skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
what the hell? this is not "just coming to lisp", it's something someone wrote as a personal hack. I upvoted it and commented to encourage more lispers to post here.

Erik Naggum's essay on the subject is highly referenced and cited by people developing time and date libraries for other languages and systems:

http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html

The premiere text on time and date algorithms IS written in Common Lisp:

http://www.amazon.com/Calendrical-Calculations-Millennium-Ed...

And here is a taste of what's out there;

http://www.cliki.net/TIMER
http://www.cliki.net/net-telent-date
http://www.cliki.net/local-time
http://www.cliki.net/Date-Calc
http://www.cliki.net/cl-l10n
Do you really think that the OSS world is on par with Google's army of (paid, full-time) engineers, and that EC2 is as efficient as (or, conceivably, even in the same ballpark as) Google's datacenter infrastructure? (Amazon's private infrastructure might be run as well, although they have very different concerns -- compare GFS (http://labs.google.com/papers/gfs.html) with Dynamo (http://s3.amazonaws.com/AllThingsDistributed/sosp/amazon-dyn...), for example.)
making order from chaos seems like a real tangible creation to me. Typical grauniad (see google for explanation, for those that didn't grow up on Private-Eye) reporting...
I don't know - AT&T dropping calls and the virtual keyboard being a pain in the ass are legitimate gripes.

I haven't moved from an iPod touch because of that.
So, it's actually relevant to the topic to point this out: Once you meet Zed Shaw you will realize that he may have been trying to write like he talks. It just didn't work very well. Zed Shaw in person is a hilarious, charismatic trash-talking New Yorker who is also an intense hacker genius. If you understand both New York-style trash talk [1] and intense hacker geniuses, you will understand Zed Shaw. He seemed like a nice guy, the couple of times I met him.

But the trash-talking aspect of his personality doesn't translate well to a text-only online persona. The body language and expression and tone and intensity and back-and-forth are all lost, as is the context: He can't tune his approach to his audience, because he doesn't have any feedback.

He seems to have figured that out now and is making a deliberate attempt to change his online persona.

One big problem with the internet is that you must develop a completely different online voice from your offline voice if you don't want your words to be taken the wrong way. Your work online is decontextualized in a way that your own words are not.

---

[1] Try to remember that when an East Coast working-class person says fuck you they very likely mean "have a nice day". Though it depends on the delivery.
It's apparently more complicated than that. Here's a review by one of her former professors:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/review...
I'm curious why you think the Foundation Trilogy aged badly? I recently re-read Foundation; it's still one of my favorites. It takes a completely unique perspective on the future of human civilization.
Why the U.S. carrier group is scrap metal
if you don't need gaming, I'd get a linux box ( or a mac ), and run windows in a virtual machine.
Sleep is Garbage Collection
Well, I would phrase it differently -- the financial incentive to stay is salary + EV[options], (where EV is expected value) which takes into account the odds of the startup paying out.
Same as always -- a grounding in fundamentals, strong experience with a couple choice technologies that aren't too out of date, at least vague familiarity with the new new thing, and the ability to assimilate the new new thing quickly when you need to (probably implied by the previous points).

EDIT: oh, and business smarts wouldn't hurt.
Interesting. A few things stand out about your view:

You support public financing of education, but only when there is also public delivery of education services.

The objective of public financing of education is economic egalitarianism -- why should a kid not be able to go to school just b/c his parents can't afford it or don't consider it a worthwhile expenditure.

By objecting to some cases of public financing of education (such as vouchers) you seem to think that a kid whose parents are poor or who do not value education should have only one option, public school. I'm curious why you feel the need to limit the choices of the poor kid so much, but not the rich kid -- why shouldn't all parochial schools be banned?

It may be the case that you oppose the public funding of k-12 education. If that's the case, your argument is at least consistent. But you would then need to admit that since most people pay quite different amounts of property taxes, etc., that some deserve a refund and some deserve to have to pay extra even for public school.
It is astonishing, also not a designer, but the best hardware designs by far are Apple. I think if Gates is the archetypal Programmer as CEO then Jobs is the archetypal "Product Manager" as CEO. He may not be able to implement, but he sure knows how to write a spec.
Thanks for recommending my site Gibbon.

The Inman interview you linked to is full of techniques for marketing that doesn't cost money, but it does cost time.

My suggestion is to pick just one of his techniques and focusing on that (quizzes, shocking content, for example).
Sure -- minimizing the number of Python statements is a decent optimization heuristic in Python (and, as a bonus, that can help you optimize for human readers as well when not taken to extremes).
Though this seems really obvious, it feels like just building a really awesome product is occasionally lost in all the marketing hoopla. Apple's marketing is great, but I wonder how great it would be without a killer product at the center.
Sadly, there's no standard and acknowlegedly forceful way to say: "Your statement is technically veridical but I disagree with the connotations you intend to sneak in."

