skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Common Lisp is 30 years old -- why hasn't the state of the art advanced since then? It's really quite shameful.

I don't think it's shameful. APL is close to 50 years old now, and it's most recent incarnations (J and K) are 20 years old - and they're still avant-garde, even though the world is slowly catching up to them (with LINQ and friends), although not as elegantly or cleanly.

What exactly are you missing about the "state of the art"? Entire K modules usually fit on one screen; Reportedly, kOS http://kparc.com/ is an operating system in 5 screenfuls of text.
Perhaps a series of SubReddits?
The article is interesting, but gives some bad instructions on how to track outbound links and also probably how to track form submissions. Because of the asynchronous nature of communications back/forth from Google Analytics if you load a new page before an event is properly tracked, you won't be able to see it on the GA Dashboard. Bad intel is worse than no intel at all.

Here's what Google itself has to say on the matter:
http://support.Google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

Here's how to correct one code example from the blog post:

//this function is OK, but probably an unnecessary abstraction of a one-liner
function trackEvent(category, action, label) {
window._gaq.push(['_trackEvent', category, action, label])
}

//this event handler will not track some non-negligible percentage of events
$("article a").click(function(e) {
var element = $(this)
var label = element.attr("href")
trackEvent("Outbound link", "Click", label)
});

//corrected outbound link event handler which gives GA 100 ms to register
//the event. higher than 100 risks UX degradation, lower increases the %
//of untracked events. 100 ms is happy medium
$("article a").click(function(e) {
e.preventDefault(); //stay on the page for now
var element = $(this)
var label = element.attr("href")
trackEvent("Outbound link", "Click", label)
//leave the page after a short delay
window.setTimeout("window.location.href='" + label + "'", 100);
});
bummer. the first thing I do when I buy a new domain is sign up there. they make it so easy to manage. all good things must come to an end I guess.
Projector hire london
projector hire london
The example abstracts cited in the article are particularly worrying to me. I would be interested in seeing if someone can explain why those papers are problems that smart people should be working on.

To a very pro-science layperson they seem especially absurd.
U.S. users: 121 billion minutes on social media, July 2012 - up 36%
Who will decide what has practical consequences?
Building more powerful clients for desktop and mobile. Think user tagging, comment filtering, custom sort order, interface improvements.
I'm not sure what the current best stack is for email (last time I hosted my own, the setup involved UUCP), but my ideal setup would be as follows:

- continue using Gmail as the main account

- have a catch-all on my server which simply forwards to the Gmail account

- for sending mail, have a regexp that when matched, will rewrite the 'from' username to that

As an example of the last point, if my subject has &hn& at the beginning, remove that string and change the from address to 'hn@example.com'.

I believe this should be possible with postfix. What I'm not sure of is if Gmail will flag my servers for the steady stream of spam being forwarded (I'd prefer to let Gmail's filters handle all spam).
There are many open problems in ethics and metaethics (i.e. what is right and wrong, is that even a thing, etc) that seem (to me) to have pretty clear practical consequences.

I think many of the problems could be phrased in a way to convince most people (that think about this kind of thing) as well.
and a link to the github page https://github.com/01org/graphbuilder
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4883875

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4886633
Notably absent from this guy's syllabus is anything concerning ethics, morality, values, or right and wrong. In all the fields he cites - even, to a large extent, psychology - values are exogenous.
Many other regions on the planet had also been in discord and warring for millennia, without producing an Industrial Revolution.

However the unbelievable progress made in the last centuries and today wouldn't be possible without having a lingua franca. The difficulties you'll have programming without knowing English are an excellent example.
Mashable's new design is beautiful (AKA not functional)
As a source repository its more than useful for non-toy projects from my experience. While the issue features a bit lacking when compared to full blown ticket trackers, the pull request feature is brilliant. I've yet to see another tool that makes code review and collaboration as simple and flexible as github's pull requests.
I've been using altomail for a while, it's nice. It's just a somewhat bugged preview, but I got impressed. I'm still figuring what they want in exchange for the service (it's free right now).

Anyways, it is just an UI on steroids, AOL didn't have the guts to roll their own new service.
So, you imagine what a philosopher does, and then tell this imaginary philosopher what to do?

Doesn't that strike you as awful presumptuous?
Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange explained in colors
Do you know of any smaller, publicly-traded companies which would benefit from a widespread shift towards RISC infrastructure? I had no idea that ARM was that close to being a viable competitor to x86, and after spending an hour reading about RISC vs CISC/ARM vs x86, I'm now looking for some stock to buy. ARMH is the obvious candidate, but it has had a huge run in the last few years, and the other big names in ARM processing are... well... already big. Any thoughts?
Any chance I could grab an invite too? My email: http://scr.im/backus

So quick :) thank you
Mail-to-Things Applescript with ML notifications - vanderVeer.be
thanks, also to the other people who invited me. Too bad, invites don't show up as a graph :)
I find the lack of ticket features in github has been the biggest blocker. Doing any reporting, or saved searches on github issues requires custom tooling.
>>> "The limitation of TDD is that it blocks rapid iteration in what the program should do. When you load the entire model of the program into your head, requirements change at the speed of thought. With TDD, they change at the speed of a lot of reading and typing."

