skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
freebase.com?

I don't follow them, but the vision seems similar. They launched about a year ago.
NASA Releases EUROPA under Open Source License
How Limited Liability Companies (LLCs) Are Taxed
In any case, when evaluating Erlang, I found the immutable variables to be rather unpractical. I can see why they might help to avoid errors with multi threading, but I don't see a reason to be excited about it? At the end of the day, it is another limitation of the language. With Java, that is what people complain about, the constraints, why wish for it in other languages?

If you think that immutable variables reduce programming errors, you are free to just not change your variables anyway, I guess. No language constraint required.
I don't know, the editor just seemed ugly. But perhaps I'll give it another shot.
How does everybody backup?
As soon as you start writing code for your own business, backup is a relevant question.

Since OS X Apple always came with decent freeware solutions that could be used with external firewire drives for example. Time Capsule is a logical (and great) successor.

But what about linux and windows? At work I use linux and we backup with ibms tivoli software. This is crap of course, because replay of a crashed or exchanged hd requires installation of a linux system first in order to access the backup. After that the data has to be moved bit by bit and apps have to be re-installed one by one.

As long as I used windows (until 2000), it was even worse.
(sidenote: the degree with which an os is called professional is reverse to its backup capabilities. This strikes me since ever!).

How does everybody backup their macs, linux boxes or windows systems?
Computer security with Quake-based 'cyberspace'
That is a really brash statement. Usually this kind of comment comes from someone who hasn't really explored the advantages of the different languages they've tried, they've just taken every language that's come to them and manhandled it until it felt like the language they like. I've seen that happen before a lot, somebody likes C very much, so when they're introduced to Lisp, they basically write C in lisp. what does that give you? well for one thing, you have basically a program that is no better than the C version, but with a strange syntax. However, it means that the coder also hasn't taken advantage of the things you can do in lisp that are different from the things you can do in C. You can't write closures in C, so if you've only ever written in C you probably won't use them when writing in Lisp, and thus it seems like a pretty useless transition.

Languages ARE interfaces to the computer system, but that doesn't mean that some aren't more powerful than others. I could write a paper with a typewriter or a word processor, which are both viable ways to produce a document, but I can do things with a word processor that just aren't feasible on a typewriter. If you've never used a word processor, you won't miss things like "copy and paste" or being able to tweak your margins at any time, but if you HAVE used one before you will feel stifled without those abilities. Now, if you use a word processor, but you don't figure out how to use any of those handy features, than it's just an electronic typewriter to you and you'll say things like "tools don't matter! Typewriters and Word Processors are just two different ways to write a paper. That's it!"

of course, you'll probably get a few odd looks for saying that.
I've dealt with a couple systems that link Lisp 'trivially' to C. When they say they link trivially, what they mean is that they let you call the function in the C library just like you'd call it from C. This is frequently extremely not how you want to do it in Lisp, and so you're forced to either a) write a Lispification layer, in which you take all the C functions and turn them into a library that acts like you want a Lisp library to act (the usual approach), or b) just write it like it's in C, which makes you very angry all day long, and also loses some of the benefit of writing in Lisp. Both approaches slow you down quite a lot. Especially if you decide not to be an asshole and release your lispification layer as open-source (which you should)-- because then people will all be pounding down your door for fixes and extensions and maintenance for new versions of the C library, which is not what you want to do. You didn't even want to write the layer to begin with, presumably.

So no, 'trivial' C linking not actually a silver bullet making everything hunky-dorey with respect to lack of libraries. Python has a significant advantage in that it's popular enough for many people to have already gone through the Pythonification process for most important libraries, and have also open-sourced their Pythonification layers.
Yes, I think you're right that something like this could and should be done. I've been collecting ideas and experimenting with stuff like that for a long time. It's not easy. Finding datasets is not the big problem, so I think tagging datasets doesn't help as much as it does with, say, photo collections.

The crucial thing is data quality. You basically have three kinds of public datasets:

1) Academic ones, which are mostly high quality, but tend to be dusted and not kept up to date.

