skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. They should have hired best UX engineers for the design. 2. Hosted the solution in the cloud and called and made sure the host is aware of the upcoming traffic. 3. Rolled out the application in test mode at least a week before so that staff can do trail runs. 4. Worry less about hacking and made it easy to login (just via an ID) ~ me being Captain Hindsight.
I spent a huge amount of ad money on reddit for literally no conversions and a handful of clicks. These were ads that were hugely effective on lots of other sites.

Spending your money to advertise on reddit is less effective than simply flushing it down the toilet.
Hello Dr. Emmett Brown! :)
Its disingenuous to call scheme and racket lisps. They have parenthesis and first class functions but the similarities stop there.

So yes I equate Lisp with common lisp. I didn't read the entire article (far too long) but he does mention 'defmacro' which is in Common Lisp.
Six strikes copyright disconnection event in NYC, Nov 28
How to Create a Mobile Game the hits the Top of the Charts
Very good article, though I doubt it'll convince the usual mass of unbelievers. (I love Lisp, for the record, though my primary exposure has been through Emacs Lisp - so shoot me).

A really great book that helps you get appreciate the concepts in Lisp, without really talking about Lisp directly too much, is "Patterns of Software" by Peter Gabriel. http://amzn.to/TxDKGG

I found it to be a very enlightening read. Definitely a book you have to sink into with plenty of time and quiet.
Yes and no.

On one hand, management consultants are typically working with the executives of a company, and usually one of those executives will have been a former consultant (the executive boardrooms of companies are filled with them). Not to mention that both consultants and executives usually have the same set of "skills."

On the other hand, one former management consultant I spoke to told me that executives would often hire consultants to tell them what they already knew. The only purpose of bringing the consultants on-board was so that their recommendations would serve as political validation in case they had to explain their decision (i.e. if they failed).
False equivocation BS.
>It's almost as if the market, left to its own devices, doesn't always make the best long-term decisions when short-term benefit weighs in opposition.

It does not.

To say it does is an extraordinary claim with deserves extraordinary proof --and, no, ideological ramblings from economists is not proof.

Furthermore, this opinion regarding the market, ie. the "free market" concept, is a very isolated in acceptance Anglo-Saxon idea.

Far from being a scientific conclusion, like gravity or evolution, even though it's touted as such from it's proponents.
In a post below this, user Asian11 admitted to a group of people being his peers and classmates. They also used the word "we". That seems to be more than 'gut based conjecture'.
You could trick it with a picture of a happy family watching TV in front of it. Bathroom breaks all around!
This.

As much as I recommend that a serious power user learn and use a solid shell (bash or zsh, as my earlier comment suggests), several nines worth of users probably never will do so. Many could, though it's still probably somewhere between 10-25% of all users who would really have the aptitude to do so. And I do feel that the time invested in learning good tools on a well engineered platform pays of in spades.

That said: general-purpose computers are hard to use, very complex, and far more users know how to use them in some small way but really have little or no deep understanding of what they're doing or why. It's something that the tablet/handheld market's addressing, though I fear that the inclination to turn these into pure consumption devices will ultimately torpedo this goal.
Live stream of Light Table in the Node.js Knockout
I think a legal system should very much be stable, but it should also be flexible enough not to prevent innovation elsewhere from happening.
> We absolutely intend to make it a powerful platform for computation on big datasets.

The datasets I run on tend to be several terabytes and all the clusters that I use utilize various distributed filesystems (eg. Lustre [1] or Dcache [2] or Xrootd [3]) to store these files across local storage on all the nodes of the cluster.

I think for big datasets some kind of support for these distributed filesystems will be necessary as most private (scientific) computing clusters use them. The complication is of course that to use these filesystems, one needs to build support for each access protocol into a python module (off the top of my head I'm not sure if they exist yet; perhaps they do). While most of these filesystems do offer standard posix 'mounting', this is usually not recommended for performance reasons.

Perhaps I'm outside of the intended use case anyway. To a certain extent this problem is solved for my field of research (of course nothing ever works all the time heh), as all LHC/OSG Computing Grid centers run the same Scientific Linux distribution with the theory being that any code that works on one should work on another.

But this sounds great for teaching classes and labs! I look forward to using it.

[1] http://wiki.lustre.org/index.php/Main_Page
[2] http://www.dcache.org/
[3] http://xrootd.slac.stanford.edu/
Does Facebook have "biological effects” and potentially cause cancer?
>There is no place for humor or overly subjective terms like "evil" in a software license or other legal document, and the problem with Douglas Crockford's license is that he fails to understand that.

No, the problem is that the other guys WANT to use Douglas Crockford's code.