I agree 1000% percent with that. You articulated very well what I see as the single biggest drawback of TDD.

It's as if you're still working with clay, but you put metal around it every 2 seconds, so you lose the benefit of working with clay.
Wouldn't mind an invite myself. While I was wandering the site I thought I had a break through idea only to discover that such a thing already existed. What I wanted was the pushd (dos command---dating myself) Then I realized that if I only would right click on a link and open it in a new window, then I have exactly what I want :)
Agreed. If you're going to give an unexpected user experience, it better be a damn good one.
just sent invite..
Well, we have to imagine philosopher; the philosopher Form can only be known to us through our experiences with "philosophers" we encounter, from which we can build an idea of the true Form philosopher :p
This is totally misleading, and may make people feel they are not good at programming.

To quote one of the masters of CS:

The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.

Dijkstra (1972) The Humble Programmer (EWD340)
> Can you recommend me a setup for using Arch as a desktop? Eg: which UI should I install?

I've been using Gnome3 for years and am very happy with it.
I've found that the little bits of bullshit philosophy I've accrued over the years find second lives as ideals with practical consequences.

By the time you reach Hegel it's all getting a bit silly; and there's a lot of early philosophy that can be dumped because we can directly interrogate reality on things that previous philosophers cannot.

It's like raging about maths or fundamental science. Turing's paper is a work which must be so far outside the ordinary fellow's experience as to be nearly an insult. It also invented the modern computer as a side-effect.
The buildings are all referred to by number on MIT campus too (Building 14), and while it takes a little while to get used to that it becomes second nature before long.
Just treat labels like remembering the closing tag of any html element.
>>>> "The answer is diet, nootropics, meditation, exercise and knowledge of techniques (e.g. how to memorise facts rapidly). I won't go into specifics but suffice it to say that most people are undernourished and are mentally impaired because of it."

Dude, if you have some concrete insights in these areas, you definitely should go into specifics. A lot of us would be very interested.
To be fair to AMD they did provide documentation to the open source community and paid engineers to work on open source projects. The same could not be said of the other major discrete GPU vendor Nvidia (who have only now started to make their closed source driver perform well). I've also found the closed source driver for AMD's APU range to be great on linux.
I'd love to see a browser plugin that corrects this. There are so many sites that just don't bother.
Except this fellow hasn't even left the cave, he's yelling at the shadow of a shadow of a philosopher.
Gmail's backend is written in Java.

The frontend is written in Javascript, it has nothing to do with GWT.
They also have CPUs and GPUs in most of the next generation games consoles.
Does any RSS/Atom client exist which can subtract feeds? So you can for example add HackerNews feed and subtract feeds from /r/politics and /r/worldpolitics so only link mentioned on HackerNews and not mentioned on /r/politics or /r/worldpolitics would pass?
Perhaps, but the other options to make it not anonymous don't allow label clicking either.
Other classic (and similarly short-sighted) ideas along those lines would be:

"Stop (all) basic research while there's still applied science to be done."

"We shouldn't be spending money on space exploration while there are still people that are starving/homeless/poor."

"Why are people working on a cure for <<insert non-terminal disease>>, when we still don't have a cure for cancer?"
>>>Get your karma right.

You mean to say "Dharma". In the Indian context they are two very different things.

Also did the read the bottom footnote?

>>> And My Apologies, I lied. Its not a drought. There are amazing customers who can build you an empire – they are just not waiting to be sold to, they have to be taught, nurtured and groomed in – Probably not the early adopter kinds with an impulsive buying habit perhaps. Simply hard nosed buyers.
I can't quite believe the bit about the retina iPhone screens being a large cost. If I can buy replacement panels (screen, touch sensor and glass) for under $10 shipped, I highly doubt they cost more than $8 a pop to make.
Stop stealing dreams: Seth Godin on education & school
I know this is a rhetorical question but the vast majority of these machines are made in Germany.
I first came across it in Hayek.

I'm still thinking it through myself (as you'll see from my self-linking below). My sympathies like with positivism, but I feel that it too has limits.

To me the question is not merely which is correct? It's: which should we subscribe to according to what situation?

So for example, I consider that for the systems we manage and face as professionals, we should be Newtonian-Cartesian positivists[1]. We strive to achieve a state of total understanding and predictability.

