skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lisp being too minimalistic or offering too many choices is an interesting argument. It's not wholly untrue. Lisps culturally offer power and flexibility.

Many- most perhaps - developers don't want that. They want a golden road to deployment, a KISS mechanism to write basic code to do basic things and keep doing them. Flexibility and power expand the solution space too much for their taste.

Well, that's OK for them. I'll just be doing my Lisp as much as I can.
This sounds a lot like Lumni, which has been popular in South America and is coming to the US:

<< Sneider’s dream was to attend college so he could become a nurse and serve his community. To do so, he needed $8,500 — a sum that is close to the average annual income in Colombia. The problem is that financial aid and student loans are far less abundant in Colombia than they are in the United States. Sneider, who was unable to provide collateral or a cosigner, had little hope of getting a loan from a traditional lender.

Here’s the deal that Lumni struck with him: In exchange for $8,530 in financing, Sneider agreed to repay 14 percent of his salary for 118 months after he graduated. At that point, regardless of how much he has paid, his obligation terminates. Although this might sound similar to a loan, an “income contingent” repayment plan like this is far less risky for a low-income student like Sneider. >>

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/instead-of-s...

Enzi is doing something similar, over a longer time period:

<< Enzi, another start-up, has just put students from India and Iran through Stanford University; they are paying investors up to 6% of their income for five years. The big challenge is to come up with enforceable contracts, says Ashni Mohnot, Enzi's founder. Millions of poor would-be students could benefit. >>

http://www.economist.com/node/16996791
That just means that 'name' is a poor name for the parameter. Have 'first_name, last_name' or 'full_name' or 'names,' for example.

In addition, I think it's a good practice to get into to try and validate parameters at the top of any method. If the values don't fit your use for them, raise an exception.
I think the point that's missed (especially by you) is that proprietary, closed source software is fundamentally more insecure than open source.

As a user of proprietary software, you can't inspect that code for bugs and you can't inspect it for malicious code - you just have to take the vendor's word for it that "it is really secure, honest! And there aren't any backdoors put in by the US government/china/whoever"

I don't know whether chatsecure is any good or would withstand attacks by a nation state, but if I were a security researcher or an aid organisation in the 3rd world, I could look at the source and find out.
hahaha .... didn't google offer them a crap ton of money at some point. they need to fire the asses that did not take it.
To be honest that Python list comprehension is really hard for me to internalize.

I find Ruby way much more natural.

xx.select { |x| bar(x) }

Even Clojure is better

(filter (fn[x](bar x)) xx)

or

(filter #(bar %) xx)
"I'm going to say this in the nicest way possible: you're an idiot." Disclaimers only disqualify specific interpretations as judged by the speaker, they don't define the terms of the receiver.
> There is no tool that will print out a dependency map.

systemctl dot | dot -Tsvg > systemd.svg
I totally understand the idea of just giving in and then moving on, but I don't get the apparent dislike of telling the story. Should he not tell people about this bad practice? It may be too late for him, but it's not too late for everybody. It's useful for people to know that a company has a bad policy like this before you get involved with them, and they won't generally tell you themselves.
Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that (Lieberman) delegation is quite a dangerous concept when applied to the most popular object oriented languages. You're effectively calling another object's methods and masquerading yourself as that object, or to put it another way you're exposing all of your privates and implementation details to another object. Hence it is much more dangerous, and potentially quite incorrect, than just forwarding.

The only safe way I can see this being done is by adding a reference to object A when calling/forwarding a method on object B. But that's just forwarding with extra data.

Maybe I haven't worked enough with fully dynamic languages, but I don't really see much or any benefit to doing 'Lieberman' delegation, over and above other options.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815

Pseudocode is better expressed in Python than Lisp, therefore much better in the academic world.

My point stands: READABILITY.
Boring. Another blogging platform with no new functionality. What makes it better than Tumblr?
Using Backbone for server rendered web apps.
i don't know about you but i'm getting sick and tired of these "marketing" posts with sensational titles.

if you have a book to sell just say so, so we can directly skip your post.
Because highly specialized jobs are a vast minority. OP was talking about retail jobs, not "database scaling specialists".
My weird suggestion: start at the beginning of Perl's great 5.x renaissance, Perl 5.6. Any book that explains that version's features, learn all of it. You will learn probably the most comprehensibly compatible version of the language you'll ever need, and you'll strengthen your basics before learning all the new goodies introduced in later Perls.

I'm the type of person that wants to write Perl once and use it almost anywhere. Lots of useful language features in later versions simply aren't supported on systems that didn't upgrade their stock Perl version (for example, Centos 5 ships with I think Perl 5.8.x, and the current stable is 5.16.x).

