_getValue('hndomains', '');
}{
var blacklist = GM_getValue('hnblacklist', '');
}x;
I think he doesn't like all the upvotes for the snarky anti-PHP comment:

You don't really learn PHP so much as catch it. Like a disease.

At the risk of being modded down, the comment has some merit. PHP programmers usually gravitate to PHP without having much experience with related, but supposedly better, languages like Ruby, Python, Lua, etc. But PHP programmers who really dig into programming often leave for other languages. The Ruby and Python communities are full of ex-PHPers. But how many people from the Python or Ruby communities leave for PHP?

This isn't to say that PHP has no merit. It was my first web programming language. But maybe its merits don't stack up well against other languages, which is the subject of the original article.
Sorry I haven't done that already. I should soon though, because I'm finally getting an iPhone.