skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also factor in the times you say stuff like "in my business", or "in my area" without explicitely mentioning your software. Such statements seem to be you begging us to check your profile to see what your business is.

Maybe just 7% of your comments are about your business, but imagine you are talking to a mattress salesman, and every 10th sentences he says is about mattresses or about his business. Is that not a bit annoying?

I'm not saying what you are doing is wrong or that it does not fit the standards of the community. I'm just saying it annoys me personally. Nobody else maybe, just me. So I'm pointing it out to you, because it may also be annoying someone else, and if nobody mentions it, you won't be aware of this.

For example, you original comment on this thread was funny and insightful. The followup comment about bingo software was not, it just seemed like marketing.
Setf is the generic form (and it's pretty cool how setf works). There are more succinct ways of putting it.

But you need to remember that functional languages discourage that kind of mutable state. It should be no surprise that some things (like assignment) are more awkward in that environment. It's a tradeoff.
Chipotle has the best burritos I've tried in the Boston area. There's one in Harvard square and another in Davis square(I think).
And hashtable lookups are possible by just function-calling the table itself with the key:

=> ({ :foo 1 :bar 2 } :foo)
1

the common pattern of defaulting to a value if the key isn't found is easy too:

=> ({ :foo 1 :bar 2 } :baz 4)
4

The above is a hash map, #{ ... } creates a hash set which otherwise has similar semantics. Sets, being function-callable, can be used directly for checking if something is one of a bunch of values:

(if (#{301 302 303 307} response-code)
; we've been redirected

Maps and sets (you also have sorted maps and sets and a compact struct-map, all of which have identical semantics as the hash variants where appropriate) can additionally be used with most functions accepting a seq (list) or can be converted to a list explicitly using the seq function.

Basically, maps and sets really are first-class citizens in clojure. Some of the flexibility is down to the fact that Clojure is a Lisp-1: these features are therefore hard to replicate in CL. (and yes, hash tables also bothered me somewhat in CL, altough other things probably bothered me more)
I'm assuming a) he made the comment b/c he went to college and b) 4 upvotes is a significant amount for this thread. If college taught him to think well, he should be able to give a better reply than "No." If those agreeing with him agree because they also went to college, they should point this out instead of just upvoting him.
s/Lassez-faire capitalism/Reality/.

No current economic system can sustain it on a large scale either, because reality itself is against it. Maybe someday, but we need still more productivity first.
Look, I'm the last person who would assert that a liberal undergraduate education is a necessity for everyone -- I dropped out of a high-priced, prestigious liberal arts college after a year, started coding for a living, and think I made the right decision. That being said, there is real value to be found even in the "soft" classes at such institutions.

While any college likes to tell potential students and parents that they'll teach their students "how to learn," the truth is that most kids do still have a lot of cognitive development to do at 18 years old, and even more social and professional. Being able to spend several hours a day arguing about complex and nuanced subjects with other bright young people (all under the supervision of a facilitator with a very high level of expertise in the subject under discussion) is an almost priceless experience.

That being said, it shouldn't cost $50k/year just to be able to have those discussions. Moving some of the content online will help (though some amount of face-to-face interaction is still a must to develop good social graces IMHO). Cutting down on the level of pampering should be a first step, too -- at 19 years old, there's little excuse for someone to be unable to cook for themselves, or find a place to live.
ATS programming language
Yes, I agree that you need a car unless you happen to live in central Austin or downtown, or in certain parts of South Austin. The downside of course is that those areas are generally more expensive. The median house price in Austin last I heard was something like 190K, but in central Austin I'd imagine it's over 300 if not more.

IMHO, Austin's upside is the low cost of living (see above median house price, low taxes (no state income tax)) and overall livability -- lots of live music, universities, etc. I think the tech scene here is better than a lot of places, though no doubt it's not nearly as good as Silicon Valley. Still, there are few places I'd rather live.
The issue is that there is no one solution for all problems and all contexts. ANY given language was written in response to a given set of problems in a given set of contexts. Change one thing to be outside that domain and the fit is less good. Change almost everything and the fit is a misfit.

For example: a 5 lb slege hammer is a very good tool for breaking rocks. Now fix a Rolex Watch with it. Its not so good of a tool, is it?

The answer is understand the problem and its context. Then select the tool that fits good enough (YMMV). Otherwise you will soon find yourself in a world of hurt and still not have a good solution to your problem.

I am sure Lisp has a problem set and a context set for which its a good match. Though I haven't found it yet but then I really haven't looked. The tools I use are good enough for the problems and contexts I have encountered in over 40 years of software development. Thus I have no reason to hammer my head against the rubber wall of Lisp as well as approximately 900 other languages.
What problem with schooling is solved by having a laserdisc player instead of a VCR?