It's a lie, of course[2]. But a useful lie. It creates incentives that accepting an incomprehensible universe do not create.

Whereas for some situations, accepting that while it may be in principle deterministic for in practice unpredictable (chaotic) is an important step[3].

[1] http://chester.id.au/2012/04/09/review-drift-into-failure/

[2] http://chester.id.au/2012/06/27/a-not-sobrief-aside-on-reign... , especially the comments.

[3] http://chester.id.au/2012/12/07/review-the-essence-of-hayek-...
Microsoft's battle for consumers: it's time to drop the Windows name
I guess this might be stunning to some people, but even as early as before 1980 there existed people who did great science, and in some cases even great philosophy, and, oh horror, they did not always knew the Bayes theorem, decision theory or too much neuroaesthetics and they were not even very rational in their private lifes. Instead, they became completely immersed in their narrow, precisely-defined field of inquiry and had the completely irrational drive that is neccessary to persist the years of labour it often takes to repeatedly subject ones beliefs to the trials of experiment and revise them times and times again. This kind of insight is not possible if you study game theory on one day, and mathematical logic on the other, and this is even without touching on the huge amount of often conflicting assumptions that underly each of those distinct fields and the ignorance of which often leads people like philosophers to nonsense conclusions.
I had the same question.
The Time And Money We Spend on Apps – Where Does That Come From?
Linux includes Android smartphones, most of the top supercomputers in the world right now, stock exchanges, and so on. It's true that "we're all running some distro" but 99.9% of the distros don't have this problem, so you can't say that "Linux" has this problem.
Agree. This evolution will inevitably play out according to a version of Jevons Paradox. :-)
Own a 3D-printer? Help a student gather information
I am passionate about 3D printing and would love to hear from people that own or regularly access a 3D-printer. If you are willing to talk with me about your experience, I'd love to hear from you.

Please send me an email at tyler (underscore) benster (at) brown (dot) edu, and mention hackernews in the subject.

Cheers!
I am really curious: did you read the example abstracts in the post? If so, can you help me understand why things like that should be funded?
What about some other strange decisions AMD has made?

-Abandoning Geode in 2009

-Selling Xilleon to Broadcom in 2008

-Selling Imageon/handheld division to Qualcomm in 2008

Imagine if they kept developing those products...
As the SaaS Industry Surges, Startups Look to Organize the Cloud
Do you really like Justin Bieber perfume?
Everyone is suggesting Reddit, but there too you will find heated arguments [1]. In general, HN comments are way better, and trolls are kept in line.

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/135b5z/yes_the_f...
Very cool! I did not realize Google Patents had this capability.
You could use every buzzword!
Why is this patent trivial?
> Dropbox is a piece of software that could recreated in about a month by a smart hacker;

A service running on AWS with intra-account deduplication, with signup, referrals, billing and support, Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Blackberry, Android, kindle and web clients, all internationalised into English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish (both European and Latin American), and an API with six platform-specific SDKs for Dropbox integration.

"About a month, one person"?

> Why are 250 people working at Dropbox?

https://www.dropbox.com/about

https://www.dropbox.com/jobs
Exactly what I thought - I only 'own' the code if it's a topic branch, once my peers reviewed it, they should know it as much as I do.
I'd appreciate an invite too, if you still have any and are willing to share.

jerod dot santo at gmail dot com
I don't think you know what "patent troll" means.
I quit proggit about a year ago because it was absolutely jammed with politics, tech startups and the like.

To the point where I founded a circlejerk sub to mock it.
r/ProgrammingLanguages/ is about programming lanugage design, although it doesn't get a lot of traffic.
Reddit's voting system has two issues:

(1) Lots of strategic downvoting. That's why no thread stays above 75%. It happens to comments as well as threads. Some of it is spammers trying to improve their own ranking, and some is probably just trolls.

(2) "Stalker" downvoting, which is when a person retaliates to a comment by downvoting that person's contributions en masse.

I wonder if they've put any machine learning muscle behind this. Is it easy to fix, or is it just a hard problem?
HN comments about patents also tend to be laughably simplistic... just at the other end of the spectrum.
That's ridiculous, KickStarter's level of quality is about equal. (See the Ron Paul game)
Looks nice, but what's the difference between Notifyr and:

• http://www.buddy.com/ • http://js.dotcloud.com/ • https://cloudmine.me/ • http://backlift.github.com/docs/ • http://www.meteor.com/main • https://parse.com/about/index • http://derbyjs.com/ • http://www.kinvey.com/ • http://www.stackmob.com/ • http://www.appcelerator.com/cloud • http://pusher.com/ • http://www.firebase.com/ • http://www.pubnub.com/ • https://www.getbridge.com/ • https://www.tambur.io/
Really cool. It's good to know that there are hackathons for this kind of thing.

