skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's hard for me to really say, but at the least I can talk about my own experience. I began learning Common Lisp by going through "Land of Lisp" by Conrad Barski, and because it was so fun it really helped to keep me motivated while learning such a different way of programming. The book was also useful in that you learned through writing short programs which actually did something, which I found to be a great teaching style. I mean, I really, really loved going through that book.

As far as I know, there are no comparable books for Clojure. However, once I became familiar with CL, it was not at all difficult to pick up Clojure. Sure, Clojure has some new ideas, especially when it comes to mutability and concurrency. But in terms of the basic language, it's very similar to CL and in many ways it's easier to work with.

As for emacs - I also strongly recommend using it. It has great support for lisp and really makes development a joy. Emacs itself is written in a lisp variant, elisp. If you do decide to go with emacs, use this: https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit . It's a great set of packages pulled together by someone who, it turns out, is very big in the Clojure community. I'm not really sure what the best resource is for learning emacs these days.

I've really enjoyed the way I've learned lisp, and I feel comfortable recommending that you start with Land of Lisp and emacs. I hope this helps!
Making 1$ is not the point. Same way as writing single line of code is not the point of the recipe about how to deal with writer block that says "write single line of code".

Also problem with too many crappy games and do little awesome games cant be solved by telling people go stop making bad games and instead focus and make more awesome games.

I believe it's more about encouraging a lot of people to write as many games as they can and build better mechanisms for discovery of awesome games.

When I first saw android market (I skipped the iphone) I was amazed how idiotically simple it was. Newest and highest ranked, few categories and that's all? How am I supposed to find anything amusing for myself with such crude tools. After few hours of using it I could suggest 4 or 5 improvements that would make my experience there immensely better.

I'd like to have something like jinni.com for games. Something that understands what games are and who I am and how those two things relate.
California companies with 5+ employees must now provide pensions?
If you think you've found a bug, please let us know by tweeting or emailing team@, and we'll get it fixed. We haven't had downtime in 2 months, so I'm curious what seemed to be broken.
apt is pretty configurable though.
For example I get an automatic email every day notifying me of package upgrades that are available. Only security patches are installed automatically (you can even specify individual packages to be excluded altogether).

I've mainly used mysql and never lost data due to an upgrade (we backup before an upgrade anyway), YMMV of course.
“Drilling” Through the Big Data
"The law is aimed at businesses with five or more employees that don’t offer pensions or 401(k) savings programs. The law requires companies to contribute 3 percent of a worker’s salary to a retirement account. Workers will be enrolled in the program unless they choose to opt out."
You'd have murdered him by now had you ever read Markdown.pl or run into its hundreds of bugs and corner cases
file.{009..011}
It entirely depends on your usage. My coworker uses them for turn by turn and that works great for him. I use it for transit, and it's not so great.

I get that they wanted to open up transit for other apps (or couldn't build it in for some reason) but I really do hate the amount of times I have to tap to get bus info now. I would much rather the integration.

For this, Google Maps works great, except when the bus site isn't working properly, which tends to be once a year when we have a massive influx of people come to town.
I agree.

But to be fair, there are a lot of "projects" that can't stand alone, but are valuable to existing businesses. The current vogue is for these to be initiated as startups.

It sounds more glamorous than a bigco project, and sometimes it is. Sometimes it's even more profitable for the founders than the cushy bigco job (with benefits and accounting and budgets etc) that they didn't have during those years of effort.

But usually not. The rewards have to come from elsewhere.
I kick in the pants, using a textbook tied to his foot?

I think analogy has been stretched past breaking point here.

Ok i'm going to have to launch something now just to try it out
If too many people generate fake clicks, advertisers will no longer want to place expensive ads with Google. That loss could easily amount to 10 (or even 11) figures. Over 90% of Google's revenue comes from advertising. Even a slight reduction in that revenue could cost billions.

If AdSense is associated with websites that contain copyright-infringing material, Google could find itself on the losing side of a gigantic lawsuit with the MAFIAA. That loss, too, could easily amount to billions.

If AdSense is associated with any other kind of content with questionable legality (child porn, hate speech, bomb-making tutorials, etc), there could be similar financial ramifications, or worse, damage to Google's brand. This can also be worth billions.

So it might make sense, from a purely financial point of view, to be overly aggressive in banning AdSense users. A few false positives might cost tens of millions of dollars, but that could be the lesser of two evils if the alternative is to let a few false negatives slip by.

Edit: As for lack of communication, someone at Google seems to think that letting people know too many details about exactly which page violates which policy would allow the bad guys to work around those policies, leading to more false negatives. Security through obscurity! Similarly, if you ever set up a mail server, you'll quickly realize that Google doesn't let you know exactly what you need to do to get rid of that pesky "via your.hostname.com" message. You could try adding DKIM and cross your fingers, but there's no guarantee. That's an anti-spam & anti-phishing feature, and Google doesn't want spammers and phishers to know its exact policies and algorithms.