At least Internet access has potential answers to that question, even if schools are structurally unsuited to following through on them. But even with my HN-style bias, I'd rather spend money on VCRs and the remainder on sporting equipment than laserdisc players.
Ask YC: Do what you love and the money will follow?
In another thread this was brought up and I thought it might be a good thought experiment.

The refrain, "Do what you love and the money will follow," is repeatedly frequently.

Is it truth? Can you think of examples of doing something you'd love but it not provide for your financially? ("I love living in a log cabin in Alaska!")

Can you point to examples in your own life where you did follow this advice -- and it didn't pan out?

And if you share, maybe you can give us hackers an attempt to figure out why it didn't work out -- and how we can improve our own odds as we follow our passion in the future.
Disclaimer: I dont have a graduate degree or even a CS degree, but I have done language design and implementation. I doubt that you will find a program in language design per se. You should already know the mechanics of language implementation: parsers, code generators, virtual machines, etc. I think the design of general purpose languages has converged on a few design schemes: static typing like Java, dynamic like Python, functional. Granted that it is possible to make huge improvements in Java and other mainstream languages, I think it might make sense to pick an area where most languages dont do it right, such as concurrency, and graft it on to an existing language. Even if your real interest is in the design of languages, I think you need to pick a goal for all this study. Given that, any good program with one or more professors that are working in your area of interest will work for you.
Something that may be of interest, given your C background: Python and C mix really well. Not sure if that is relevant in web-centric development, but it is when you want a more general-purpose language.
Well, if my parents had thought that, then I wouldn't have to spend fourty hours a week sitting at a computer like a zombie. And that's just to be able to survive so that I can do more such work!

As for raising children... It really is impossible to raise them well. Every decision is a compromise and even if one choice is obviously better, it's just the lesser of evils. And those evils could have been prevented if the kid hadn't been born.

(I suppose I'm trolling, but this subject is so near and dear to me that I can't resist.)
The sad thing is, they didn't seem to make something people wanted...

So I don't see there being any useful advice here, apart from maybe "Get to know lots of people, one of which might buy your co. regardless of its merit".

Also the whole saga reminds me of the sad days toward the end of the dotcom bubble, when teenagers were making 'startups', without product, and planning on an exit as soon as possible.

As for live current, just because you own cricket.com, doesn't mean you have any traffic going to it. Premium domain names are just ego trips...
My point was just that creating / maintaining / destroying a brand on twitter would be interesting to lots of people. Not just the cancer SM consultants though.
Well, I don't identify as upper middle class, like many of people who now go to university I'm lower-middle class - first person from family to go to university. Hence I guess academia is held by suspicion by people who havent had any contact with it. I have a phd, and whilst my direct family were always supportive, there were other members of family and friends who wondered why the hell I would choose to do that rather than rake in the big bucks in a bank. If I had chosen an academic career, it would however have been very difficult financially to stay in the uk - those I know who did typically had parents well-off enough to help buy a flat or house.
What we need is a decentralized, XMPP-or-similar-based Facebook clone that you could own. I'm not a Facebook expert but I've been shoulder-surfing as my wife uses it and I see little that could not be cloned in this manner.

Facebook itself is almost entirely unnecessary, and not with "pie in the sky" technology that may exist someday... it could be done right now.
Web 2.0 often thinks its solved problems it hasn't and this is just another example. The only people who will be surprised by this are the people who bought into the hype that "everyone's opinion is equal in the new social web"

The truth is you have to work hard to be listened to and sometimes you have to keep repeating your good idea over and over and over again until someone listens. There was a flurry of posts just a few weeks ago (started off by Paul Buchheit: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/overnight-success-t...) that pointed out how "Overnight Successes" are often things someone has been working on for many years. But it was only when they'd been around long enough to be trusted that people started actually paying attention.

But if you work to establish yourself you will eventually be listened to and that is why this isn't censorship.
Nice outline. I agree with just about everything you have put forth here, but I think OP might want to either skip the graphics part for now and let someone who really knows it handle it, or learn that right after XHTML/CSS. JavaScript is going to be easy for him, better not to focus too hard on it and give time to what is going to be a little more challenging.

As for learning XHTML/CSS, http://htmldog.com/ is an incredibly easy tutorial. You'll understand it all in hours.
I'm a sane person that's happy to live in the middle of Philly. It's a great city, even though it's got some downsides. I never understand people that have such a totally negative view of the city. I much prefer living here overall, versus my experience in NYC and Boston.
One problem is that ~90% of all published material is little better than white noise that should land in the bit bucket. The big problem is which ~10% is worth saving. The answer will be very different for each of us.

