skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The discussion of PG's decision to use closures for web development seems off topic. That doesn't directly affect the popularity of the language; it's quite possible to do things in Arc without using closures for state on the web.

I played around with Arc quite a bit and the biggest problem was that it did not have a standard library with enough stuff in it. In contrast (and talking about a totally different type of language) one of the reasons Go has been successful is the excellent set of standard packages.

If you start your language with sufficient standard library kindling then others can build on that and write more and more libraries. But start with insufficient libraries and it's hard to take off.

So, the initial releases of Arc were constrained by things that PG had already written. If you wanted to do the same then it was just fine.

As as concrete example I wanted on my old UseTheSource site (which was in Arc) to go grab a URL from a third-party site inside the code. There wasn't an easy way to do that so I wrote an external script in Perl and did the following in Arc:

(def hn-valid (user)
(if (uvar user hn)
t
(let v (system (+ "perl check-hn.pl " user))
(if v (= ((profile user) 'hn) t))
v)))

The Perl script grabbed a page on Hacker News, did some light parsing and returned either 0 or 1. That really put me off making any extra effort to use Arc (and I like Lispy languages) because I was either going to shell out to something else, or have to write everything from the ground up.

A similar thing happened with UseTheSource's Twitter integration where I could use Perl's Net::Twitter::Lite to trivially integrate.
Nokia's MITM on its browser
Seems that nokia is doing naughty stuff. After Turktrust case it makes people paranoid about what to trust.
A few million light years could still be within our local group (depending on the exact value of "a few"), but you're right about my error. I'm not really sure where I pulled that epic brain-fart of a figure from...
Fine, I'll yield the semantic argument. "Coming out" in the context of sexuality typically refers to homosexuals publicly expressing their preference for the first time and adjusting their public identity to match.

I was attacking the idea that most aren't judged upon first expressing their sexual desires. It's important anywhere and everywhere. Bringing home a partner of a different color? Size? Class? "Looks"? Judgement is issued. In some cultures the kind of partner you're able to pull speaks directly to the honor or worth of the family. It's never not a big deal.
This is a fairly small asteroid on the scale of planets. While it might have some negative consequences for the thin film of life clinging to the surface, the planet itself wouldn't even notice.

Impacts _much_ larger than this one have happened many times over the course of our planet's history, and have had no significant impact on our orbit.
Sure I did, but what's the problem? That's part of growing up dude.

Also, if you need RFID chips or other tracking methods, then something is seriously defective in the child-parent-teacher relationship, because when I grew up my parents were finding out from the teachers themselves if I was skipping classes and my parents also made sure I understood that school is important, so skipping a lecture was the exception, not the rule.

Also, if you still want to track your own child, search for an app to install on his phone or something. Why should all children get the same treatment because of a couple of paranoid parents?

Speaking of which, I remember a saying: if your child climbs a tree, he gets the thrills in case he reaches the top, but you don't feel this excitement, just the pain in case he falls down.

As parents, we should remember this and IMHO the smart thing to do would be to teach him how to climb a tree properly ;-)

(I should mention that I'm also a father)
Cloud and tough economy take a bite out of IT services spend
A little bit, yes, but in a friendly manner. The key is to do it early, when you can still laugh to yourself a bit about it. If you let the frustration accumulate too much, then it might come across as snide and I understand what you're saying about passive-aggressive. Still, even an occasional snide remark that vents some steam is better than boiling hotter and hotter on the inside.
Your sexuality informs and alters 100% of your life.

No it doesn't. And choice exists in almost everything.
Transparent 3D TV from HiSense
Here is the CPU: https://twitter.com/daredevildave/status/289029688943321089/...

Turns out a m1.small is much better than an t1.micro :-)
5 New Year’s Resolutions for the Modern Day Venture Capitalist
Translated:

I know many people, and none of them refer to their
significant other as a 'partner.' For example, I know
one guy that is 50, who refers to his same-aged
significant other as his 'girlfriend,' and it doesn't
seem to bother him that 'girl' is in the name instead
of 'woman.'
I'm gay and this analogy is strained and opportunistic.

The charged moment when you're buying flowers for a same-sex partner is charged psychologically, not because of external fears. I live in a very liberal city, and there's almost zero chance I'm going to get bullied by the lady at the flower shop. It's charged because of how I grew up, because of the other people who made me feel like an outsider or a freak, because of what it means more broadly that the world, even this city, is set up for other people.

None of that comes into complaining about the speakers being on the wrong side of a TV. True, you can use slippery language to say that these are both "standing up for truth" or something, but in reality the motives behind each gesture are totally different. Standing up for quality as a person in a supply chain might be admirable, but it is not a "coming out" and it is not emotionally charged in the same way that revealing your homosexuality, over and over again, still is.