According to Wikipedia [1], AdSense represents 28% of Google's ad revenue. But unlike ads placed in Google's own pages, Google needs to pay out the majority (~68%) of that revenue to website owners, so AdSense's actual contribution to profit is much lower than that. Google has plenty of other places where they can place ads far more profitably, even if a lot of third-party websites dropped AdSense.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adsense
This is one of the reasons I like Iain M Banks' space-fights, no matter the other flaws: yes, they're a bunch of drones fighting, but those drones are as entertaining characters as the flesh-and-blood passengers.
I think maybe there is value to people like me who are not professional game developers and have always wanted to make a game at some point but found the time commitment too much. You may not have a month free to work on something, but you might have a spare weekend.

It doesn't really matter if most of the games are crappy, the only costs are 48 hours of time and maybe a few MB of server space somewhere.
Of course this doesn't mean markets aren't within some small constant factor of being perfectly efficient.
水郷の町・佐原のまちなみ / Sawara,the riverside district
Generally with NP-complete problems - that small constant factor is still often an order of magnitude away from optimal (path finding/search/salesman/shortest subsequence etc).
> can't use the one that powers the display

Not true. I'm running OpenCL GPU code while reading this on the same machine with one AMD 6570 GPU right now.

> only Nvidia

Not completely true. Nvidia are doing much more, but AMDs cards are more than capable and OpenCL can work. AMD was/is certainly the favourite of the Bitcoin miners.
A slightly long and/or dodgy video by the professor who wrote this (I'm setting your expectations): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iOJZZFDKpc

I found it rather enlightening - but the paper is still highly readable and I encourage HNers to peruse it and perhaps check out the video as well.

Previous discussions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2895474

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144548

More from the professor: http://philipmaymin.com/cv.pdf?q=phil/cv.pdf
The article reminds me that in the early 90s there were a pair of games - Elite and Frontier - which had realistic movement in space. The first half of every battle was spent in time dilation (you wouldn't want real time) while you and your opponent accelerated to generally match vectors.

As for the 'carriers in space' thing that he thinks is incorrect, it's at odds with the rest of what he says. While he does defend his point with a function of sea carriers providing the interface between sea and air, that's not all they do. The aircraft carrier doesn't function as a battleship, the fighter aircraft do. The carrier functions as a support ship, an auxilliary, to the craft doing the fighting. Same in space. The large support carrier gets to hold the supplies, living quarters, extra fuel and so on, and the small craft contain the bare necessities for waging battle without having to lug around needless support slowing them down (remember also he talks of issues regarding mass and agility). I'm not saying that it's viable, just that there's more to a carrier than 'sea/air interface'.
I don't own an iPhone and never used one, but reading the comments is surprising. I didn't realize how bad the Google Maps app was for iPhone, ie. no turn-by-turn, large ads, et.al. I'm rather shocked that people are complaining so much about this one app in the entire iOS ecosystem and if their lives depended so much on maps that they now refuse to upgrade to iOS6 over it, what were they paying $300+ awful reception (in Los Angeles) per phone for the past several iterations for when you can get an Android w/ turn-by-turn for $50?

Why the current maps is what they are is left to conjecture, but I wonder that if there was a push-back about no turn-by-turn and lower quality maps for the past, idk, 2 years, if Apple would have released their new version of maps.

I never got the impression that Apple listened to or cared too much about what their customers wanted, nor do I think they have the required data abilities to deal with creating a good mapping algorithm. It is quite possible, that with zero to little feedback about no turn-by-turn, that iOS meant far more to the customer than maps. As a passive observer, I am wonder why maps alone is creating so much push-back. Isn't there something special about iOS that moves people to spend their hard-earned money on each next device, often with no convincing improvements, sight-unseen?
Why WinRAR team didn't add digital signing to the code for that VMs? Old WinRAR versions would contain VM interpreter, public RSA key and signature verification code; new WinRAR versions would embed already signed blobs of VM code into archive files; private RSA key would stay on WinRAR developers' computers only. And no one would be able to execute arbitrary VM code on end user PC.
The title of the post in HN says "mourning", but it should say "morning".
I'm assuming nuclear fusion is viable with the development of the ITER and DEMO plants in the South of France.

If they aren't viable - I'm calling time of death on the world.
Direct link: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2284v2 [PDF]
I wonder if was because Picton was unincorporated (I believe it happened 14 years ago)
Russel your problem here is that we are looking at something that is about to change technology forever and you are taking the least productive path to discuss it. It's very clear to the majority of us that this is big! It's not tested simply because it's so new and innovative. We are fortunate enough to be the first ones to have this insight shared with. It's now our job to make amazing projects that put it to use and inherently test/prove it. That's what Brett is trying to do here.