Another problem is that its hard enough to find something of significance in our current avalanche of bits. Imagine what it will be like after a few decades of exponential increase of essentially white noise. We will be saturated with bits we call information but will be unable to extract knowledge or understanding from it.

You could be better informed by listening to static on the radio. At least you could tell that a thunder storm is approaching.
I believe they met Sacca at the 'Chris Sacca comes to Oxford' conference.
Android app destroying G1 users’ memory?
I disagree. It's useful to be able to do a full prototype so a superficial understanding is useful, but I don't think there is significant value really learning HTML / CSS.

There is a huge body of information about which version's of which browsers work with which feature. This is one of those cases where specialization pays huge dividends and working with someone who keeps up with this field is really useful. Think of it like accounting it's useful to quickly learn the fundamentals, but knowing how to audit a fortune 500 company is overkill.

PS: The problem with learning HTML / CSS / JavaScript is it's got a short shelf life. You can learn C and come back to it in 20 years but GUI side of things keeps evolving so unless you constantly keep up you are basically starting over when you come back in 5 years.
It was probably spent on Boso. Look at boso.com, they had a big team.
Stories From The Tell-All MySpace Book
I think the revolution he's talking about is one of more complex computer/human interaction. Writing programs, of one sort or another. Think Excel, or Emacs, or the Python repl.

It's hard to visualize what exponential growth means, but if you can simulate it using Python, you can suddenly imagine it.
Congratulations on bringing into the world yet another of your collective creations :)

This calls for Dancing Baby:
http://dancing-baby.net/Baby/BabyMus1.htm
(Since when did he get sunglasses?)
A year of arbitrary data, beautifully prepared.
I don't think it's fair to complain that "banker douches" raised house prices. There were plenty of non-bankers getting in on the housing price bubble.

The housing price bubble was a national phenomenon that can't be pinned on bankers, but New York got hit especially bad, because of Wall Street, and has been slower to right itself than the rest of the country. One-bedroom apartments in Manhattan are still renting above $2000 per month.

Incidentally, academia is solidly middle class and successful academics can easily buy a home.

For outright stars, this is true, but the stars of other professions can easily buy several houses, so no point is made here. Hell; in finance, utter mediocrities can buy apartments overlooking Central Park. And if you know anything about academia, you'll know that you do have to be pretty much a star to achieve even a middle-class income trajectory relative to age. Getting into a top-10 PhD department is a hundred times more competitive than any MBA program, and the average student out of such a program (to say nothing of those who have to settle for upper-middle or middling grad programs) struggles to get even a mediocre post-doc in the middle of nowhere. I've heard that the average PhD from a selective department will write 70 applications to secure one or two offers. The mere fact of finishing a PhD program, for what it's worth, puts on in the top third or so of entering grad students, already the cream of the undergraduate crop.

By the way, why all the hostility ("banker douches", "under-cultured jackasses") towards people who chose a different career path than you?

Meh, I'm fine with quants and quantitative traders, but I don't consider them "bankers". I don't have much use for the 23-year-old douchebags who make a mess of Stone Street and expect to be treated as an elite caste because they're investment bankers. They're also not very smart; if they were, they would demand more interesting work than standard analyst fare, and get fired for their "sharp elbows". I know a few truly intelligent people who went into banking, but most of them found the environment hostile and either shot for quant/trading, or left finance altogether. The types of people who thrive in hierarchical corporate environments tend to be, on the whole, pretty useless; this isn't particular to bankers, but universal.
Did Gandhi get rich? Does it matter?
So sick of hearing all of this.

If it fails, it fails, just go for it!

I hate pessimistic people.
Yes but lisp is not a functional language and (to my incomplete knowledge of CL) setf is the only way to modify the hash table. Thus, people have to use that form if they want to use hash tables.
Ask HN: What software(s) traders use to help make investment decisions?
What software traders use to help make investment decisions?
We still have a lot of "rule compliance costs", esp. when a company has employees, but you can hack this. In the worst case you just source this paper work out. The problem is more that Germany lost its startup-mentality. The last time we were a real startup country is 100 years ago.
For that reason, he isn't only working on issues of disease, but also food supply, education, etc.
Hey thanx Russell...yup, concurrency definitely seems to be one of the "hot" issue wrt language design; the thing is, I was hoping I could be in an environment(academic or otherwise) with like-minded people where I could be in the midst of good ideas and also position myself well for commercial work in the field; therefore, still looking out for academic programs...Thanks again though.
The author sets self-improvement tasks, which are worth points. Keep track of your score with the provided scorecard.

I like the site design, a pity the scorecard didn't benefit from the same style.