He talks to the cab driver because not doing so would mean rejecting himself. You mention the speakers because you want your company to do well and you're frustrated that the person who's job it is missed something blatant.
I totally agree about all the baby steps, which, over time turn into a flow and then a torrent.

Example? Look at the attitude change regarding gay weddings in the US during the last twenty years.

In ten years married gay couples will be pretty normal and it started with only a small number of "weirdos" some 20 years ago, who where true to themselves.

Fort the record: I'm straight but feel that it's beyond the pale that people should be denied love and happyness, just because we don't share the same sexual orientation.
Staying Healthy on a Long Flight
Same here. I was very active for three or four months, because I loved the idea, but after re-explaining what SQL injections are the fourth or fifth time in a week I decided the community had simply gone too designer and really needed a dose of Stack Overflow.

I loved the idea of a community to unite developers with designers, but there seems to be a different constant factor on exponential growth with developers than designers, presumably because we actually are, on average, a bit more introverted.

I feel a lot more slighted than is reasonable over the fact that they let you check developer or designer or both, so 90% of the designers checked both. I can't make a reasonable-sounding argument for why that irked me so much but it really did.
The guys were sitting there minding their own business and she started talking to them.
Then they really got going and all this got captured on tape.
* * curr

Unfortunately the spaces seem to be unavoidable.
After a careful re-read, you're right. Yielding!
Warning: May freeze your browser.
+1. this is the worst user experience I've had in a long time.
So adjusted for cost of living, the average software engineer in the Valley makes less than one in Philadelphia?
Its really amazing to me that such cost of living difference can exist inside the US.
If you were going to be spending money on booze to make your life, in your estimation, better then free booze == cheaper route to good life than paying for that same booze. If you aren't interested in drinking booze, then that's obviously of no benefit to you.
The subway system used to be operated by different companies. To simplify greatly- the letter lines were a different company (BMT) to the number lines (IRT). That's why there are so few stations that allow you to transfer between letters and numbers, and why trains on lettered lines cannot run on numbered tracks, and vice versa. It's also why we have countdown clocks on numbered lines and not lettered ones- they use different technology.

There are even stories of one company intentionally obstructing the other. If I recall correctly, the BMT built track that they had no intention of using, just so that they could block the IRT from extending the 7 line beyond Times Square.

Sometimes I wonder why the subways fascinate me as much as they do.
Discussion of the word count problem Knuth vs. McIlroy http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4304696
I scoped my blog just to unit tests, because it's short note rather than article. DI can be useful on integration and acceptance level too - for simple apps you should be able to configure whole app or its parts as easy as you run it on production. Without DI you have to do some magic with class / module constants, which can populate on other parts.
I've always thought that lover implied sex ('lover' describing that they 'make love'), which is not a given in all relationships.
I find it strange to read an essay on the (un)popularity of Lisp which does not mention Clojure.
Ruby on Rails/Javascript Developer (Remote resource)

We are in search of a talented frontend developer to add to our small startup team. An individual with sound technical skills, but more importantly, an appetite to learn new things and help build a really great product for our clients.

We are small startup operating out of the New York, San Francisco, and Charlotte areas. We are developing a multi-tenant reporting platform using MongoDB and Erlang ERTS to deliver information and analytics to our clients (companies, not individuals) in the wealth management industry. You would be joining the two founding partners and one full-time (SF-based) developer. We all work remotely and rely heavily on Skype and Google Chat/Hangout to stay in daily contact and to get things done. We work as a team to define the functional and architectural direction of the platform and we are looking for someone to join!

Our web stack is a Rails 3 app talking to a MongoDB backend, with a heavy real time processing component. At this time we are primarily seeking a frontend resources with firm Javascript experience and a desire to work with our existing technology stack.

Please reply to this post or email at info@purveu.com

Thanks!
Code Hero's buggy Kickstarter has backers preparing to draw legal lines
At least for me Apple certainly doesn't wait until the end of the month, although they do batch small transactions at seemingly random intervals.
I just see a spinner. I give up.
Isn't the idea of "coming out" a bit old fashioned now?

What do you mean? People still have to come out...

(Straight people don't "come out")

Depends. Some straight trans people have to come out as trans.
That's good. I mean, people complained about using Git in Windows for ages because it was too Unix-friendly. At the same time, almost nobody actually likes SML/NJ, and I think part of that is because it has its own strange build system rather than autoconf/make/cmake etc. and until a few years ago really couldn't produce standalone executables.
In most places, people are seen as a default of straight.

Yes and that's wrong.
It didn't fail. To the best of my understanding, it's a very successful project.

What happened is that Microsoft bought Skype, and it clearly feels that of the two brands, Skype is the more valuable (for what they paid, it better be). Having two brands of instant messengers (and two code bases, etc.) with the same target market is redundant, so one of them is being retired.
Clojure adds syntax, which breaks some of the inherent symmetry of Lisp slightly[0]. This isn't something you're likely to notice unless you do a lot of heavy metaprogramming.

