skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good point, don't know why I didn't think of that. Moment of absent mindedness I guess.
It yells danger to me when only one week of course materials is not "under construction."
Skeptic's Guide to the Universe: http://www.theskepticsguide.org/

Astronomy Cast: http://www.astronomycast.com/
> the standard functions and macros illustrate that

You do know that nearly all of the standard list functions destroy at least one of their arguments, right?

People like to call Lisp a functional language, and you can use it that way, but it is really just a very nice imperative language.

Statements like:

(loop for x in some-list sum (* 2 x))

are just more efficient in CL than the "functional" approach:

(reduce #'+ (mapcar (lambda (x) (* 2 x)) some-list)

In this case, the LOOP is about 10x faster than the reduce, probably because it conses about 5000 times less memory. CL is not set up the same way Haskell is, and hence you want to reuse data structures (or never create them) where possible. This is very imperative and very non-functional. (But I am not saying it's bad, LOOP (or ITERATE, which is what I use "in real life") is very easy to read and write.)
Modernization at my old high school involved a Laser disc player for every class room.
holy hell, get an editor.
Oh I didn't mean that the technical areas are totally hunky-dory. I was just pointing out that at least you could drop out midway through and still have something useful to show for it (technical knowledge of some sort). Dropping out of your average liberal arts major won't leave you much that is directly applicable to a job. It's the degree that matters.

Both areas have their problems for sure. In fact the technical majors suffer from having a ton of people in them that don't really find the material interesting, they just want a good paycheck after they graduate.
Radiolab:

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/
Nod. If I had a nickel for every web app I've thought of and could have executed on but didn't, only to see others take the same idea and launch...I might have a buck fifty.

I should qualify that when I say the Amazon feature is "obvious", it's only from my perspective as a user. I would want a site-independent wishlist for the simple reason that I wouldn't want to manage wishlists on multiple sites. Only now, however, is it clear to me what the business incentive is for that.
The Power of Well-Structured Parallelism
http://www.google.com/search?q=steve+jobs+1984+macintosh+deb...

"When Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh at the company's annual shareholders meeting on January 24, 1984, pandemonium apparently ensued."
Cellphones as Credit Cards? Americans Must Wait
It depends on how important you find purity and strict typing. They are both useful, but the mistakes that experienced programmers make are not usually related to types. Having recently started writing "real" software with Haskell, I've noticed that the type system doesn't save me a lot of time. I still have to debug stupid errors, like calling a function with the right type signature but with the wrong effect. By the time I've debugged and written tests, I haven't gained a whole lot over Lisp or Perl. The advantage of Haskell is that it's as expressive as either of those, but executes a lot faster. (One concurrent app we ported was very quick to use 100% CPU on Perl with just a few outstanding operations. In Haskell, it gets to 10% CPU and runs out of file descriptors. Wow!)

As for monadic computation in Haskell, it is very comfortable. You can create an environment where you only have exactly what you need, which makes your program easier to read and reason about. (No "IO a" signature? This function doesn't do IO.) It is not something I can't live without in other languages, but it does solve the intended problem very cleanly. (Similar abstractions like monoids and functors are also nice ways of looking at their respective problems.)

The author of this article is right, though -- in a language with mutable state and without type inference (for return), monads are just not worth the bother. They won't give you anything you don't already have.
Take a look at http://factorcode.org/ - it's very Forth-like, but has a lot of modern constructs. It's very active and the (core) libraries are quite stable.
Your plan relies on the fact that people would find the "public humiliation" unpleasant. Whatever you want to call it (I just repeated your words), being unpleasant is an integral part of it.
And a high tolerance for lots of squinting after hours of reading off of an LCD.
> I prefer to see monads as fold + tail recursion

Are you sure you know what monadic computation is? (I would say, "are you sure you know what monads are", but I don't like to use adjectives as nouns.)
The findings basically show that people generally don’t use verbs when tagging and that the titles and descriptions they write are almost always a more useful definition of the thing being tagged (especially when searching across large datasets).
Microsoft donates code to Apache Stonehenge project
This guy really knows his stuff, and I'm curious to see how the energy distribution system he proposes will play out, if it (hopefully) is ever acted upon.
It's true that Jobs isn't necessarily the best presenter in the world. But I haven't seen anyone who can continually present their products with the purpose, passion, and pride that Jobs does, all of which are on display here. (No doubt because, as you say, he so often reveals monumental products.)

