skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> An occasional snide remark that vents some steam is better than boiling hotter and hotter on the inside.

We may have very different values, but if the alternative to venting steam is your prolonged unhappiness, it's for the best.
If you enjoy lying about anything, that's a serious red flag regarding you as a person.
>I would be willing to be that Google's annual revenue is bigger than all the major studios, put together.

Perhaps, but why would anyone (but google and their shareholders) care about that? What's important is the taxes, job creation, etc., etc.

The tech sector is big but lots of things in CA are big. California is the top agricultural producer in the US [1], for example.

[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/faqs.aspx#10
Engagio Founder on Building An Inbox For Online Conversations
> Really? You run Facebook or something? Got any figures?

100 total devs, over 10 years of development, with the codebase spanning 5k files and over 1 million LoC.

> Hang on. How many files are you including? Generally you only need to include one, right. Your framework, maybe an external library. Then you can call in whatever modules you need, as you need them. Right? Or are you using some weird kind of framework without modules?

This is a homebrew framework, but you're missing the point: regardless of how you kick it off, the framework itself still has to include files left and right. And modules or not, some code somewhere still has to include supporting files.

For every single file in your codebase, you will have at least one include call to it somewhere, possibly many more. It's silly to look at this as a "how many includes do you need to launch a request", because any simpleton can make it so that all you see is a single include, but that doesn't stop the fact that you must still manually include each and every other file -- at some point in the framework -- before you can use it.

> (1) conceptual; less "WTF" for new developers to deal with

I'll point to the supporting evidence provided by others here that shows that pretty much every modern framework uses autoloading. Thus, I wouldn't say it's a WTF, rather, the opposite is probably more true: who manually includes files anymore?

> (2) complexity; code-flow is both simpler and more explicit.

Removing include calls does not make the code more complex nor harder to follow, any decent IDE will let you control-click into the definition of classes. I'd argue that less LoC is a good thing (so long as we're not talking about "clever code", which this isn't).

> If you can provide some demo code, I'd love to see it.

Or, you know, you can read what I said as I perfectly explained the situation. But I'll play along.

// test 1
$start = microtime(1);
$i = 1000;
while (--$i);
$end = microtime(1) - $start;
printf('%.7f', $end); // .00004s
die;

// test 2
$start = microtime(1);
$i = 1000;
while (--$i) {
require './test.php';
}
$end = microtime(1) - $start;
printf('%.7f', $end); // .082s

Note that test.php was a completely empty file (and thus no parsing required); in reality, those files are often 1000+ lines of code and take much longer to parse.

Even with this simple example, the non-require version is 2000x's faster than the require version. This is also in a perfect world, e.g. there's no other files also being required that'd overflow the realpath cache, nor is there really any other OS activity that will hamper my tests. In the wild, there could be 50-100 requests being served concurrently, which would affect the system calls even more.

> I think you will find largely it's just a result of having a dumb framework or being ultra-contrived in your example to an unrealistic degree.

It's a dumb framework, but considering that it's a legacy project that has survived 10 years of organic growth and is still paying my salary (I've been here less than 1/2 of that time), it's not getting re-written anytime soon. But, weren't we talking about autoloading?
Hands up if you saw the headline and thought about Objective-C Automatic Reference Counting...
There was talk of some EU "payment neutrality" regulations in the wake of visa/mastercard cutting off wikileaks; did that ever get anywhere?
Nietzsche was known to use linkbait phrases as well, much in the same spirit as the article.
Adam Lisagor | Video as User Experience
that font is awful.
> If it is so good why ain't it is used more?

Speaking just for myself, it's because most commonly available distributions (such as SLIME) require you to learn a new editor on top of learning a new language.

I think emacs is great, but it's not my editor of choice, and when a language distribution all but requires you to use emacs, it's going to have a hard time gaining traction with me.

This may have changed over the past few years, but it certainly stopped me from learning Lisp some 10 odd years ago.
They should know and should care.

At least in the UK, a CC attracts the processing fee of ~=2.5%. The Debit card, does not, or charges a fixed processing fee. Many web retailers/vendors pass on this processing fee. The bigger you are, the lower processing fee you can get (fraud, chargeback rates and other factors all being equal).
There is no story here. They donated money and had it run through PR to get the right amount of public impact, like anyone would do with that amount of money.
The motivation behind "generating Java" was that the game could then be deployed in a browser, just like Minecraft is. Maybe Clojure can already do that though. I haven't looked yet. =)

Clojure runs on the JVM, but perhaps Clojure is expensive in the context of a 60-frame-per-second realtime app. I doubt it would be significantly more expensive than Java, but that's something to test.