Clojure cannot guarantee elimination of tail calls, because of the limitations of the underlying JVM. This also means that it can't properly handle corecursion in the same way that pretty much every single other Lisp can.

(Both of these have been discussed before many times before on HN, so I can pre-empt the next comment in this thread, which will be someone pointing out that Clojure provides "loop" and the "recur" macro - to which I'd respond, yes, they're logically equivalent in the end, but having to force the transformation to a loop explicitly breaks the paradigm, which for me is the whole point of using a Lisp. This is one of those topics that can be discussed ad nauseum with no "conclusion", so it's not worth spending too much time on it.)

Lastly, anytime you're dealing with binary compatibility between various JVM languages, the abstraction is inherently a bit leaky. I haven't used Clojure myself, so I can't comment specifically there, but from my experience with using Java libraries in Scala, I can testify that some of the warts of Java end up leaking into Scala code. Nothing debilitating, just a bit frustrating[1].

[0] Racket does too, but the "syntax" added (square brackets) has the same semantics, so it's really just an equivalent token - an alias, if you will.

[1] One particular example I remember has to do with how Foo.class in Java works, and how a library dependent on this particular pattern has to be used in Scala - it just gets a bit messy.
Care to elaborate? I think it's a well-worked responsive design. The only annoyance is the navigation bar flitting up and down on scroll.
A coup would be making spending a while in SV & then taking your SV salary back to Nashville.
> Many of those restaurants serve exceedingly unhealthy food.

I haven't found this to be the case at all. Most of the cheap good food in the city is ethnic food. I don't think there is anything particularly unhealthy about the grilled chicken skewers I get at the local halal cart.
I had thought that the ability to do a simple quine by rewinding DATA was some weird implementation bug, so nice to see the rationale here !
Well I guess this means I won't have to worry for much longer why bitlbee 3.0.6 broke MSN.
The Looming Coffee Apocalypse
Ceaser - CSS Easing Animation Tool
What important/high traffic sites run off Node?
Are we in some king of Lisp day or something? Hahaha
I did this on my work laptop as well. The process was painless, however, the lack of interop with Live Messenger is quite frustrating. Not everybody in my company has migrated so that means that if I want to add somebody still on Messenger, I have to go to the live.com website and login to do it. I can't add them in Skype. On top of that, I can't share files with people on Messenger, which is super annoying. I hope that things get better in 66 days!
Care to share? How much do you make and how many years of experience do you have?
Mornington crescent!
How to publish games - a brief guide for developers
Anyone have any idea what will happen to the various XMPP MSN-proxies used to hook your gtalk account up to MSN etc?

I'd love to have the same for Skype, but last time I checked, Skype had them all (all unofficial clients) banned...
Hrm, let's perform an in situ experiment! Right now, get on the horn with the people in your world and announce that you're actually gay/straight, whichever is different than currently. Then live accordingly for a few years so we can see what changes!

The stakes: one upvote.
Introducing Bullet: The Functional PHP Micro-Framework
Venus does have an athmosphere, it's just not made of the same gasses as the Earth's athmosphere. There is no "bare face".
Altho in reality it probably has no bearing, but most people's casual exposure to Arc is the HN website - which at the best of times is slow. So the mindshare being developed here is "arcane AND slow" - not a great advert.
Ask HN:Resource to learn "web development" independent of a language/framework
Can you guys suggest some good resources (online/offline) to learn web development which is more focussed on the concepts,workflow etc of a web application and not just using a specific language/framework ?

For example, I want to learn the core and depth of:

- How do components of a typical web app architecture interact and what they really mean? Things slike client, server, databases etc.

- Specifications such as WSGI,cgi etc ?<p>- All about sessions including client side, server side, best practices ,cookies etc.

- Request, response and how they really work (again independent of a specific language).

Basically, the depth of building web apps not just high level frameworks etc. Just wondering if there is a good resource. Not interested in front end design though. I already know enough to build CRUD apps (i use python/flask specifically) but really want to get into more depth.
Arc is beautiful, but Paul Graham was wrong about one thing. For language adoption-- at least circa 2013 (which he couldn't have foreseen)-- libraries do matter. This is to Clojure's advantage and Arc's detriment. A typical IT boss is not going to let you spend 6 months writing libraries, so a lack of libraries is a problem. The people who pick languages in all but the most daring startups tend to see "lack of libraries" as more of a problem than it actually is.

Paul Graham was building a web company in the mid-1990s, so rewriting a bunch of libraries was not an impediment. First, they had top-notch programmers who were willing to work with FFIs, write tools they were used to in other languages, and understand technology deeply enough to write good libraries. Second, the state-of-the-art for libraries in the 1990s was, if nothing else, less Big. Third, they didn't need to sell their language choice to a boss; they just needed to sell the product to the market and investors, neither of which cares what language you use as long as it works.