Someone could give a one-off presentation that might wow you more than any single Jobs presentation. But I can't think of anybody in recent times who has delivered more total wow over the course of his lifespan.
http://www.ebookee.com/
That's pretty fair, but why not just use a windows server, you can get them cheap, and you can even get windows VPS at a pretty reasonable price.

That being said, fogbugz does use mono for any *nix installs (for some things)
This could help a team of developers working on a project to collaborate on a design (real-time multiuser table editing maybe?) or keep track of revisions/branches to the data model. Think Writeboard for databases. Make a premium version that generates change scripts and sell it for $10/user/month. I wish I had done it first! Great job, Mr. Žára!
He points out really common (mostly) advertising practices that sites use that really tick off users (me at least): tooltip ads, CAPTCHAs, and others. He did miss some other horrors, though, such as a story that puts one paragraph per page over 10 pages, intro ad pages, or ads that obscure the content until you close them.
Mostly, it's interest on debt plus SS / Medicare / Medicare which moves money around but are not direct spending. ~68% of what's left is Military spending.

http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/ is a good place to start for the US Federal budget, but that's just the major branches I don't know of a good breakdown for say the number of LCD's the government buys. The picture on the bottom right is a good summary.
I've been toying with Factor for about a week. It's been an enjoyable experience, as both the language itself and the included development environment are extremely well designed.

Having never played with Forth-like languages before, I'm finding writing even the simplest algorithms strains my mind -- in a good way, though. It's mind expanding in the same way Lisp was the first time.

I doubt that Factor is the next big thing, but I think that for smart people it's one of the most fascinating things around right now. Zed Shaw, for example, is a big fan:

http://blog.cusec.net/2009/01/16/zed-shaw-on-factor/
That would be awesome. Then I could make a new account and get to -100 karma without having to post any comments, to see if anything neat happens.
C++ FQA Lite: Templates (good for a laugh)
"if they actually did those things more frequently, maybe they wouldn't need propping up."

This sounds suspiciously like a version of the old "liberal media" complaint, but regardless, it's fundamentally wrong.

The news media is not failing because of some problem with the quality of its product -- it's failing because the web has made impression advertising so utterly worthless that it's becoming impossible to profitably maintain an advertising-supported business that provides professionally produced content to niche audiences.
Yeah, I'd have to say this one's a little less exciting web-design-wise than whitehouse.gov. Body text as img, and two people that were maybe a little overly proud of their accomplishment in the source.

(not that my html & css skillz are so hot either, but...)
When i was 15, this was going to be my billion dollar idea. In fact, monopolizing the cellphone processing market was integral to my plan of world domination.
Sadly, neither of the two blog entries related to the story explained why the student was allowed to claim without any investigation that not having a Windows PC forced her to drop out of college. Given that a $200 laptop (or $50 desktop) likely would have been sufficient to get through school, was it really rational for this woman to put off her life for a year, even if she had to buy an extra computer? The whole thing sounded like an excuse for mom and dad.
How about a top losers list... users who are using the site the most every day.
I wasn't really all that interested in astronomy, but I was hassled over and over to listen to http://www.astronomycast.com/

And.. I'm won over. Each show is on a different topic (many just physics/quantum related, not "astronomy" per se) and they're a joy to listen to. I've definitely had a quality of life improvement since subscribing to this one.. and I even know what variable stars, weak and strong nuclear forces, and ion engine are! :)
Man, this is great! I was just doing the same thing at my company. I write web services in .NET, and we have PHP and Java products who's developers have no web service experience and needed some sample code to convince them we could make the interop work. Now I don't need to finish.
Think about his audience though, Apple shareholders (fanboys). This is a great presentation aimed at people hoping to love whatever it is they're about to see.
I think everyone had this idea. It is kind of saddening that it is taking so long for this dream to be realized.
I get the feeling that this will get killed...