2) High quality commercial datasets, which are expensive and tightly guarded.

3) Free datasets of mostly low quality. Yes you can use dapper to scrape it and freebase to store it, but what's missing is a process to assure data quality. That's what a community effort could provide or coordinate. Something like apache.org for data. And there would have to be a way for non-programmers to help, because with most datasets programmers are not the ones who know the data best and the coding can be extremely dull. It's unbelievable how many different ways there are to screw up data and how difficult it is to clean. There's always some manual work left and you can't beat a pair of eyes (yet) to spot errors.

There would also have to be a way for users of datasets to pay a reasonable amount of money to have a particular dataset brought up to high quality standards.
Yep, the CSP style of channel communication is great. Those thinking Erlang is better than sliced bread need to make sure they're up on what came before and after; http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/ Personally, I find Erlang to be too clunky as a language. Good for special purpose telephone switching software maybe, but for general programming the CSP style can be done in nicer ways than having to switch to a whole new language.
Document your CSS as a Poster
> Wonder if I can get it to work with Django and ditch theirs?

Probably. You just don't use theirs and import the Template module instead.
Whereas your trading strategy presupposes that someone else is right, but that they persistently under-react.

I find it more intellectually appealing to make my money taking a stand than to make it by saying "Me too, me too!"
Flags. Rated.
it's a site about flags and um... their ratings.
that's a nice progression. i like the text adventure/add your own bits angle.
Languages don't matter, eh?

A month ago I heard a couple of hackers talk about how they were able to complete a personnel scheduler in Scheme in 20'000 LOC and a few weeks time, when the previous C++ codebase was 200'000 LOC and was never going to be finished.

Not always, but for certain endeavours, certain languages are just much better tools for the job than others, and by better, understand order of magnitude better. That's a very real fact, even if it doesn't make the languages zealots any less obnoxious.
Sun Buys MySQL
Paul comes off rather rude by not commenting on the contents of the rebuttal. Have you only been able to hear the first couple of sentences because you were in a rush, or could you tell the rest of the talk by the opening and didn't bother? It doesn't become very clear to me.
I just copy my /bin directory onto an 8GB thumb drive. Rotate once a week into fireproof box.
Not often we hear about CSP here. I did my doctorate in it (Hoare was the head of department at the time). Are you using CSP for something real?
Sun To Acquire MySQL
Air: The Only Thing Left In Your Wallet After You Buy Apple's New Laptop
How to Prepare Your Startup for the Downturn
The Danger of Free
Personal stuff I copy to a USB drive in the house.

For business stuff it's tar + ssh to a geographically distant location.
"It would create a false sense of security and breed complacency, both of which are more fatal to a start-up..."

Yes, this is true for anything. As soon as you get a few bucks, a good developer, a good idea, a great hack, or even a little help from an unexpected place, there is a natural tendency to "let up". Don't do it! These are the best times to really "turn it on", as if it's your only chance.
Bootup Labs: Technology Incubator in Vancouver
Free Computer Science Classics from ACM
It's simple and thin like the iPod. If price wasn't an option and I could have more than one laptop I'd certainly want one. I can fit my iPod Nano in my wallet. The Air looks like it could fit in a folder.

Weight is more important for me, though. I don't honestly need anything extremely thin.
There are times when I just want to say, "Anything you can build, I can build in BASIC," but I chicken out.

OK, here goes...

Anything you can build, I can build in BASIC. Sure, I may have drop down a level and roll out some tools every once in a while, but my BASIC app will so whatever your <language du jour> app does.

There. I feel better already.
That doesn't sound like something a "normal" programmer would come up with.

It would be nice to have some "cookbooks" for typical applications in LISP or Scheme. Searching for "scheme web development" turns up just one or two hits, all very basic (like this one http://www.scheme.dk/blog/2007/08/introduction-to-web-develo...)

They lack a lot of features one has come to expect from modern web frameworks. Could be that some turn out to be unnecessary, but still. I think I have found good online references for learning the basics of Scheme, but for now, I still don't know if writing full blown web applications is really feasible.
I use the latest beta version of the online backup software I'm writing (www.tarsnap.com), and then copy said beta onto a USB key which I carry around with me.