And if you're thinking "Oh, i'll just upgrade perl on that five year old legacy server," kill yourself now and spare the agony.
"I'd be more worried if it was a gradual but consistent 27% decline than a day-after-earnings 27% decline."

Why not both? http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...
I'm a daily laptop linux user, specifically Chakra Linux, http://chakra-linux.org/.

My wish list goes something like this: better wireless drivers, improved sleep/suspend/hibernate/resume, better power management, a better package manager, more up-to-date applications ...

At the very, very bottom of that list -- the very last item, so far at the bottom of the list that it's in danger of falling off entirely -- is "faster boot times".

Dredmorbius is spot on, at least for me and my daily usage and the couple dozen or so servers that I'm responsible for. If things are so pooched that I have to reboot it, then it doesn't really matter to me anymore whether it takes 30 seconds or a minute to start up. I would much prefer not having to reboot it in the first place.

Since Chakra was (I think) forked from Arch Linux, I'll have to check and see if they're gonna do this too.

I hope not.

(edit: none of this is intended as a criticism of Chakra's development team, who have been doing an amazing job of putting together a system that, despite its warts, I genuinely enjoy using every day.)
Simtower clone OpenSkyscraper ported to SFML, impliments elevators.
That's not very transparent, how would I have found that visiting the site for the first time? In fact, there is no communication to the user before asking for access to post to their twitter account. I guess the intent is to be insiders-only? Kinda mysterious?
"Clojure basically obsoletes Ruby and Python" "Clojure is a uniform attack on everything of value in the Ruby, Python and Node.js world"

This kind of smugness[1] is one reason why Clojure will never take over the world. It seems to be some kind of unwritten rule that every Clojure evangelist has to knock another language in any post anywhere [2]. Ugh.

I am a great admirer of Rich Hickey (the man is a genius), and am happily using Clojure in my present project, but this kind of triumphalist rhetoric is a big turn off. I don't think Clojure "obsoletes" Ruby or Python, anymore than Haskell or Erlang "obsoletes" the various lisps.

[1] This attitude seems particularly endemic amongst people who've moved to Clojure from the early Ruby on Rails community, where sneering at alternative frameworks was part of the culture.

Rich Hickey, while justifiably proud of his language, as he should be, never makes silly statements like this.

[2] see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4272186 for an embedded gratuitous swipe at Scala in an otherwise insightful post.
I realize what's right for one isn't necessarily right for all, but to my mind this is a recipe for trouble. Especially in light of multiple endorsements that read "Owing so much in student loans, I wouldn't be able to pursue my dreams if it weren't for this investment."

Move back home (if it's an option) and spend a year or two working 9-5 until you can finance your dreams with no strings attached. There are countless mentors who will help you find your way, and it won't require a stake in your future earnings to get where you want to go.
Why do you say "WILL NOT" in such a definitive way? It doesn't seem like a good bet as a company to rely on your users and the public to forgive you when you step too far, especially if you do it repeatedly.
It's a pretty bad language. There may be worse, but it's pretty bad.
Or that we were (note: past tense) in a bubble, but that bubble consisted of a handful of companies and only affected a small number of investors/VCs. This was a common theme in the HN threads on SV bubble speculation, and ultimately I think that's what turned out to be the case.

I definitely agree that in the long run, this is a good thing. It sheds some of the hype and gets people focusing on the fundamentals.
There are some great books out there, so pick a few and go to town.
One could use Javascript to argue that while midlevel languages tend to live in a sort of meritocracy that the very top level of languages always have some sort of immensely-powerful backer that they ride on. JS rode on top of Netscape at time when they were just that powerful. Java rode on Sun. C# and Objective C are there because of their powerful backers Microsoft and Apple.
I'm looking... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga#Amiga_community Looks awesome.
lesson learned from groupon and digg: take google's money
it will use for cars
Thanks timo614. This is a very helpful piece of information. Will be subscribing to railscast soon.
You can delete your account in facebook? I can only find "Deactivate"?
This looked more interesting to me, but for whatever reason the kickstart has been canceled.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bladepad/bladepadthe-det...
> You know, [Lisp] was fairly popular for a time.

I'm afraid I have to dispute this. I'm about as dedicated a Lisper as you'll find -- learned it at the feet of Bernie Greenberg, Gerry Sussman, and David Moon in the late 1970s, and still use it when I get the chance. (Oh and I think my Symbolics machine still works, though I haven't fired it up in several years.) I was around during the time you're probably thinking of -- the AI bubble of the mid-1980s -- and even then, Lisp was the language a lot of people loved to hate, if they knew anything about it at all.

There was some interest in Lisp, to be sure, but I think "fairly popular" is putting it too strongly. It has always been a fringe language.