So by generating Java, then it would be an interesting system because it winds up producing the same sort of code which Notch made by hand to deploy Minecraft to a browser. Yet it's derived "from the clojure code".

And yet it's also generating C code, which is also derived "from the clojure code". So it's very meta, which I can't resist exploring.

Why is it "pretty much impossible" generate the game engine C code in a non-lisp language?

Well, it's straightforward for you write a program which generates some C code. But how about "either C, or Java"? Or "either C, or Java, or Haskell", ... etc.

You'll soon discover that the nature of the implementation is completely different for different languages. A Haskell game engine would look utterly nothing like a C implementation would look.

So the situation is, you would need an intermediate source code representation of your game engine which supports introspection. And whatever data structure you use must also be able to be modified during the "code generation", because it's not until the codegen step that you know what sort of special-casing you'll have to do (in order to generate code which implements your game engine in e.g. haskell, or brainfuck, or... etc. Point being: each of those has a different set of special-case requirements, and you can't know which until you're already in the codegen phase.)

So, you could use a different language, and you could represent your "game engine source code" as, say, JSON. And you could have conventions for what your various operations "within that JSON string" actually mean -- e.g. whether you use infix notation, or prefix notation, or.. etc.

And then you could have a notation for how to specify a function, within that JSON string.

And so on.

But then, at the end of it all, you wind up with a poorly implemented version of what lisp already offers you. It lets you do all of that automatically, because those features are built right in to the language. Indeed, the language is the primary reason the features are possible: Everything is a list, and everything has access to all lists at all phases of the program's lifespan. You can run at compile time, or compile at run time, etc. You have access to the entire syntax tree at all times, in every program you write, which enables you to manipulate it. You simply can't do that with e.g. Python. Hence the requirement for an "intermediate thing, which you can manipulate" -- we happened to decide on using JSON as the representation, but you could've easily decided to use something else, etc. The point is, that "intermediate representation" is just a poorly-reimplemented version of the toolset which Lisp gives you by default.
"with a fairly complete and correct library for writing webapps"

Some of which were dangerous and unwieldy actually. Then proven dangerous and unwieldy. And then most of things that made idiomatic PHP were removed from the language or discouraged and nobody writes that way anymore.
4K and 8K will suffer the same problem as 3D, poor amount of content available. HD was an easy sell as TV streams all pretty much shifted uniformly over to HD, plus there was two competing formats for home movies, plus with upscaling it made old DVDs look a bit better. 3D was never going to gain mass market traction as you paid a huge premium for...well, not a lot.
The title should say "JSTOR free registration".
Can you give three Examples?
> Non-functional programs read like plain English.

It depends partly on what you're used to. You're used to programs specifying instructions (since that's what we think of as an algorithm), so yes, Lisp won't look like "plain English" instructions.

However, functional programs don't define instructions - just relationships. For the most part, they wash their hands off of specifying the details of the execution, in favor of looking only at the high-level, mathematical relationships.

In that sense, Lisp programs like

(define x (map (lambda (x) (* 2 x)) (sort '(2 3 2 1 4))))

is defining a relationship between x and the list '(2 3 2 1 4), the same way that

x = 2y + 3

is defining a relationship between x and y. The latter doesn't tell you how to get the value of x (for a given y value), but defining that relationship is sufficient to understand the concepts.

So, you could say that non-functional programs read like plain English instructions of actions, whereas functional programs read like plain English mathematical relationships.
Kickstarter-success Pebble live stream from CES2013
I believe he's referring more to the fact that the real world price per unit of game currency is not a round number. If dragon eggs were worth exactly $1 each, people would be slightly more careful about the value/cost of in-game purchases.
Sure, but when you mine stuff, where does the stuff go?

Instead of deflecting the whole asteroid, you're suggesting chipping it into a bunch of pieces and deflecting those somewhere. Same problem.
How I raised my kids on the command line
Yes, Pidgin will stop working. I'm not aware of any Skype IM clients other than Skype itself.
Security Vulnerabilities in Heroku
made a small js to display all the gif/jpgs inline on that page.

https://gist.github.com/4494373
I'm getting tired of my current HN account so let me trash it.

Fuck Gays.

I'm Jose Gutierres from the Bronx in case you want to beat me up. There, no more walking on egg-shells.

In all seriousness, being too PC is also harmful. I'm not homophobic but really dislike that you cannot have a conversation without somebody getting but hurt.

And to finish it off. Fuck muslims, hindus, christians, mexicans, jews, scientologists, hispanics, etc.
If you feel I left you out then fuck you too.
"One can't overestimate his tendency to economize."
Relative to Arc, it certainly has.
That and we seem to be trending towards streaming more and more media. Convenience trumps quality more often than not.
3D will certainly never gain favor with me until the requisite headache inducing glasses are eliminated. Polarized glasses reduce my field of vision to about 25% of what it normally is so I feel like Im watching through telescopes. I have yet to see a 3D movie that makes me think "I am so glad I am wearing these glasses".