Why don't they get Community Wizard back?
The problem with the initial news report was not that the woman just couldn't figure out Linux, it's that the news outlet took sides. Instead of bothering to research their story, they instead came to the immediate conclusion that Ubuntu is some sort of shady ersatz Windows that doesn't work. That's not the job of a news outlet and was shoddy journalism.
Yeah - Forth and Forth-likes encourage an extremely modular, concise, expressive form of coding... When you add macros it gets some of that meta-programming feel that comes with Lisp.

All that said - I've never found it 100% natural, but (perhaps paradoxically) on the other hand I'm usually pleased with the results.
> Anyone who thinks that America could never turn into a dictatorship is fooling themselves, and would be wise to remain vigilant for freedoms sake.

Yeah, but recent developments lead me to think we'll have a 15-year dead cat's bounce on the decline to serfdom, and I have another passport, so...

...yeah...
Very true. But there is too much money at stake and carriers are wary lest a rerun of Microsoft-IBM happen to them with this technology.
I took an AI course because I wanted to learn. I learned other technologies in the non-AI modules.

I learned Lisp (aka Scheme), SQL, Prolog, CORBA, Java (I already knew C++), and Business (etc).

My grades aren't good enough to get a job (I got a 2:2) but it doesn't matter - I can run my own business with what I know.
It's real in Japan.
I use cherrypy + SQL objects + Cheetah, cause that way i choose what components i want to handle all the general components of a webb app(http reqest/respose, ORM and templating) Also i know exactly how things happen so that makes me feel comfortable ... ie as you guys call it less magic :)
It's a series of posting on what has and has not changed since the previous edition of "High Tech Startup" was published in 2000. Very much from the VC point of view. Two things stand out: there are no new ideas and it is much more competitive now.

I think he is wrong about no new ideas, but I can see the point where he is coming from: there are so many copycat startups. I mean, how many social networking sites or ad management companies do we need. It is way more competitive, because it is so easy to start a web site now.

Another series is on what hasn't changed. Still the VCs desire for stellar CEOs. VC funding odds for a given business plan are still in the same ballpark as winning the lottery, although he doesn't take into account that odds of winning the lottery are much worse than 10 years ago.
This is an awful analysis.

Flickr tags are by people categorizing their own photos (that is, publisher-generated categorization.) Not people categorizing things they've found or aren't theirs. This leads to radically different behavior. Given this is a librarian, the second case is much more relevant and interesting.

One analysis without understanding the space or how the subject differs from the desired outcome (that is, categorization) seems very embarassingly shallow.

(Yes, this annoyed me the first time I read it, a while ago.)
It's still my idea! But I think I'll prefer credit cards as cell phones.

(i.e. cards with e-ink and touch sensors and micro-antennae that can still function as phones) :)
Ask HN: Who wants an intern?
Is anybody at HN looking for an intern or someone to help out with geek stuff over the summer?

I'm a student at Northeastern University in Computer Science and Cognitive Psychology, and I'm looking for something exciting over the summer.

I'd love to go out-of-country, but anything non-Newton (a suburb of Boston) would be a nice change in scenery.

I've got a copy of my resume online at http://liftare.com/resume.pdf .

My email address is mheld@ccs.neu.edu.

Be well,

Marc Held
I don't think there's anything particularly magical about the number five. We weren't there and that may have been adequately deep analysis; we don't have the information to tell.

Personally, I can't say I'm inclined to think "the employee needs a table" is likely to have any useful root cause that goes any deeper... "I need a table" is hardly some sort of exotic need.
Bad Times Spur a Flight to Jobs Viewed as Safe
Probably because they do the software stuff right, but a huge number of their employees are schlepping boxes in warehouses, or doing customer service?