Yes, I like eating dogfood. :-)
It's the dream, for a company like MySQL. Build it until the community loves your product, and then cash in when you get acquired. Congrats to those guys for succeeding. I can only hope that I'll one day be fist-bumping with a major technology player who recently acquired one of my products (don't we all?).
My only complaint is the price. Not because I don't want to pay it. Because I fear losing it. It is SO portable that I'd take it everywhere. Lose attention for 10 seconds and it could be gone. That's what I like about the eee. I wouldn't feel as bad losing a $400 device as an $1800 one.
Scheme web development:

http://brl.codesimply.net/

Full-blown web application:

http://ourdoings.com/
Expect to see lots and lots of Java in MySQL in the near future. The worst thing that could happen to any good software project - intrusion of Java - will happen almost certainly to MySQL.
I regularly use 4 USB devices with my laptop. Keyboard, Mouse, Camera, iPod. Even if keyboard+mouse go together, and Camera and iPod are swappable, I still need at least 2 ports simultaneously. Maybe the keyboard won't be necessary, but I doubt it. I have yet to find a laptop keyboard I didn't hate.
The data they store is so simple and non-relational that they should be making heavy use of memcached and/or BerkeleyDB and/or flat files and/or something else extremely fast and simple.
My problem with the price is that I'm not sure whether it could work as my primary computing tool or not.
I was worried about the same thing. Got an example of what you're worrying about?
That's a really perplexing question, isn't it? I gave up trying to answer it after your "Beating the Averages" essay didn't make the world-changing impact it rightly should have.

I suppose the good news is that Lisp hackers today don't have to feel the fear you felt during Viaweb, that the competition would figure out you were using Lisp, start using Lisp themselves, and beat you. Now we know that kind of thing just doesn't happen. Now you can shout it from the rooftops and know they'll only fear you, since you must be some amazing braniac to be productive in so difficult a language.
Under Linux we use Rsync. Its great and only the changed portions of changed files are updated. Under Windows I use Viono Backup (www.vionobackup.com). Its in beta at the moment, but this is secure and encrypted and works similar to Rsync
Wow, so who had that one on his/her 2008 predictions list? :-)
I must not have understood you... let me try again. You object to Seykota on the grounds that cutting a loss entails taking a loss. That's objectionable because losses are objectionable. Did I get it?

Of course, a big loss is more objectionable than a small one.
I'm doing mine in Arc#.NET.
So much for their pushing Postgresql:-(
Sun is acquiring MySQL AB (Jonathan Schwartz's Blog)
Thanks - so brl is following the ASP style approach to html generation (mix code and HTML)? Similar to PHP and JSP?

I like that better than creating the whole HTML in S-Expressions, but at the moment I wonder if the best approach would not be the one I know from XMLC: just operate on the dom-tree of the web page, and then serialize the dom?

Where are good places on the web to discuss such things?
I use SpiderOak (BTW: I'm a programmer for SpiderOak)
I guess it is good for us since we program in Java and MySQL, although I definitely wouldn't want Sun to run the great MySQL product into the ground.
Perhaps you want to look into the object databases that are available for your language. For example ZODB[1] or Durus[2] for Python.

[1] http://www.zope.org/Products/StandaloneZODB

[2] http://www.mems-exchange.org/software/durus/
2 USB keys (kept in separated places) plus external disk (connected only for copying).

Should suffice...
Depends on the startup.

Writing code is between 1% and 99% of a startup.
Yes, it is the first user conference for the open source network analysis software. Sharkfest is the new name for Ethereal. It will be a great conference, meeting the man himself, my hero, Gerald Combs. And it is in our neighborhood.
I second the Rsync recommendation. I back up our servers every 15 minutes with it. In the event of a catastrophe, we will have lost 15 minutes worth of data, at most.
"Facebook may be inching towards Plaxo's (and others') vision of letting users freely import and export their data from any site, including social networks like Facebook, we're told."