Yeah, there is. You yell. That's why cable TV news shows (and politics in general) suck so much -- you get two sides who refuse to actually contradict each other competing on volume to have their message triumph over the other.

That's because most of the people watching are going to come away with one idea, and you want those people. If you want to "win" in the minds of those simple-minded people, and your opponent isn't saying something that can be easily falsified, you have to compete on volume, arrogance, and ferocity.

On the other hand, if you only care about the viewers or readers who are capable of having a nuanced view, you can simply say what you have to say, as clearly and cogently as you know how. They'll understand and remember. But will you really be satisfied with those people? Probably not, if you're fighting for votes or market share. In other words, unless all you want is a fair shake from intelligent people, what you want can't be had in a civil way.
Sorry, but I have to dismiss this as Obie protecting his economic interests as an owner of a Rails consultancy. I can only guess that he sees negative Ruby coverage like this as a threat to new Ruby development, and thus the future of his consultancy.

With few exceptions, Ruby applications running on MRI will be wholly unsuited to high throughput environments. This is true regardless of how good your Ruby code is. Saying that using Object#kind_of? is bad Ruby coding may be true but it's mostly orthogonal to the speed of the code. Even the most aesthetically pleasing, extensible, and clean Ruby code will be slow.

After a certain threshold of requests per second the bottleneck will almost always become Ruby. After all, it might not even matter how aggressive your caching strategy is if it can take upwards of 50ms to even talk to your cache. MRI Ruby's IO subsystem and its threading model absolutely hamstring its suitability for even IO bound applications.

The good news is that Ruby will improve in the future. For better or worse, Engine Yard hitched its wagon to the 1.8.x generation of Ruby. Engine Yard's customers will be using the 1.8.x series of interpreters for quite some time to come. And Engine Yard has the engineering know how and an economic interest on improving that generation of Ruby.

But in the meantime those of us building applications that need to make efficient use of a given set of hardware are left with a choice. Do we fight with our platform tooth and nail to try and wring even an acceptable amount throughput out of it? Or do we change our platform to best suit the problems in front of us?
Governent Maintains Control Over Banks By Refusing to Accept Repayment of TARP Money
On the subject of "public money", would you also vehemently oppose allowing a welfare recipient to spend money out of his/her welfare check at a church bake sale? Such behavior only increases the church's "general fund" and would seem to be equally distasteful to you.

What about spending money from one's tax rebate on a church raffle?

Also, how is anyone being forced to contribute money to a church they oppose? Are you saying that if my tax dollars went partially to the $0.50 someone used to purchase that donut at a Presbyterian bake sale, that my tax dollars are now being used to support a church I oppose?
Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" was very influential with me.

http://craphound.com/down/download.php
If this is true, why isn't it classified? I don't think any government is in the habit of exposing the 'single point of failure' of their war systems.

As some of the commenters on that article have pointed out, this smells more like a budget-approval game than an actual credible threat...
Promotional Apparel 
With the recent hit to the economy, it was no surprise that my catering company has also struggled. As a small business owner, I could not afford to lose much more business, and needed to find some way to further promote my company.

I tried to think of new ideas to generate business and awareness of my company. As a relatively new company, there were still many potential clients who had never heard of me. I needed to find both one-time clients, such as weddings and office parties, and repeat clients, such as meeting organizers.

I had never used promotional products before, and thought this would be a good starting point. Pens or staplers seemed overdone, and I needed to think of something truly creative and eye-catching. I wanted a product that would be seen by as many people as possible, and one that could also be a conversation starter in order to generate buzz about my company. With a small marketing budget, I needed a promotional item with a long life: one that would be used repeatedly and would continue to promote my business, rather than a single-use item.

Suddenly, the idea occurred to me: promotional apparel! It would be fantastic to have people wearing advertisements for my company - particularly satisfied clients. I knew that I provided delicious food, prompt and attentive service, and that the large majority of my clients were very happy with my business. Yet I could not expect all of them to tell all their friends about my company. However, if they were wearing promotional apparel with an eye-catching or interesting logo or sentence, it would be more likely to promote conversation.

Promotional apparel seemed to be the best answer to my immediate need to market my company. Tee shirts are the most obvious route, although I have also considered sweatshirts, caps, and even wristbands. and I brainstormed various slogans and graphics for them. I envisioned a clever slogan or catchy logo, such as an abstract cupcake, with my business information on the back. That way, conversation or not, word about my business would be sure to get out.
One of the most effective marketing tools for any growing company is the use of promotional clothing and <a href="http://www.promotionalpro.com/promotional-clothing-and-apparel.htm">promotional apparel.</a>
Props to Doctorow's Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom.