I think that it will require a radical shift in display tech (a'la holographic projections) to make me rethink this position, and even then, I would probably much prefer a 2D screen for television shows or most movies. Games and virtual reality simulations would be a different animal for me.
I understand that my main beef is with the content producers. I think that if Hulu and Netflix brought more money to the table they could get better arrangements that don't include as many weird restrictions. Netflix doesn't seem to have device restrictions the way Hulu does either, and I can't help but think Hulu shouldn't have offered that concession to the networks at all. Having 30 Rock but not being able to watch it on my Apple TV is basically a legal bait-and-switch to me. I'm not watching TV on my laptop instead of my big TV with the big speakers.
And dwarfing them all, the sulfa drugs.
Definitely. Those are the kind of things I am interested in. The more I use frameworks and read the source code, the more intrigued I get to get into the depth of the mechanisms. http is surely a key topic.
The irony is that people seemed to barely notice Zuckerberg's recent gigantic donation. So even if it was stage-managed, it got pretty much washed out of the news.
I wonder if, in the future, this limitation of Clojure will go away. I know there has been talk of the JVM folk adding things like support for tail recursion. That said, I'm not smart enough to know whether talking about adding support for tail recursion translates to "Once we're agreed, let us go ahead and solve this tractable problem," or if it translates to "Gee this would be nice, but it's wicked hard."
ARC vs. Arc. (Which is why it should be Lua and not LUA)
Well for example Ghostery! kills all functionality, when killing all trackers on the page. ;-)
Books & Print Sandbox Project Will Explore Future of the Book
You realize that you just have to provide a chain gun now, right?
Not growing is, in itself, a failure. Live Messenger had a chance to become what is SNS today at its time. But several missteps followed and a year ago, it closed its web existence (to Wordpress), and now this.
It's not increasing suddenly -- it's been increasing for the last 5+ years. Or really increasing for the last 15 years continuously, but in the last 5 years it's gotten a boost with new libraries and so forth, fast Chrome enabling rich experiences, etc. JavaScript is just being used for more and more things, and there are more of the things that it has always been used for.

To say it's "treading water" means it was flat between 2011 and 2012, which I don't think is true.
> faster compiled languages

Lisp is a compiled language.

For that matter, it's a damn fast one, too. The Lisp implementation of PCREs are actually faster than Perl's, by some benchmarks.

I don't want to start a tangent about benchmarks and their relevance, but it's clear that Lisp performance isn't a limiting factor.
Ask HN: How should I price a seasonal/temporary service?
I have a system which helps event management companies to handle the registration for events, take payments, handle scheduling, task workflow, configuration etc. It has been in use for several years for some of my customers who I engaged with and sold directly, but now I want to pivot the sales model and put it out for public consumption on the web as an available service.

One challenge for me right now is around pricing strategy. My target is a group/person who hosts and sporting tournament, baseball for example. Typically these happen over a long weekend and the ramp up ahead of the event is several months.
I could price it on a monthly fee but the baseball tournament has a peak cycle on the calendar, if the tournament is in October then registrations probably start in late July or August. November until June is dead time and the customer does not want to pay for the service that is doing nothing for them during that period.

I could go with a participant cost model, maybe $2 per baseball player but that ignores the fact that there is a vast difference between a single elimination football tournament where each team has as many as 100 players and a golf tournament which has only 100 people participating all together.

My other thought is to a percentage spend model, since we handle your payments via credit card or ACH we just up the percentage charge to say 5%, kick the processing fee back to the processor and keep the spread. This could work but lots of the organizations who participate in organized competitive events only have checking accounts and prefer to pay via paper check.

Any ideas on some novel pricing approaches?
Bandwidth Media Queries? We Don’t Need ’Em
I think (and this is total subjective speculation) one of the problems is that Arc is so beautiful in its simplicity that the sort of people attracted to it think "man that looks like fun to implement, I think I will work on a lua/js/python/jvm port! then it will REALLY take off" instead of building things (apps, tools, libraries) WITH it.
Apophis isn't getting closer than 9 million miles today. If you're interested in close passes, you may look forward to February 15th, when 2012 DA14 will pass only about 21,000 miles away, within the orbits of the moon and geosynchronous satellites. [1]

[1] http://earthsky.org/space/asteroid-2012-da14-will-pass-very-...
It is true that I am not a liquor drinker, but if you replace this with free beer or wine, it still is just a perk, and not something that I'd cite as improving my quality of living.
Neither high-res or display technology will do squat to "push the envelope of content creation". The desperate scramble to escape the commoditization trap will throw up more and more and more of these "breakthroughs", of declining marginal utility.
Promoting Hinduism? Parents Demand Removal Of School Yoga Class
How To Register Domain Name With GoDaddy.com? | Techsmasher.com
From what I remember the big killer apps for the PS1 ,XBOX and N64 at launch were FF7, Goldeneye and Halo respectively. The important thing being that these were platform exclusive titles.