It's they who are needy and demanding, not Douglas, who doesn't have to "understand" anything.
Poor copywriting. If the snark were written more precisely so that it couldn't be considered misleading, Apple would probably have been able to get the press points without being forced to put a large statement on their homepage disclaiming the previous one as "inaccurate".
And yet, despite this disaster,

Mitt Romney’s campaign handed out more than $200,000
in bonuses last month to senior staffers, according
to new disclosure records filed Thursday.

Richard Beeson, Romney’s national political director,
received a $37,500 payment on Aug. 31 in addition to his
salary, according to records filed with the Federal
Election Commission.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/wp/2012/09...

When I first heard about this, I remarked to a friend "what the hell are they doing giving out bonuses? The bonus should be that your candidate gets elected!"
bryanh, just saw your pull request, I'm excited to get your contributions :)
like Frank on It's Always Sunny? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTZ_ZPIEqBw
InDinero: Getting through the “trough of sorrow”
I'm surprised they only order from Jing Jing in Palo Alto. I mean, it's a great place but there are lots of other good places too. (Hunan Garden on El Camino comes to mind).
As the person being replied to, I'll respond. This is an excellent post. Major upvote. I agree with everything the OP is saying.

My first point about "flow" is, I think, connected to this idea. Stupid wastes time. It breaks flow and replaces meaningful, objective feedback with noise. I also agree strongly that our happiness is correlated strongly with spending as much of our time on programming (I.e. real work) and as little time on stupid shit as possible.
That's a really interesting point. I think a big part of anything like this is how prepared you are. For example, Florida routinely gets hit with much stronger storms, but they are much better prepared. New York doesn't deal with many Hurricanes, so our infrastructure--that millions have learned to depend on--failed. To your point, it's amazing how places and people can adapt to different conditions. I'd love to hear more about running a startup in Lebanon
You can do cool stuff with unhygienic macros, however, like anaphoric macros. Interested readers should check out On Lisp by Paul Graham, as well as Let Over Lambda by Doug Hoyte.
You look like an angry person man, chill the fuck out.

Rule of thumb is if you build something this nice and with that order of magnitude in complexity you can put My Little Poney stickers on your homepage and still get respect. Who cares about the "attitude" and the "language" for Christ's sake, they BUILT stuff with their own hands and are offering it to the world, they can do whatever they damn please.
Or unix epoch if you want an easy life when it comes to querying.
well, other than "doesn't work", "broken", and "can't", I dont know what exactly the problem is.. care to explain further?
great listener who could bring people together

Cite needed. When has he ever done this?
Sadly it's not only management consultants doing that one: there's a certain proportion of the engineering-consulting business that consists of management calling in someone with an engineering degree to give a PowerPoint presentation to validate a point or provide political cover for a decision. I don't have any experience in that myself, but more than one of my friends are in jobs like that, which pay well but don't seem to produce much job satisfaction.
Charging an iPhone without AC power
For all the praise Obama’s team won in 2008 for its high-tech wizardry, its success masked a huge weakness: too many databases. Back then, volunteers making phone calls through the Obama website were working off lists that differed from the lists used by callers in the campaign office. Get-out-the-vote lists were never reconciled with fundraising lists. It was like the FBI and the CIA before 9/11: the two camps never shared data. “We analyzed very early that the problem in Democratic politics was you had databases all over the place,” said one of the officials. “None of them talked to each other.” So over the first 18 months, the campaign started over, creating a single massive system that could merge the information collected from pollsters, fundraisers, field workers and consumer databases as well as social-media and mobile contacts with the main Democratic voter files in the swing states.

http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world...

Sounds like they spent quite a bit of time and money on that. Nice article, by the way, though it's obviously a bit of a puff piece.
His use of "mistakes" is a verbal fallacy called equivocation. Not all mistakes are the same.

wikipedia: Equivocation ("to call by the same name") is classified as both a formal and informal logical fallacy. It is the misleading use of a term with more than one meaning or sense
You can still do anaphoric macros with hygienic macros.

http://blog.racket-lang.org/2008/02/dirty-looking-hygiene.ht...

<edit> And http://blog.racket-lang.org/2011/04/writing-syntax-case-macr...
I don't like Stallman the man, but really appreciate everything he and others at FSF have done and I think they certainly deserve a lot. But I personally don't like their definition of "free" (and when they draw the line) and it irritates me when I hear their "free" is becoming the de facto definition. Just like it irritates them when they hear Linux (and not GNU/Linux).

(I haven't done even 1/100000th of what Stallman has done, and don't think I ever will be, but still I'm sure I can criticize him. You didn't suggest I can't - I just wanted to say that I'm aware of this fact!).
"Indeed, the Mitt Romney.com site still bears the headline: "Smaller, Smarter Simpler Government."

Any hack manager that comes into a new corporation immediately attempts to recreate some past victory that he had elsewhere.