The other freely available (this one under copyright) great post-singularity work of sci-fi is The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html
Russia to unveil spaceship plans
I love sci-fi, but rather than recommend "sci-fi" books, I would recommend "speculative fiction" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_fiction), which is "a fiction genre speculating about worlds that are unlike the real world in various important ways".

Good sci-fi is speculative fiction, but bad sci-fi is just "a story told in a sci-fi setting".

This is a good way of distinguishing between Dune by Frank Herbert (which speculates about many things, including the kind of universe that exists after a computer AI suppresses the human race and is then overthrown) and Hunters of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, which is a crap book that speculates about very little in a sci-fi setting.

If you think about it, starting a company that makes a new product is basically speculating about a world that is unlike our current world because of your product! Also, you should be speculating about how other technologies and products will affect our world, so you can adapt your company before it becomes extinct...
I guess we'll find out once I get customers!
The problem presented--how do the people at the top advance--has a simple solution. Have them select people to specifically mentor (via a mutual selection process) and pay them bonuses based on how much those people improve.

You motivate the best and supply them with concrete goals by asking them to try to teach--which ultimately sets them up to be better managers down the road.
I agree. How does this article have so many points? It took me 3 seconds to realize " how little this guy understands the Internet".

It seems like there is a rising trend that anything "anti-google" gets upvotes.
I'd actually recommend Pattern Recognition. Neuromancer's good, too, but there's something about PR that's very real.
The comments to the article are excellent and very informative.

Whether or not the new Chinese missile exposes a single point of failure, I suspect that the Gary Brecher is still right, and that the U.S. Carriers are completely obsolete. Between submarines, swarms of cruise missiles, swarms of small boats, and ballistic missiles, it's hard to imagine carriers surviving very long in an all out war. Of course this doesn't really matter, because in such a war nukes are the main worry. But this does mean that the money spent on carriers is completely wasted.
I can think of two reasons getting emotionally attached to the tools: learning the tool, be it Java or Ruby, requires considerably more thought than learning to use a screwdriver and using the tool shapes the way problems and solutions look to a programmer.

Required effort causes programmers to know less languages and to value the languages they already know higher as they've had to come up with a rationalization for learning the language. This rationalization hinders acknowledging the downsides of the languages they've learned.

Additionally, languages give us our vocabulary and solutions seen beautiful by a programmer of one language can seem incomprehensible or at least ugly to programmer of another language. This is at least something that I've personally observed in a Java-shop I work in.
I share the same skepticism towards telecom as Lawrence Lessig. In short: they've always been slow to innovate, they only look after their bottom line, and they stifle innovation.

Comcast will not build anything before hackers get to it. Comcast will do what they've been doing all along: protecting their profits. I'll be surprised if they finish this open platform and if it doesn't suck.
Specialist vs. Generalist: Who Wins?
If sleep is garbage collection, can I switch back to old malloc/free? So I can do it more evenly over the day? :)
Yes, I have told him. Thanks.
A hobbyist small UAV builder can indeed cause a lot of damage if he has evil intent. For instance, a small UAV with half a pound of high-explosive could glide over a "secure area" and try to hit a high-value civilian target. Much easier than detonating a car-bomb or trying to take someone out with a sniper rifle. Sharpshooters will have to scan the skies too (if they're not doing it already).

Fortunately, it's not exactly easy to buy IMU's, otherwise we would have heard of guided-missile hobbyists doing evil things. Also fortunately, GPS shuts down above a certain altitude and speed (not applicable to GPS units belonging to the U.S. military).
I can't believe I hadn't heard about it, either. Just tried it on OS X, and it's fantastic.

Have any other games been developed on top of this engine?
Wasn't it just a year ago that Dubai was held up as a shining example of modernity in the Arab world? The future of cities in this interlocking global economy? Its reliance on tourism and finance was lauded because everyone knew that oil in the Persian Gulf would eventually run out. And a lot of people I know wanted to go to Dubai (my sister actually wanted to be spend a year working overseas there) just to check it out.

Dubai's problem is that they've built an economy that's almost entirely pro-cyclical. Tourism does well when the economy booms, but dries up when it busts. Finance does well when the economy booms, but blows up when it busts. So it's no wonder that in the biggest downturn in 80 years, Dubai's economy is hurting.

But that doesn't mean that Dubai's an example of how not to build a city, any more than Silicon Valley or Detroit are examples of how not to build a city.
Ship-based anti-ballistic missile missile?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-161_Standard_Missile_3

check.

Ability to part 4 acres of sovereign territory 12 miles off your shore with 70 fighter aircraft on board? Priceless.

Air supremacy solves all sorts of problems, including striking the the anti-ballistic missiles in their silos/bunkers/trucks/staging areas.