I wonder what that means for OpenID?
Ask YC: Who's going to the Crunchies?
To meet up or not to meet up? That is the question.
While I use my dvd drive heavily (watching dvds, especially when I am offline), I don't think that a 80 gb had is sufficient to store a suitable amount of films for offline use.

The real problem I see is this: reset of the password has always been done by inserting the boot dvd. This needs an external drive now and should better not be necessary on the go.
The subtle difference between JSP and BRL is that in JSP %>string<% becomes a statement that outputs the string to a web page, while in BRL ]string[ is simply a string expression. This makes the same handy syntax available for putting any static/dynamic elements together, whether in web pages, emails, or SQL. This would be hard to replicate in a non-sexpr language. Hacking is quick and easy, and centralizing similar code from individual pages is straightforward and natural. BRL doesn't stay messy as PHP tends to.

Other features of BRL could be implemented in a non-sexpr language. It just seems nobody cares to make languages truly suitable for database-driven web apps. PHP could have done something like define-input to solve their register_globals problem while retaining a lot of the convenience it had become famous for. A ResultSet object in any language could be extended to have a very useful subset of the functionality in BRL's sql-repeat.

Anyway, I'm not sure the best place for discussion. Most lispers and schemers don't seem interested in web development. Maybe you could discuss it here on news.yc.
That's a {def (on n) (on (+ n 1))} wonderful {(on 1)} idea.
Facebook's real problem isn't Privacy, it's Monetization. 3 possible solutions...
Java Intrusion is almost the worst thing... it could be worse though... Adobe could have bought MySQL and converted it to native ColdFusion (running on Java).
Take the history of OpenOffice. Pre-2.0 didn't require you to install Java. The problem is that Java VM is a commercial product controlled by Sun. By restricting Java VM to certain platforms Sun can potentially kill OSes they don't like, because with no OpenOffice (now also MySQL) an OS can be considered dead. This is worrisome - well, for those who don't trust Sun at least.
I guess the guys of http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/Nostradamus/ had.
Unix is sexy [nsfw]
Why would you do this? Isn't /home where your data lives?
Full-text article "How Companies Become Platform Leaders" from MIT Sloan Management Review
I always read s-expressions left-to-right. The outer expression tells you what you're getting. I usually don't have to go very far in before I know what the code is intended to do.
Interesting question. I consider S3 with a front-end like http://www.jungledisk.com/

Does anybody have any experience with that?
That's dilemma, not question.
Javascript Library Performance Test Roundup - Results
Oops, I should have written "sub-optimal use of time" or something like that.
A Java version of MySQL + JRuby, which is almost shaping up to be faster than mainline = Sun threatening to control the market again.

Although JRuby + JMySQL on the right VM could make easy virtualization on RoR for companies like Dreamhost.
Got downvoted on reddit for a similar remark. The only logical conclusion I can derive from that is "Ron Paul likes Java".
Mac backup: Last day of the month I run Carbon Copy Cloner to backup everything to a 500GB firewire external drive. (firewire, so that I can boot OSX from that image, if need be.)

PC Backup: I dumped my PCs 18 months ago when I bought my Intel-chip Mac. Now both my "PCs" (XP development machine and Win2k3 Web Server) are running as virtual machines on my Mac, so my Windows install is actually just one big file used by Parallels which is backed up as part of the Mac backup.

--Jack
On my system, anything that changes is in /bin. For a catastrophe, I would reinstall the OS and environment and then restore data from the thumb drive.
Seth Godin on Workaholics
Microsoft seeks patent for office 'spy' software
Oracle, BEA Systems in $8.5B software merger
Facebook = $15 billion.
MySQL = $1 billion?

The world is a messed up place.
You can't buy an open-source project. While MySQL has (so far) distributed their code under an open-source (well, sort of) license, they follow the traditional "all development is done by employees who assign copyright to the company" model. In contrast, Sun could hire a few Postgresql developers, but there isn't any central organization which they could buy out.