On another note -- it struck me the other day that if history had gone a little differently, we might be using Dylan instead of JavaScript. Oh well...
Am I crazy or does Wired have the best tech startup journalism? These are the kind of startups that should be covered by TechCrunch and funded by YC.

More evidence that public education is completely broken in terms of job training.
But checking all known GUIDs might be more feasible.
Quora's latest investment round (May) valued the company at $400M [1]. According to Alexa, Quora has perhaps 1% of the traffic of Wikipedia. It seems to me that Quora has two options:

1) Be acquired by Facebook or Google. The problem is that it's no Instagram, so today it could not command a significant premium over the valuation of the latest round.

2) Find a way to make money. Just like Facebook or Twitter, ads seem to be the only way. Only, it does not have the traffic; no growth at all in the past year [2]. Therefore, the management must be doing everything they possibly can to improve their metrics. It's do or die, goodwill be damned.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora#cite_note-15

[2] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/quora.com
Yes, its too bad cleaning up the architecture doesn't necessarily cleanup the physical design. As GPUs have been more recent entrants to the general purpose space it is clear they are trying to avoid the same mistakes. The only place you will find a a true GPU binary is buried deep in the memory of the runtime stack (for NVIDIA at least, not sure about AMD).
When people say they hate "parentheses" in Lisp, I'm pretty sure what they really mean is "I hate s-expressions." You may find them natural to work with, but it's pretty clear most programmers do not. Witness the crazy amount of work compiler writers put into writing parsers that could be trivially done away with if they just switched to using s-expressions.

Personally I prefer both Forth's RPN and C/C++ (Algol?) style notation to Lisp's s-expressions.
Facebook almost 50% down, this Thursday may be a bloodbath...
But my point is that you can get freedom by local optimization rather than just by getting more wealth. People lose a lot of freedom by squandering what they have.
I just meant he could have edited his first comment instead of replying to himself.
The problem with this article, irrespective of the truth or falseness of its allegations, is that it tries to make its point in the complete wrong direction.

Instead of starting with indisputable facts and building them into a case against the current system, it starts by making broad, ill-defined accusations against an similarly undefined aggressor, namely "the corporations." Before it even starts talking about what "they" have done, it speculates about their motivations.

It's not enough to give arguments for why somebody with power would want to dismantle education, and show how it could happen. If you want to make that sort of case, you need to outline how it did happen. Give us laws and sponsors. Name names. Give us debate about those specific laws, and relevant arguments made by the alleged aggressors.

All this article does is confirm people's biases, without providing any actual information outside of the author's opinion.
It's a good point. I've thought about this before. I think the 1960s imagined future was predicated on basically infinite energy availability. That clearly hasn't happened, but what did happen most people in the 1960s didn't predict.

Makes you wonder what 50 years hence things will be like, given that the microtrends to which we pay so much attention will likely not continue.
I don't know. Maybe to be in the top 10 on TIOBE index? It's paradoxal that you have this superior paradigm that not only is not dominating but it's not even in top 5 languages that are used. (Not to mention that all dialects account for that 13-th place, so if you disperse percentage on all of them - they are of the chart)
Maybe because of these unproductive meta-comments.
Thanks for such an insightful post :)
Medium to me looks like something similar to svbtle.com
Where svbtle.com is new blogging platform , they are considering it as Publishing platform.

The flagship kudos concept is part of Medium.com as well.
Design documents are necessary, but are no replacement for comments. When working in GCC briefly, I found the design documents to not be nearly so valuable as the (few, poor) comments that existed in the code (objc).
I always wanted an internal Quora at my company - I figured that was a possible product for them in the future.
Electrician Phoenix AZ
If you want bash instead of dash:

dpkg-reconfigure -p low dash

Its that easy to get bash back...
Facebook Countersues Mitel With Old AOL Patents
I think you were confusing orbital inclination with axial tilt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_tilt
No, I still have no idea what opbeat is, what they do, and why I would want to beta test their service.
There's a whole bunch of tools groping awkardly in a single direction here:

1. Give a graph to the computer

2. The computer makes the graph a reality

http://chester.id.au/2012/06/27/a-not-sobrief-aside-on-reign...

Puppet, Chef, Cfengine come at it from an on-disk direction.

Upstart, SMF, systemd, launchd come at it from a runtime direction.

They're still talking past each other. And it's annoying.