I don't think you really do grasp the magic of what he has come up with. Yes you saw his video 8 months ago. But if you did truly grok what he is putting forth, you wouldn't make this generic rebuttal about whether its tested or not. That can be applied to anything.

We come to hacker news to get the kernels of the newest innovation that is happening around the world before anyone else. If you require ideas to be tested before you do anything with it, you will be late to the party. Your loss.

Now Russel can you please stop standing up for this point. It's unfortunately the first thread on this awesome piece and a waste of our energies to discuss.

Lets discuss how we are going to implement this watershed idea for innovation!!
You're claiming node.js wouldn't exist without jquery?
A bit of history on the work of the NRL on modified Fischer-Tropsch processes / Hydrogenation:

From Wikipedia on Fischer-Tropsch: ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer–Tropsch_process )

Carbon dioxide reuse

In 2009, chemists working for the U.S. Navy investigated a modified Fischer–Tropsch process for generating fuels. When hydrogen was combined with the carbon dioxide over a cobalt-based catalyst, the reaction produced mostly methane gas. However, the use of an iron-based catalyst reduced methane production to 30 per cent with the rest being predominantly short-chain, unsaturated hydrocarbons [27] The introduction of ceria to the catalyst's support, functioning as a reverse water gas shift catalyst, furthermore increased the yield of the reaction. [28]. The short chain hydrocarbons were successfully upgraded to liquid fuels over solid acid catalysts, such as zeolites.

[A patent application and a more in-detail research paper describing the process(es) is referenced there.]

Overall this looks very interesting as a military application (independence from other sources, logistics).

You will find more articles from 2009+ on this topic by searching for "Fischer-Tropsch seawater".
Economics is clear when explaining its foundation: Markets are only as efficient as its participants are rational and fully informed. The entirety of modern economics is built upon the presumption that the last two conditions are 100% true.
But accelerating a kinetic warhead to .98c is just as much scifi as saying 'shoot them with phasors'. It's not something we can do with current or foreseeable tech (as far as I am aware).

The other thing is that the faster the missiles go, the harder they are to aim. You lead your enemy's ship and fire the missile, they make a minor course correction in the meantime, and your missile has to detect it and change its vector to match.

Space combat is one of those fun things to discuss where no matter what you suggest, someone will come along and advise you of something you've forgotten.
Computational Complexity is about asymptotics so constant factors are irrelevant. In this case if perfects markets require numbers of operations that grow astronomically with respect to input and P <> NP then the best we could do are hueristics and approximations. Indeed it is possible (I think likely) that in many cases even getting good approximations will be in NP.

Also worth noting is that the expensive nature of being perfectly informed is one of the main drivers of the large sizes of firms. We can measure how well markets are doing with respect to the amount of excess, beyond normal profit that producers can capture in the long term. Current polarization of wealth and excess of rent suggest no, we are very far from efficient markets.

There is an argument one can give that the abstraction of interacting humans leads to a computer more powerful than a regular turing machine. I don't believe this but everyone who thinks AI is not possible on a turing machine does.
You, my good sir, are a genius
Misleading title.

If most people feel that Facebook is not an appropriate way to interact with close friends or business associates, then the "full potential" of Facebook in its current form obviously does not include interacting with close friends or business associates.

Using something to its "full potential" doesn't mean using it for everything whatsoever. Are you using your compact hybrid car to its "full potential" when you use it to go off-roading? Do you really want to compile your 1M LOC program on your phone in the name of using your phone to its "full potential"?
True, there is a lot to be learned from behavioural economics. But neoclassiscal stuff is not all bad. The notion of bounded rationality which places limits on the rationality of people is kind of old. And in aggregrate; people, corporations in particular do tend to approximate rationality. This is why they can be 'psychopathic'.
AMD, BlueStacks Bring 500,000 Android Apps To Windows
I take it you never used CUDA or OpenCL before? Because everything you said is complete bullshit.

>Well, multi GPU debugging is terrible. You need different cards(you can't use the one that powers the display) and there is only one company that counts there, Nvidia.

You can run computations on the same card as the display. You can compile to software emulation to debug logic code.

>Nvidia is married with Microsoft, and the only intuitive tool you can use for debugging is Windows-only, no mac or Linux support.

CUDA works on Windows and Linux, not sure how good the mac support is.

>Another problem is that it evolves from graphics and you need to use graphic concepts whether you need it or not.

You don't need to understand any graphics concepts. It's parallel programming concepts you need.
I agree wholeheartedly, oh-my-zsh is usually recommended to beginners with zsh, but I've always found that to be a mistake.

If you don't understand what zsh can do, how do you expect to take advantage of a highly specialized pre-configuration?
Many of my friends believe a) submarines still have deck guns and b) warships at sea still fight by drawing alongside and attempting to board. And these are the military enthusiasts!
No, it's based on them being true enough that other approximations are less useful models.
What would be a more realistic portrayal?