Arc is prettier than Clojure but, in my experience, Clojure is more than attractive enough... and it has the familiar JVM libraries.
Works on Android for me which is even more impressive.
A good friend of mine, living in SF, recently came out to his parents who live in suburban Colorado.

His mom asked him the typical questions--"Are you sure? Have you tried dating girls? Are you sure you just haven't met the right one?" while his dad set quietly at the table.

Then all of his sudden his dad broke into a yelling rage, in the middle of a packed brunch place, accused his son of being scrawny because of AIDS, and stormed out of the place.

You really need to stop a second and try to see things from different perspectives.
I wonder if they are they retiring the old messenger protocol as well. Currently, I use Pidgin with my Live Messenger account, but perhaps that will stop working come March 15th.
How should I deal with an employee sleeping with my wife?
Well , there's a few things.

Not all "hackers" are language geeks, plenty of smart people will not necessarily invest their time in learning new exotic programming languages as language learning for the sake of it is not interesting for everyone.

Other considerations for language choice will certainly include documentation and the accessibility of that documentation. Looking up a few pieces of code to do familiar tasks is much easier than reading a grand language design document as a way to get a feel for a language.

Having usage in some large commercial setting is also a consideration. For example knowing that Google uses python extensively can give one some confidence that python is unlikely to suddenly die out one day because Google wouldn't let that happen.
Kickstarter implemented new rules in late September (you may have seen their "Kickstarter Is Not a Store" blog post and since then it is very hard for tech projects to get accepted on their site.

So far, Indiegogo has been awesome. We've spoken with their staff a few times and response time and quality has been excellent. A very good group of folks.
Shipping the product.
I'm your average developer, work in a small software shop, not a startup, not a fortune 500 company. Getting the thing out of my hands, and into the hands of our customers makes me happy.

For my own personal projects: having users use it. I started with android apps last year, very slowly (too slowly), but having someone use the app brings joy to me.
My first project, which was a website in about 2003, got me into a slump after there were only a couple of people who even tried it (should have marketed it, thinking about it now). However I still use it - so it's not a total waste.

I am actually afraid of writing beautiful code, as when that was my goal, each of those projects have either been canceled (at work), or never made it past recoding stage (at home).

Another thing that brings me joy is solving a complicated client issue. Normally our support solves all the issues, however when we did first large scale installations, I was sent to customer site to diagnose a large list of problems.
It feels good to make issues go away.
Dropbox integration coming to Samsung cameras
The state of tech marketing is summed up by Qualcomm at CES
Ditto.

I noticed that Entropia Universe added a gangnam style dance to their in-game emotes last year. And it's been advertised all Winter on UK TV for some console dance game.

I wonder if this is one of the most motion-captured/implemented dance moves/sequences ever? :-)
Why I Quit Facebook – The Most Un-Social Network
This is neat! Had to show it to a couple of other people around me, sucks to explain who the characters are though to non-gamers :).
I'm confused by this article. The whole thing is positioned like they are blowing the whistle on some scandal, but what scandal? That a public figure donating a large sum of money wants to make sure it brings some good PR? Is that a surprise?

Or that the money was donated with specific uses already in mind? Shouldn't someone who donates that much money be allowed to condition it on the changes they'd like to see made? If you don't like their ideas, don't take the money.

Or is it that the bulk of it is to pay teachers bonuses? That sounds like a good thing?

Seems like sensationalization of a non-issue
It's depending on project/person.
For me it's JVM (but of course JVM is big benefit also), mostly because with JVM I'm not able to create library which might be used in native code for example in iOs app (theoretical it's possible with ECL,Clozure CL or "Scheme to C" compiler).
Anyone aware of a UK alternative?

Mint is US only and the closest thing in the UK we have to that is lovemoney, which falls short in many areas.
I'd love to hear from anyone who has experience with alternatives.
The Tube wan't centrally administrated. It was formed by the nationalisation of desperate private companies [1]. This process continues even to this day with current right-wing, free market ideologist Boris Johnson allowing London Overground Lines to join the network [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground#Nationalisat...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Overground
Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but is he telling us that we should try to be offended?

I'm referring to the second to last paragraph: You can't know if your values are being violated if you're ambiguous about what they are. Second, learn to develop a sixth sense for when your line is being crossed. It may be a gut feeling. A nervous laugh. A habit of rationalizing.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it because some people (especially in the media) seems to set out to be offended, and they're really annoying.

Of course there are many valid reasons to be offended and we (as individuals and societies) should treat everyone with respect and try to offend no-one. But it is possible to be too easily offended, and I'm afraid one might end up in that category by following his advice.
I thought Lisp is the pinnacle of programming until I discovered Haskell.