Romney's experience is buying companies, cutting them back to appear profitable, then flipping them when he could or plundering them into bankruptcy and personal profit when he couldn't. "Harvesting" is the term he used.

So that's all he knows. Cuttting. "Smaller."
Silicon Knights ordered to destroy Unreal Engine games
hm as someone who always has a few servers up in the cloud i found the idea exotic at first. especially since you dont need github, any ssh connection between two computers will do. but thats not always easy and the more i think about it, git over xmpp sounds like a cool idea. but still, in the end one can just email or dropbox the whole zipped repo. and git patches and whatnot.
Wow, I thought the bonuses he gave out at the convention for winning the nomination made sense. I wonder what last month's were for, "winning" the debates?
Interesting. I think there's a demand for a generic, protocol-agnostic git push framework where you can write plugins for both sending and automated receiving.

All git patches boil can be boiled down to ASCII patches. There's no reason you can't write a framework to send/receive ASCII-formatted git patches/pulls/pushes via email, xmpp, twitter, etc.
What is the future of contact management – is it the address book?
unelectable whackjob

Hard to say that, given how the so-called "electable" guy did.

My objection always was, the republicans nominated the guy who could not beat the last guy who could not beat Obama (i.e. McCain).
>I don't know why people focus so much on "default" desktop environments. No desktop is more supported than another one, as long as there is a package

That's not true. The "default" gets much more attention from users, and most new users will use it.

In a project like Ubuntu, for example, the "default" gets more funding, more people working on it, including professionally and more tailored themes.
Yes, Companies Are Harvesting and Selling Your Facebook Profile | Common Dreams
Watching this play out is hilarious. I'm not quite sure if it is schadenfreude, the morbid curiosity akin to that experienced from watching a snake eat a rabbit, or just the prospect of watching an 800lb. gorilla behave like a spoiled child, but I have a real feeling that Apple could end up fighting the UK court systems and losing, very, very hard.

I simply cannot believe that Apple's previous behaviour was sanctioned by its legal team. The idea of not just losing in court but then pissing the judge off...wow. There's a really childish part of me that hopes that Apple won't comply with this latest judgement just to see what the court does next. Monetary fines? Product bans? Executive jail time?

I believe that the best thing Apple can do now is fold, and grovel. However, I have no idea if they'll do that. I've said before in previous threads: the UK court system is much more invested in proving its own authority than Apple is invested in a silly argument with Samsung. And on that note, if you were Samsung, you'd likely be rolling in the aisles just about now.

EDIT: I see that they've complied. I see why, but I'm disappointed!
So what unpredictable performance characteristics do CL & Haskell exhibit, that languages like Java or Erlang do not?

Consider Neo4J, Cassandra, CouchDB, Riak, Voldemort, all major players in the current NoSQL world. All use Java & Erlang.

Just how much computation does your database need to do, unless it's some special in-memory database like Redis? If you have your data on ordinary disks, you'll spend most of the time waiting for them.
Romney himself has a considerable track record of success in the private sector. Hard to think he would know less about what works than Obama, who has never worked there.
Maybe not built with hate, but used in anger?
Macros extend the power of the language way beyond its core primitives. For instance, I wrote a macro, TEMPORARY-ASSIGN. I use it like this:

(TEMPORARY-ASSIGN ((traversing obj) true)
... do stuff ...)

In Python, the equivalent code would be.

old_trav = obj.traversing
obj.traversing = True
try:
... do stuff...
finally:
obj.traversing = old_trav

There's no way to abstract out that pattern in Python. Every time you want to temporarily assign a field or variable, you're stuck writing the above code. Another example:

(defun foo (x y) ...)

is how you define a function in Common Lisp. I wrote a macro, DEFUN-CACHE

(defun-cache foo (x y) ...)

which is the cached version. In Python, you can do the same with decorators, but that's one more tacked-on feature. Lisp programmers have been writing defun-cache since 40 years.

If you want to learn more, Paul Graham's On Lisp is the definitive book on the topic. You can download it for free http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html, and it's very readable, even if you're not a Lisper.
To add to jdoliner's answer, the reason why you can write table('foo').filter(lambda x: x['bar'] > 5).run() is because we do some language trickery on the client side to compile the query to an AST. In this case, we overload greater than operator, call the lambda function once on the client with a special object, and return an AST. This AST is then sent to the server and executed there.

It's rather difficult to integrate into a host language like that smoothly from the driver implementation perspective, but once the driver is written the user experience is amazing because you can write queries that look exactly like Python, but they're executed entirely on the server.
I wonder if this is to do th google new offering and its possible attempts to bypass whatever firewall systems China have around its internet http://www.google.com.ph/intl/en/mobile/landing/freezone/ind...
from the down votes apparently it doesn't work in the lab either!
This is a great point, and it's one of the more frustrating things to encounter as a developer who knows more than just "the language I'm writing a website in". Security is not optional and security must be managed at every level of the infrastructural stack.