What I would really like is a system that does both as first-class citizens. I may be waiting a while.
Is having hardware acceleration for AES and SHA256 really a "CISC quirk", or just a really specialized set of arithmetic instructions? The classic RISC idea of making the core simple and fast doesn't really apply here; internally, it's all simple micro-operations driving special-purpose hardware. It seems similar to having a fused multiply-accumulate operation: they've figured out how to accelerate the core of a common task, and this is the API they've decided to give it.
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
I think the more interesting question is whether we will see higher-value positions move more freely between self-employment and formal employment in the future. This would be the best possible solution. When it makes sense to be self-employed be self-employed. Then leverage that in getting into a higher-value job position when you return.
Sparsehash | An extremely memory-efficient hash_map implementation
We've Been Acquired
https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account
https://ssl.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_a...
Wouldn't streams actually make it easier? The site that wanted to do the archiving could subscribe to the stream and slurp up the content as it became available. As far as crawling older content presumably having a stream doesn't preclude you from also having permalinks to each entry.
most likely for energy-efficiency reasons.
Dog, a new language from MIT Media Lab (45min in)
I am looking forward to the new devices if they're priced right. The specs seem right, I think Microsoft could be onto a winner here. I will definitely consider getting one of these, the interface is a hell of a lot nicer than the iPad or Galaxy tablets.
SERIOUSLY! Riak is NOT MEANT for single-node clusters!!! It gets faster THE MORE NODES YOU ADD.

The minimum recommended number of nodes is 3; the "ideal" minimum number of nodes is 5.
I'm a college student working on a niche web app, a multiple choice test maker for teachers. Dev blog: http://www.deveneur.com App: http://www.girps.com
>Another example is Americans beginning the response to a question with "So, ____________"

There's no purpose to this really. It's filler, similar to saying "um" in the middle of a sentence.
Reminds me of this:
https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=50696

Minus the extortion of course.
In the case of answering a question, it's just an utterance to indicate thinking, like "uh".

(In the case of asking a question, which seems more common, it's a softener to make the change of subject less abrupt.)

Both are common in other languages, so I don't think Americans are being strange here. Probably why we think other people are rude, though.
The part I like about the execution is where you have CROs and Core Facilities, and not scientists themselves validate results. Apparently Milikan when he measured the electric charge was off (smaller than actual) in the measurements... but researchers who checked, worried perhaps about their academic reputation (speculating here) slowly adjusted this number upwards over several years till it asymptotically approached the truth. Having a 3rd-party, that is less impacted by academic politics might be a good thing.

From Feynman's Caltech commencement speech on this:

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of
the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the
charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and
got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a
little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the
viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of
measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you
plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little
bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than
that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until
finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away?
It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because
it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a
number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something
must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why
something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to
Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated
the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that.
We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that
kind of a disease.

[1] http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/cargocul.htm
Some users will. I asked Quora to delete my account today over this issue. I'm just one person, and many of those who are angry and hurt care about the service, so they feel betrayed (rightly).
That is legit. I have done it on occasion. It is like a relaxed form of literate programming.

I don't understand this vitriol against all forms of code commenting. (I personally hate the useless, mostly empty function headers forced by some coding standard)
Or... because I don't really care what what time Postgres started up 2 years ago.
It's possible, but run the numbers. Companies that would pay for that * monthly price = ?

Very hard to justify a Twitter-like valuation with that.
The JVM does not have slow start up. If you write something that doesn't use the GUI, it's pretty much immediate.

It USED to have slow start up time, but that was years ago.

You say, "slow startup times, etc". Care to expand on what the "etc" bit is?
REST Web Services in the Cloud: Part 2, by Mark Prichard, CloudBees
The article you linked to describes the angle of plane of the orbit - the circle it makes around the sun. These vary by only a small amount.

The axial tilt is different. It is basically how far the axis through the poles of a planet is tilted compared to the plane of its orbit. This is what you were thinking of initially - it can very a lot.
I'm actually kind of tired of sites that just give a stream of data.

That's why on all my projects going forward, I'm going to try to take the next step and design the page itself to be attractive as to the placement of the content---more like a magazine, than like a Reddit.
Imgur founder gives an overview of their tech stack
Ditto, I'd like it if they would offer it out as a whitelabel solution.

It's much better away of dealing with somethings than an FAQ or endless forums.
I suggest asking for feedback at sitepoint, Warriorforums and other affiliate hangouts. You'll get some attention.

I also suggest experimenting with PPC advertising.
AskBot is an open-source StackOverflow clone that has a hosted option. (Easier than hosting it yourself, since correctly installing can be tricky.)

AnswerHub (formerly Qato) is a managed clone of Quora for orgs. They caused quite an uproar because they originally hewed much too closely to Quora's design.

[edit: I see that AnswerHub is now more like StackOverflow.]
Yes its true, they can't be twitter but they have a fine product which can be monetized without taking away from their shoot for the stars plans.

I always believe in having a profit, so when you fail in shooting-for-the-stars you fail into profitability, stability, and the dolldroms of merely having six figures in your salary instead of eight in your stock portfolio.