Now, the real issue is people taking this bait and all of sudden thinking "maybe those Republicans know what they're talking about one defense." Um, no. Because the real answer is "who the hell cares?" Anyone really think we want to go to war with China? Anyone think China really wants to go to war with us?
The bigger you get, the quicker people will be to suspect you. It's the flip side of "Everyone loves an underdog." Everyone hates an overdog.

This story and that recent one about Google Checkout

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=533849

are like a controlled experiment to measure how much of this dislike is rational. Google did behave badly in the first case. Here they've merely been attacked by an idiot.
History shows that the license change was an attempt to find a business model. (they already had commercial licenses with the lgpl - maybe no one was buying?) If you interpret this as being untrustworthy, then so be it. These guys are doing amazing work and to question their ethics, when you obviously don't know them, shows a bit of immaturity on your part.
As someone that considers myself largely a specialist, I'm going to say that in the web world, it's mostly the generalist.

Technologies on the web are changing so fast that from a specialist's perception, there's scarcely enough time to learn a technology in depth before it's outdated. There are outliers, generally those implementing the technology themselves (e.g. the people developing jQuery, the people developing RoR), but in general most of the people using those things only have a couple years experience.

Things like systems programming, where I mostly come from, it's not uncommon to spend 5-10 years learning the field in depth without the technology changing much underneath you. Web development 10 years ago was so different that it's almost difficult to call it the same "specialization".

As a result, my strategy has been to learn just enough general stuff to get myself by in a pinch, but more importantly to be able to recognize people that know their stuff in the roles that we'll eventually want to bring in people to fill.
Hmmm, the Twitter guys say Scala helps them write "reliable, high performance code" that is "correct and maintainable," and Obie Fernandez basically blasts them for needing that help. Their problem is that they wrote a large codebase in Ruby and ended up creating so many bugs that they had to add a bunch of run-time checks to guard against them. It seems reasonable that they would want to choose a language that helped them with that, rather than sitting around flagellating themselves because they failed to get the job done in Ruby, which is apparently what this writer wants them to do.
Workers more productive if allowed to use the Internet for leisure
Truth in labeling: the headline is sarcastic. It's not really a 'reasoned response' when, by the third paragraph, it reaches for the new gross-out hyperbolic cliche, "made me throw up a little in my mouth".
I always thought so,I think it does some defragging too.
Well, if this mechanism is the same in fruit flies and in humans, that implies that it's a pretty low-level kernel function.

We could change the source, but it might take several hundred million years to finish compiling your new biosphere. And in the meantime the old biosphere might well eat it for lunch. Literally!
Correct, and the median EV[options] is 0.
There Is More Than One Way To Do It - TIMTOWTDI - it's a pity that that slogan is confined to the Perl community. No other slogan is so effective in imposing a culture of civilized dialog between competetive projects.
Sorry, but I have to dismiss this as Obie protecting his economic interests as an owner of a Rails consultancy

This was my exact thought. After reading his claims to Alex's "agenda", I looked at the sidebar and saw that he's written four (obnoxiously-covered) Ruby books. Who really has the agenda here?

Near as I can tell, Alex's entire argument was "Twitter is really big and ugly; we need a stricter type system; Ruby doesn't have one." That seems perfectly legitimate to me.
By this metric employee #1 at Facebook should have bailed by now. Seriously?

Ultimately this can be boiled down to, "If you don't think your company is going anywhere, and you're not being compensated adequately, then it's probably time to look elsewhere." Which is a step closer to reality, but ignores things like the fact that you might simply like it where you work.
China doesn't want to, but a bunch of pirates/guerillas/terrorists/etc. with speedboats, motorcycles, and Cessnas might. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/aug/21/usa.julianborger
I thought the whole point of the latest CIWS and last-option missile batteries on carriers was to protect against missile attacks, ballistic or not? Granted, stealth and/or mach 10 is hard to defeat, but in general, the whole point of having a carrier is to keep the carrier in a "safe" spot, and use its vast array of aircraft to project power towards the arena of hostility...
This doesn't seem particularly newsworthy. The general thrust is that any nation willing to declare war on the United States could potentially sink its aircraft carriers. OK, we'll stipulate to that, but really does that reduce their value today?
Modern garbage collection is done more evenly:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_sc...

Perhaps the brain could do something similar.
I must have a very aggressive GC because my memory is all but worthless for everything besides code.
I hope MagLev does great things for the Ruby community. I like the language, but keep away from it because of lack of a formal spec and the slow implementation. I suspect most potential users have the same reasons for not giving Ruby a go.
Do you really need to read entire sci-fi novels to extract whatever cool ideas they may have? In terms of getting ideas for startups, 99% of a novel is probably irrelevant and it might be better to have a resource that just gives you the 1% that matters.