Anyway, it's not an especially big deal to me that they would fire someone for taking too many sick days right before Christmas. If they disclose this to employees beforehand, they're likely to weed out people who tend to take sick days, whether for legitimate reasons or not.
Combining low-rez videos and high-def stills to create improved video (vid)
My CS degree cost ~30,000 and took 3.5 years. I personally thought it was well worth it and a fairly good deal.

If you are an instate student who does not live on campus it's less than 3k / semester including books. So 12k pays for a degree that includes face time with actual teachers. I think I had one class with more than 35 students.

Four Year Program Student Fees 2008-09:
Fall and Spring Sessions:
IN-STATE
Tuition and Fees	$ 2,449.00
Room	2,153.00
Board (19 Meal Plan)	1,599.00
TOTAL:	$6,201.00

OUT-OF-STATE
Tuition and Fees	$ 6,406.00
Room	2,153.00
Board (19 Meal Plan)	1,599.00
TOTAL:	$10,158.00

I know MIT and Harvard both accepted some credits when students transferred so it's not a "low end" education.

PS: I got a 4 on AP English and after talking their test I was dumped into a remedial class. I thought this was insane until I took English 101.
Not a podcast, but something you should absolutely listen to if you haven't already:

Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076...

It's by far the most entertaining, enjoyable, and well written science text I've ever read/listened to. You can download it on iTunes -- go with the unabridged. I listened to the abridged one first and liked it so much I downloaded and listened to the unabridged one... twice. And then proceeded to listen to four of his other non-science books.

Get on the Bill Bryson train. You won't be disappointed.
As I mentioned, Article 3 is one of the most likely. I don't know how the other two references you cited could be a problem. If you'd like to email me (jlv at ensigntech.com) I'd be most interested in your theories.
Are these guys for real?

http://sleep.fm/about.html
The difference is that you're seeing the value of a (good) college education, whereas most of the people who post the anti-intellectual rants here, in Reddit, and elsewhere want to view the sole purpose of higher education as vocational training. If it doesn't teach you Javascript, it must be useless!

(That these same people tend to develop fetishes for math and physics is an interesting aside; I've never met a mathematician or a physicist whose attention is drawn to practical questions.)
http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=arduino&l=1
Yes, but that is not really a contradiction, is it? The People always have the authority to overthrow their government and setup a new one. That much was laid forth in the Declaration of Independence.
I live in Japan but I don't use it. It would save me about 5 seconds on each my infrequent non-internet transactions, and that's about it.

The pre-paid debit card function (shown in the left pic in the article) is more useful, though. Because you can use it for small payments, you don't have to be carrying lots of coins all the time. And in some places there are exclusive cashiers for these debit-cards so you can check-out much faster.
> You do know that nearly all of the standard list functions destroy at least one of their arguments, right?

Cons, c*r, list, mapc, reduce, the mapping functions (mapcan/mapconc destroys the output of its inputs, but that's different).

What definition of "nearly all" are we using?
I always find the word 'flesh' a bit strange. In Chinese 'Human Flesh' actually means 'manual'
It's also a featured GAE project.

http://gaesql.appspot.com/
I'm totally talking out of my ass, here, but I wonder if the issue of using cell phones as payment in the Japan, is partly due to the decreased usage of credit cards.

I know that in Latin America, where I grew up, there are very few people who use credit cards. The infrastructure for electronic payments and debits just isn't there and fraud is rampant. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of countries with state controlled telecommunication companies or cellular near-monopolies can leapfrog the credit card adoption hurdle by offering epayments via cellphone.

What do people in non-US countries think?
> The problem with .... it's that the news outlet took sides. Instead of bothering to research their story, .... That's not the job of a news outlet and was shoddy journalism.