Similarly, there are persistent rumours that Sun will buy RedHat; but never any suggestion that anyone would buy Debian or FreeBSD, because the later both lack any central corporate body.
There is a language spec, you can write your own VM (I wouldn't recommend it...).
The complete Pasta Theory of Software
Ten quirky things about Python
Visualizing Regular Expressions
Err... yes, I know. As a Postgresql user, it was nice to know they were spending some money on Postgresql, and I'm sorry that that will likely come to an end.
Sun Microsystems acquires MySQL for $1 billion
I've been using git for backups the past few weeks. Works incredibly well.

I only backup code and documents though. For other things it might not be such a great solution.
pg: do you think that using a fairly obscure language lowered your valuation in yahoo's eyes because they knew they'd have to rewrite it, or raised it because they knew the hackers they were buying were top-notch?
Does a single Arc instance serve all Hacker News traffic?
I'm excited for a tidier, more practical Lisp but curious about how efficient the initial public Arc implementation will be for web apps.
You can only download them using a free ACM account, and even with such account, you can't download most of them (ie, von Neumann's one).
Yes, in the C++ version the s-expressions are stored on disk exactly as they were before. The C++ version literally reads a file of Lisp code and executes it. As an instance of Greenspun's tenth rule, it's hard to beat.

The original Lisp version was actually running till last fall. When they introduced the C++ version you had to explicitly choose to "upgrade." There were some users, including me, who hadn't. Finally last fall they called me and told me they were going to move us to the C++ version. It's barely different.
My guess is this question is coming from a Ruby developer.
This is an interesting move, but will make money for Sun? MySQL isn't free but it's not expensive. It will take an awful lot of sales before they break even.

I'm guessing they will find some way to raise the price of MySQL licences, perhaps by bundling higher-priced licences with Solaris.
Evaluates to:

That's a wonderful stack overflow idea.

It works, haha!
This is NSFW. I guess I should forewarn people.
Oracle to Acquire BEA Systems
I don't think it made that much difference either way. They liked us simply because we were the leader in our market.
No, but the dependency on "horizontal scaling" for medium-traffic web apps is more common due to Rails and one reason I ask.
Send files faster in Rails with X-Sendfile
Viaweb was a cash strapped startup in a competitive market, who succeeded against odds because of their speed and agility. They were running on fumes when they were acquired. A longer development period would have certainly meant the death of the company.

So, no, they could not have written it in C.
Merbful Authentication is Born
So get a decent job, then you can afford a Mac, too...

Actually this is the first Mac where the price seems right to me.
If you build a better mouse trap ...
Indeed. It's possible to create half-assed underengineered solutions on any application platform.
Can you come up with an interpretation for "rigatoni code"?
yes, thats exactly my home setup. Macs save the world.
Indentation is merely horizontal positional information.

The idea of using position to convey information is very old - music is written using vertical position information.
Please mark as NSFW in the title. I've got 3 levels of management walking by constantly.
When voting doesn't work
"Ron Paul likes Java"

Nah, too black.
I think arguments of the form "low prices destroyed business x" are complete nonsense. Apparently business x didn't deliver anything that people wanted enough to pay for, given the alternatives. That is all there is to it.
Op, must have found a ColdFusion fan on YC News... I used to write that for a job for years... rest assured, the affliction can be cured!
12 Learnings As a Startup CEO (Jobster, ~$48m in VC)
Is it threaded?
Jeez, no kidding. Here in Big Corp. land, these things can get you in trouble...
Python Tips & Tricks
MySQL is available under the GPL. Nothing sort-of about that.
MySQL is available under the GPL, but MySQL AB has a history of misleading people about what the GPL license means, in order to convince people to pay for commercial licenses which they don't need.

That's what I meant by "sort-of" -- MySQL is GPLed, but where potential customers are concerned, they try really hard to make sure that people won't take advantage of that fact.
The Economics of Marriage
Except that, you know, Java is going fully open-source. VM and the whole works.
Actually JVM is GPL'd already, somehow missed the news, so it's not that worrisome.