The goal of the site is to change your mindset towards a more positive and forward-looking one.
Yes. Starting with his ~5000th "friend", he began the routine process of sending messages to people who tried to friend him. Apparently, he sent a lot of these messages. I am not surprised Facebook cut him off. He's using a social network designed to track acquiantances as a tool for propagating content to people he's never even spoken to.
I know people who live in Philly and love it. They're sane, I think. There's no accounting for taste, after all.

I have been in Philly only some 48 hours or so, but my first impressions were quite negative. I saw way too many homeless people, way too much trash on the streets, and even walking in the so-called nice areas of downtown Philly after dark I was afraid I was gonna get shot any minute.

Honest question: what are the good things about Philly? Seriously.
Hey, I just had a great idea for an NGO!
I lived in SOMA, so the bus I'm mostly thinking of is on Howard running downtown. It's possible things have gotten better. But I'd never take a bus anywhere in Chicago (or NYC); the trains go everywhere.
Neither of your translations convert your code to anything that has to do with monads, and your first translation is just plain broken.

Your print-n-times doesn't return an action---it's an imperative function that performs an action.

The naive translations to Scheme would be as follows:

(define (skip-many p)
(<|> (>> p (skip-many p))
(return 'nothing)))

(define (print-n-times n s)
(if (= 0 n)
(return 'nothing)
(>> (put-str-ln s)
(print-n-times (- n 1) s))))

In order to fix the infinite recursion in my first example, the parsing framework I made in Scheme had a macro `thunk-parser` (actually, it had a shorter, stupid-sounding name) which for all intents and purposes just wraps the expression in a (lambda ()).

(define (skip-many p)
(<|> (>> p (thunk-parser (skip-many p)))
(return 'nothing)))

Also, both your examples rely heavily on non-strict evaluation. 'and' and 'or' are both macros that non-strictly evaluate expressions.
The future of finance: Inside the banks
> Do what you love and the money will follow.

Actually there are plenty of jobs that, no matter how much you love them, just aren't going to make you wealthy. To pick a simple example, "elementary school teacher". Important to society, probably rewarding for many people, but not something that will make you rich.

> you'll still be doing what you love and that's worth more than money.

Yeah, but money helps too.
JSPs, Servlets and POJOs. Im a complete beginner so im trying to learn the basics first. Im very aware of some Java shortcomings but I like the fact that I can get responses from thousands of books, tutorials, and the web. A bunch of Python frameworks looks very nice though, and the languaje also, but Im required to use Java for now : (
Logically speaking, sure.

If you do what you're passionate about, you're sure to develop a strong set of skills for that particular subject. A strong set of skills for a subject with a market makes you good competition, at a reasonable price.

As for myself, I remember writing a keylogger in Visual Basic when I was 11 because I wanted to steal my sister's AIM password. I loved everything about software development, and still do. Years later, I'm making 6 figures with Rails.
All the millionaires were in porn in 2000; all the people
who started startups did it for a different reason.

Two things.

1. The people who started startups wanted to make money just as badly, they just didn't want to tell mom that they were in the porn business.

2. I'm really lucky I love porn.
Lisp is the best language for generating HTML, XML, writing compilers, or parsers.

PS: Lisp is more a family of languages that share features than it is a specific language.
I haven't seen many studies not based in the physical sciences where this isn't true.
Having a good design "sense" is important - you should at least be good enough to tell excellent from good from bad. This goes doubly if you're in business for yourself, since you'll likely have someone else doing your design for you on a contract basis, it's good to know they're good at it.
But but... this guy is a "social media expert" ...
I don't know the details, but they are programming there.
That's because breaking an abstract task into concrete steps is a task in itself. So, people with an abstract task have more to do than those who just have concrete steps.
That's why the interpretation is in parentheses.
Learn HTML and CSS, then you'll know the full circle.

You need to know these things as a backend developer and as a programmer period.
I'm still waiting to read of even a single example

Joshua Schachter, Delicious. It's rare, but not unheard-of.
It's better advice than this:

Do what you hate for money and the love will follow.
Affluence...a social network for millionaires
In fairness you could define a function that did it for you:

(defun assoc (table key val)
(setf (gethash key table) val)
table)

or something like that. (this is from memory, hope it's right) You can then let it take a variable number of arguments to make it even more concise. (yes, I've stolen the assoc semantics from Clojure, minus the pure functional aspect)
FWIW a book recommendation from articles comments:

http://www.amazon.com/Test-Driven-Development-Addison-Wesley...
I always wondered, who pays for the saving of webpages?
I think it's not all that clear with the question. How much money? If we're talking about money you get from your regular job and you feel okay about working for someone - then the answer is yes. If you feel you don't like working for someone and will only be happy working on your own stuff - then the answer is "not necessary". From what I've seen and heard, good money is a result of different (for each person) combination of professional skills, business skills, persistence and luck. And you never know if your combinations' going to make you rich.