Add in no sound in space, no seeing lasers from the side, battles where you can't visibly see your enemy, ships going 'dead' without much visible going on - there's nowhere to 'sink' if you're catastrophically holed, and vehicular explosions really aren't that common despite what movies would have you believe. If you want 'action', there's not a lot of breadth in a realistic depiction of a space battle.
We can look at it this way too: assume an oiler has maybe 10,000 t of oil and takes ten days to travel:
1E7 kg with energy density of 1E7 J/kg, in 1E6 seconds means an average power supplied by one oiler to be in the order of 100 megawatts. Or 10 kg/second. If that synfuel generation rate can be sustained, then the oiler is not needed.

The Nimitz class carriers have two 100 MW reactors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A4W_reactor

Of course, there's efficiencies, probably the oilers don't always go full speed, there's different distances etc etc...

If we assume 1% efficiency and one dedicated reactor, then we get 0.1 kg/second, 8 tons per day. You could load about two Hornets' internal fuel tanks with that.

In the sea you could probably also try other things than nuclear reactors, like farm algae and harvest it to produce biofuels (biofuel has already been tested in a B-52), or put solar or wind plants out in the ocean where there's space. No energy storage problems if the fuel is generated in situ.
Steve Jobs Is the Ronald Reagan of the Tech World
Wow, does anyone else see the startup metaphor here?

You're a little guy, running around and grabbing all of the opportunity you can, making sure you don't run head first into the big guys.

Sometimes it's advantageous to shrink yourself. You're more agile and able to navigate between the big guys more deftly.

But in the end, the best strategy is to grow quickly, because as you grow, the amount of surface area and the amount of opportunity you have grows, creating a feedback loop of success.
You find out where your specific target market hangs out online and ask there. What you're asking is for all people from all niches to gather in one place for the sole purpose of being questioned. Even if it existed, people don't know what they want.
I have only had time to skim through this very quickly, but it seems entirely based on false definitions.

He begins so:

The efficient market hypothesis claims that all information relevant to future prices is immediately reflected in the current prices of assets. In other words, you cannot consistently make money using publicly available information.

Then, he encodes a 3-SAT problem into market orders and claims:

So what should the market do? If it is truly efficient, and there exists some way to execute all of those separate OCO orders in such a way that an overall profit is guaranteed ... then the market, by its assumed efficiency, ought to be able to find a way to do so.

So he defines market efficiency to be all-knowing, and then gives at an NP-hard problem to solve. It seems like he could have given it the halting problem as well, only it might be harder to encode as market orders. But the point is that an efficient market is "all knowing" only that which is "knowable". The market isn't an oracle that can answer any question about the past, but a true machine that can answer all questions about the past that are answerable using the machine.

What he's doing seems similar to saying "if God exists then P=NP". After all, if God is omniscient and omnipotent, He could solve all NP problems in polynomial time. :)
In general, approximation of NP-complete problems is not that simple. Assuming P /= NP,

Subset-sum can be approximated within 1+epsilon for any requested epsilon>0 [a PTAS]

MAX-3SAT can be approximated within 8/7 and not better. Vertex cover can be aproximated within 2 and its not known if that's optimal.

Set cover can be approximated within O(log n) and not better.

Clique and TSP have no sensible approximation.

I would argue that potentially a loss of factor 2 is not an order of magnitude away from optimal. I don't know what is the situation for markets.
This question is subjective. Slackware is cool if you like to know how things work. It doesn't hide a lot of things that other distros automate for you.

So, in a sense, it has the advantage of keeping it simple and, thus, being a better platform for learning how Linux works.

It also offers an environment that resembles more a BSD system. So, if you like those systems, but cannot run those, maybe it is a better alternative than, say, Ubunto or Redhat (from a user perspective of course).

update: typo
KISS. IMO.

KISS leads to a lightweight and fast system and moves much responsibility back to the user, which means that the user has to learn how the system works. I wouldn't be, were i am, without using stuff like Arch and FreeBSD.

Know your system, especially in 2012.
Well in my experience it's the best linux distribution. It's more stable, simple, secure, easy to use (yes rtfm) and performant distribution around.
Yeah, I never figured out how to navigate around the UI with the keyboard on OSX as well as I did on Windows... I'll be adding faster menu access as well!
And maybe the fact that it had Twitter's name behind it?
But that doesn't preclude interesting and visual things! It's just that those elements you are familiar with from old technology are not there.

In realistic space warfare, there might be something entirely different and still visual and aural.

Unfortunately, that might require thinking in new ways, creativity and an open mind. Hence it can not be done in movies that only recycle ideas.
Scientists make old muscles young again in attempt to combat aging
Unfortunately, most economists don't develop other models, so the other models are very immature.