I know plenty of people who bought an N64 for goldeneye and mario kart alone and didn't buy any other titles.

Of course Valve does have an atomic bomb in the form of HL3.

Assuming they decide not to release a Windows version of HL3 (a gutsy ploy it itself, would piss off huge numbers of gamers) they would still be competing against any manufacturer who decided to sell a Linux based gaming computer. Though perhaps selling hardware is not something they are interested in from a revenue point of view and they just want gamers off Windows and onto something without a competing app store?
I would think (or hope) most C programmers would see it as basic competence with pointers.

Which is exactly what Torvald's was saying. All the comments here going "that's unreadable" or "it's too clever" scare me. And I don't even consider myself some C coding rockstar (took me a bit to sort out my own mental picture of pointers).
I do still think using the 3D glasses to give full screen multiplayer games a run is a great idea. Did that just not take off?
It might seem trite, but a CoffeeScript + TypeScript combination would make me very happy. I have been developing in TypeScript recently because the IDE support is awesome (and I'm a static typing enthusiast). Now if I could just reduce the verbosity and save some keystrokes...
It's up for me. This link points to the error handling page so it's always going to show an error I think.
Quick thoughts from an active runner (70-80 miles/wk):

- Figuring out when my shoes wear down is not, IMO, a big problem. I can look at the soles and tell or I know after about 500 miles it's time to switch it up.

- That said, it is incredibly important to switch shoes (or replace soles) when they wear down. I've been fortunate to not run into too many injuries, but I've been hobbled more than once by not taking the time to get new shoes. There is definitely an opportunity for some shoe company online to send me an email every X months with a 20% of coupon for the SAME PAIR of shoes I always buy. I'm sure they could figure out how serious of a runner someone is by the shoes they buy or repeat purchases.

- Now, I might buy one of these to see what kind of data it stores because I believe the future of pedometers/activity tracking is they'll be cheap enough they'll come built into shoes. In 5-10 years I expect to buy shoes that come with a $5 pedometer/tracking device built in and that would be a killer feature. No FitBit to wear, etc., just something that shoes come with. That'll be awesome.
I think that when you design a language you can take the low road or the high road. The low road is to design your language to explicitly interop with an existing language/platform so that you can hijack its libraries.

C++ took the low road by co-opting C. Scala and Clojure took the low road in co-opting Java. Languages like Arc, Smalltalk, Haskell and Eiffel took the high road and as a result they don't have as many users.

Having said that, I don't want to imply that language designers are doing a bad thing when they take the "low road." They get adopters and they bring powerful tools into the world. It's just that when they do that they have to sacrifice coherence a bit.
This is true as far as it goes. Nokia and Samsung between them hold most of the under-$100 price band in mobile phones, so it's not just Asha but ultra-low-cost phones where Nokia is holding ground.

But this is no longer most of the phone business. Nokia used to be in a class by itself, with 35% of the whole handset business worldwide. That is down to something like 5%, and that part is the low-margin business, so margin contribution makes that picture even worse.

The bad news is that $50 Androids are coming and $90 Androids are pretty good. That's right in the Asha price range.
The author faces a situation where telling the truth causes suffering.

The identity of his situation with that of a person who enjoys lying is premised upon pleasure being nothing more than the absence of suffering.

This reduces the enjoyment of a person who enjoys lying to an absence of suffering. Belief systems which might take this approach to pleasure tend to treat trying to avoid suffering as suffering - i.e. all the way down, turtles suffer.
Try googling around for "cqrs". There are many ideas on how to do exactly this effectively.

All it takes is to swap "write" operation with "event" entity (all is state). Combine that with intention revealing commands (customer_died instead of delete from customers where id=1) and you hit jackpot.

End result is nice stream of events which is ultimate source of truth and enables crazy queries you never thought you would ever need http://abdullin.com/journal/2010/6/3/time-machines-should-su...
Looks very cool. For the cost it seems like a no-brainer. I usually wait until a feel the shoe is too old before replacing, that may be too late.
There was MSN web messenger and it was fantastic. I guess they never went as far as making your conversations more permanent or merging them with your profile (and to be fail, there would have been user outcry if your one-off private conversations were suddenly held forever)
Canon PowerShot N
Japanese company Canon has brought to CES 2013 compact camera with an unusual design – PowerShot N.