"Taking sides" and "inadequate research" is how news outlets typically work. Moreover, it's pretty much the only possible outcome of "change the world journalism", the dominant form these days.

In short, the news outlet did its job and it's typical journalism.

Of course, maybe they know what they're talking about on subjects that you don't know.
Could I inquire as to how much time you put into "evaluating" the GIMP?
question: where else can i learn about neural networks and ai?
Summary: Tags aren't really all that useful because people who write good tags write good descriptions.
"Just finish it" is terrible advice because software is never "finished". Bingo Card Creator, which is "pretty freaking simple" as far as software goes (v1.0 got released in 8 days after I had the idea to do so, and half of that time was spent on tasks other than programming), has been under development for 2.5 years. I just released v2.51 and, sure enough, found things to improve about it. I've already got an extensive list for what to add for v3.0.

My website has also been out for 2.5 years, and there are a million things to do there, too. It rained yesterday, and accordingly I scratched something off my rainy day list: implemented a serial key lookup. It is a minor little snit of a feature that will only be used by probably 5 people, saving me 15 minutes, a month. But when you aggregate those by the dozens, they are really meaningful.

My advice isn't just finish it. It is "just launch it". You'll have all the time in the world to improve the software later -- start getting users and feedback for it today. (Oh, and charge money, starting at launch.)
The whole episode is recounted from memory, not a transcript, so it's probably off a little. The real why answer is 'because he didn't have anywhere else to place objects in the work area'. The table is one solution. You could go another layer deep and wonder why the work area was designed without a stable horizontal work surface. Maybe the job duties changed, maybe the designers didn't know. At the fundamental level though, you've discovered a good corrective action.
Yes, Xuzhou (a Chinese prefecture-level city) has moved to prohibit the "human flesh search" ( http://www.chinasmack.com/stories/xuzhou-government-outlaws-... )
I think Just Finish It can mean different things for different people. I do think software can be finished. I wrote a site in college for a company that still uses it. The code remains unchanged, and that was nearly 5 years ago. It works fine, has scaled amazingly well, and is what I would consider finished.

However, some other things never are truly finished, and you're right, just require launching. I find just launching it is one of the hardest pieces of software development.
"noprocast" in the settings has been wonderful for me. The only thing I'd change is add -1 karma when you click override

How about it, PG? Will you give that "antifeature" a test?
usaspending.gov
He wasn't a TV celebrity though. He was more tabloid fodder.

And no, he didn't make it from the show directly, but the show made his brand name a lot more valuable, and made it a lot easier for him to make money from his businesses. And his true worth is probably far less than that. A lot of people claim in the $150m-$250m range. It's hard to estimate a guy whose worth is primarily not in equities.
While in theory the People have the authority to overthrow their government, in reality, do you honestly think that the US government would allow this to happen without a mass killing of its own people? I have long been upset with the US, yet I have long given up on any hope that the US can put itself back on the right path.

The idea that damned the US is equality. I'm not talking about equality in the sense of race, gender, ethnicity, etc. I'm talking about the idea of putting everyone on a level playing field so that people's feelings are not hurt---not keeping score in youth sports, substantially dumbing down curricula, etc. This is what will eventually cause the downfall of American civilization. Anyone who will challenge the way things are currently being done will be viewed as a brutish person with an inclination towards intellectual elitism. I already see this happening.
Does the Little Schemer count?
Watch Raaz The Mystery Continues Movie
Raaz The Mystery Continues is said to have been inspired by Indian myths and legends, focussing on the relationship between good and evil.
Easily the stupidest piece of technology ever.
You taught classes at MIT, but are a freshman? Is that the MIT, or something like Montana Institute of Technology?
In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/

The easiest way to browse the archives is on its Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Our_Time_(BBC_Radio_4)
Very nice. I like the real-time-ness of it. Still though, I prefer http://browsershots.org because it has more browsers and they take a full length screen shot.
You have been busy!
Merb. For me it has all the benefits of both Django and Rails, and is ultra clean and hackable.