Ignoring, for the moment, all the overbearing ethical problems with factory farms (those kinds of discussions are almost never constructive), I wonder if a first principles calculation would reveal the sort of potential efficiency gains to be made if you could make in-vitro meat work and scale properly. I bet it's going to be far, far more energy-efficient to grow meat according to demand with nutrient solutions derived from plants or bacteria, than to use factory farms. And that's not even taking other critical resources like water into account.
(Anything)->15->Out.

I suspect there are others.
"C x A" is a combination of C and A. C, x, and A are defined once somewhere at the beginning of the paper/book.

Should I take this (which doesn't actually hold in the general case) to mean that every document uses its own language? That isn't exactly good for readability. We certainly don't consider every software project to be written in its own language (and no, the semantics of C does not tell us what the dP function does).
Exactly. Isn't it a little suspicious that it's for a product segment that's waning in popularity and profitability? I won't be surprised if in three years the line is killed and the factory is closed.
Ubuntu Linux is a spyware? - Hacker News , Security updates
A software for productivity analysis and spying on your employees
Jump to 2:26 if you want to skip the preamble. The color analog is thought provoking ...
15 days ago, 30 days ago, 43 days ago... oh well, at least they wait a while.
You should make this a Chrome app and something that works offline.
Hm, I have never really thought about NLP, but I guess maintaining an NLP program somebody else has written must be even more of a nightmare than what we have now...
Plans for mobile libraries and server sdks (java, node, python etc.)?
Squids on the Economist Cover
More choice is only a good thing when you make it abundantly clear what it is you're going different, and why someone should use you. Otherwise, you're just making it harder for people to make a decision about what tools to use. Your front page doesn't do a very good job at that right now.

The fact that the claim you made here about Pusher and legacy was so quickly disproven, makes things even worse.
Looking at the http://ubervu.com/ website, it seems they are using a tracking service hosted on http://trackalyzer.com/. This is a privately registered domain (there is no index page either), but from http://trackalyzer.com/w3c/policy1.xml we can derive that this service is operated by LeadLander.com.

The LeadLander product seems to identify users by company name (most likely by checking the IP address/netblock) and then "integrates" with LinkedIn and Jigsaw in order to contact (spam?) the users by email (see: http://www.leadlander.com/web_analytics.asp).

Definitely interesting, but legal? Not very likely...
I am waiting for the time that I can write python by shooting baddies in the head.
Online anonymity is pretty much gone. You can uniquely identify most visitors without cookies using a bunch of other exposed attributes.

This site shows you how unique your system appears:
http://panopticlick.eff.org/

When you combine things like screen-resolution, installed fonts, etc. you get a pretty-unique profile of each person.

Bruce Schneier addresses the topic here:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/tracking_your_...

How UberVu mapped this back to an actual email address is a separate matter - but I'm guessing they used the profile of his machine and connected it to a matching profile they had access to from some site he does authenticate with.

Now extend that concept to Google. They've got their digital hooks on millions of sites using Google Analytics. They can map those hits back to an IP address that correlates to a GMail login and get a pretty good idea about where else their users browse.
B.G. (Before Guido) it's a startup, A.G. (After Guido) it's not a startup anymore.
> I did not ... connect with any of their social media properties

What do you mean by "connect"? Do you mean you didn't visit any of UberVu's social media pages, or that you didn't load any of the tracking-related assets that their website includes? Right now, Ghostery is reporting 5 tracking-related assets on their home page, including something called LeadLander. Click around a bit, and you might even come across assets that are loaded directly from a social media service that you use. Or maybe your browser willingly supplied personally identifiable information to them without telling you about it. Like auto-completing some fields in a hidden form, or automatically connecting to an identity provider that the website happens to support.

Every time I try Panopticlick [1], it tells me that my browser is unique among millions. I guess it means I'm leaving greasy fingerprints everywhere I go, even with AdBlock and Ghostery enabled, and even without logging in anywhere.

[1] https://panopticlick.eff.org/
iTunes 11 and Classical Music
Why? Is this how philosophy is or how it ought to be?
So far the vast majority of top-level comments on this thread slag the article for hyperbole.

But it is very likely true. Although the installed base of Android systems is small compared to what Windows has piled up over ten years of near total hegemony, Android's market share is growing at a rate that makes Tomi Ahonens's prediction a very good bet indeed.

Remember this prediction, and start acting on it now.

My prediction is that two years from now Hacker News will be full of posts about how nobody predicted how pervasive Android has become.
It could be that they're taking advantage of a third-party service that he's signed up for. For example, Google Docs used to show a user's email when they clicked a link to a document that you created (it's anonymised now)