But that's hard, and nobody's going to know anyway, so let's just roll with it.
This is a feature we've talked a lot about. Another idea we think is interesting is having the database detect schema such that users could see a readout that said:
100% of your documents have a integer field named "foo" would you like to make this a schema constraint?
Wow, looks great! I'm excited to try it out.

The Github graphs are really interesting too, that's a lot of love/work right there!

https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/graphs/impact
How is scaling accomplished if you are running of a few Mac minis?
I'm not so sure. Intentionally disruptive behavior by the opposition -- or even some motivated kid who wanted to cause trouble for the campaign -- would be one of my biggest concerns if I were designing this thing.
Create Genuine Connections with the People Who Make Failure Impossible
Not the parent, but...

You write a cheque to X.
X hands it to their bank A.
A asks your bank B for the amount on the cheque.
B asks A for the cheque to check its valid.
B sends money to A.
Done. Which is why I thought they take days to be processed.
I think, using git for what it traditionally is used for, there probably isn't much demand for XMPP. Joey's thing seems to be expanding the horizons of what we can use git for though. Building cooler toys out of git, not just with it.
What, he didn't have any say in who he hired to make this work?

The POTA doesn't actually personally work on many projects. He relies on people to get them done. If Romney couldn't get something as crucial as this right, then how the heck would he have gone running the country?
We're planning to add secondary indexes in the next few releases. Doing them well in distributed systems is really hard. It's relatively easy to check off a box and introduce it as a feature, to make it actually behave well and allow for good performance is incredibly tricky. This is why they didn't make it into this release -- since it's a core feature of every db, we wanted to take the time to do this right.
> So, like the Jewish dietary laws, this prohibition actually helped keep the Jewish people (relatively) healthy.

The kashrut laws are about morality, and not about the lack of refigeration.

In an effort to live a good and moral life, Jews are told not to eat animals that may have eaten human remains (shellfish eat whatever is in their path, pigs are wonderful for disposing of bodies).

You can get might sick from spoiled lamb or goat, as you can form spoiled pig.

Furthermore, the "no meat with dairy" is an extrapolation of the exhortation not to boil a baby in its mothers milk. So Jews extrapolate and don;t have dairy products when they have red meat.

It is about honoring the Lord, not about spoiled food.
Faith based development.
So, even more like Steve Jobs? I'm not taking a jab here, but I wonder if that's how they see it.
>I wish I could land contracts like this one. Can you imagine building an app that the client will only need for 1 day, and you still get paid even if the thing does not work? The chance for fraud is huge. Who would even allow this? The people pitching this must have been some very talented salespeople...

Anecdotally, this is exactly how large consultancies, particularly those who specialize in serving the public sector, operate.

1) Deploy an army of "talented" salespeople to establish favorable executive-level relationships by exploiting every available loophole to provide trips, gifts, dinners and sporting events. Once the top has been won over, everyone below will fall in line.

2) Write contracts meeting the barest minimum interpretation of the requirements. Design them to specifically exploit uninformed procurement departments which are better equipped to source millions in copier paper or bolts than complex software.

3) Farm out any actual deliverable to the cheapest sub available nationwide. Ideally, you will have hidden travel and per diem for the talent in #2 leaving you free to fly in folks from the cheapest parts of the country.

4) Upon encountering any serious issue once work is underway simply scapegoat the current PM and shuffle in a new one.

5) Go to #1 employing the latest project as a reference that likely won't even be properly checked. In the event that diligence is performed, feed them to one of your friendly executives.
the old population is slowly dying off

As if the young population won't age and replace them? Believe me, age, responsibility, and having kids changes your outlook. When I was 25 and didn't know anything, I was pretty liberal too. I voted for Jesse Jackson once. And I supported Romney this year, even though he wasn't conservative enough for me, he was better than the alternative.
Ahh, I'll be able to tell you tomorrow!
The Mind-Blowing Installations of Bloemencorso
Joe may be responding to this soon, but in the meantime I'll chime in. There is no way to verify the propagation reliably without either introducing strong performance inefficiencies (e.g. two phase commit protocol), or divergence (paxos, semi lattices, etc.) In our implementation we're using immediately consistent algorithms for data, but eventually consistent algorithms for cluster metadata. This means that if there is a metadata conflict, the user is presented with an issue (via the web ui or CLI) that they have to resolve. We'll also be adding automated resolution soon.

We basically have something very similar to zookeper baked into rethinkdb. We wrote it internally from scratch to better suit the needs of our architecture.