skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Terrible. All you need is a plot of the amount of money in your account at time t color-coded by the method of interest calculation. The $$$ at a given time (let's use something like a 5-year CD for our ''fixed'' example and a yearly compounding financial product with dividend/interest reinvestment as our ''compound'' example) will say it all.

Anyone who can't ''get it'' with that presentation isn't going to benefit from the verbose explanation presented.
Why people believe weird things about money
Is it sad or proud that I recognized 5 of the 10 keyboards from having written programs on them in elementary school? The TI-1000 was particularly atrocious, although the PCjr wireless keyboard was pretty godawful.

The old-school HP, IBM, and Sun workstation keyboards -- seemingly cleft from a solid block of metal, with a satisfying CLICK on each keypress -- get my vote as the best keyboards ever made. It was a sad day when I looked at the HP and IBM white-box models in a store one day and realized that the good keyboards were no longer being made.
You were fortunate. I was the only guy in my college dorm with a computer, an Apple //e, when my neighbor announced he was getting a PC Jr. As a dedicated fanboy (even back then) I was nervous that my Apple would be crushed by the IBM giant. I was instantly relieved when I saw his chiclet keyboard and surmised that my computer was still the cool one on campus.

I lived to type in adventure games from Creative Computing, inCider and other mags that published BASIC code. I still remember fondly playing countless hours of Super Star Trek.
I used to think this way, but you know what? Who are we to say whether he's not living or not? I know plenty of people who are "living it up." And quite frankly I can't tell if they're happier for it or not. Perhaps you can't enjoy life without living it up, but on the same token, perhaps others can't enjoy life without making something big.
You are fortunate to have actually had the opportunity to work for a great manager. Most of us have never had that luxury.
Airline passengers going through NY now have something special - Passenger Rights
I knew it! If the universe if 13 billion years old, what was happening 13,000,000,001 years ago?
Dave Winer's new app
Truth #1: How to post a URL.

http://adityakothadiya.typepad.com/adeologue/2008/01/25-trut...
I feel like every person who writes a guide to installing ubuntu glosses over at least a few critical details. I'm rather sick of this shit.

I feel like people who write those tutorials assume a basic computer literacy from their readers. I am not assaulting you, I am replying to an assault: you have no idea how to burn a bootable CD. Period. You're not even ready to install an OS, any kid of OS. So go get yourself a basic "Build your own PC" kind of book, read it, and then try more advanced tasks such as installing operating systems.
There is another facility ruby and lisp lack- a good typing system- which you can find in languages like Haskell.
Believe me, I know. I would gladly work for a substantially lower salary under a great manager than a higher salary under a micro-managing idiot.
Some would call that a feature, not a bug.
Steve Jobs keynote speech leaked?
title changed from

BREAKING: Old man does not understand something new
I currently am working on developing Talent Management software and I always cringe when I hear that one of the key selling points is that it can help increase employee retention rates.

I've always thought that Talent Mgmt software can only take you so far. Any system in place, no matter how good it is, still can never compensate for how a shitty manager interacts with employees.

In the end, its people working with people.
Ron Paul, of course. He wants to completely end the War On Drugs, and on CNN last week he said that as president he would pardon all nonviolent drug offenders.
"After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited by the possibilities of new technology and the innovations being made in the private sector, that in 1999 they set up their own venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, which "identifies and partners with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions"."

After 9/11, they started In-Q-Tel in 1999?
Time May Not Exist

Duh. I realized this years ago.
Absolutely nothing...
People care more about status than money.
As a data point, in the source code of Arc and its libraries + the web server + News.YC + all of YC's internal applications, there are 738 calls to def (= CL defun) and 187 calls to mac (= CL defmacro). This isn't a complete list, because there are other defining operators, but it gives you an idea how large a role macros play in a typical Lisp application.

If you measured by uses of each type of operator, the role of macros would be even larger. You often write a function that you only call once, but you wouldn't do that with a macro.

Here's the last piece of code I wrote. I wrote it because I was curious to see what colors users had chosen for the top bar.

(defopa topcolors req
(minipage "Topcolors"
(tab
(each user (sort (compare > [karma _])
(keep [aand (uvar _ topcolor)
(isnt it (hexrep orange))]
(keys profs*)))
(tr (td (link user (user-url user)))
(tdcolor (hex>color (uvar user topcolor)) (hspace 30)))))))

There are 10 macros used here: defopa, minipage, tab, each, karma, aand, uvar, tr, td, tdcolor.

Actually it's a hack that karma is a macro. I wanted it to be settable and was too lazy to define a setter, so I just defined it as a macro. It should be a function, and I should be able to say just (compare > karma).
Dude. Buy a dell with ubuntu, or one of those wal-mart computers wit gOS. Or call up a computer dude to fix your computer for you. Or order correctly-burned ubuntu cds.
transcript: http://www.resourceshelf.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/face...
In theory, it should be possible to get better performance out of a Lisp application, since most versions of Common Lisp include a compiler. Ruby is interpreted at present and can be slower in some contexts. Runtime pauses for garbage collection can be quite noticeable in Ruby.
Well, it happens that I also think that this could be an interesting approach to a social news website. It could also help us avoid the inevitable problem of large user bases and abuse from more vocal (annoying) minorities - such as Ron Paul supporters.

There is also one more problem that I'd think could be addressed: language. I'd like to see a website where the user could have links in any language that s/he can speak or read. When reddit was still interesting, half of its user base was non-american. I bet that more interesting people would hang around in reddit if they could also send links in other languages.

So, with that in mind, I started working on a side-project, and it is precisely what inovica is describing: a social news website that could use Bayesian filtering to score links for each user. Check it in http://news.communick.com. For lack of a better name, I'm calling it SmartNewz.

I just started, and it is only a side-project. The site, as it is, was done in a weekend. I hope I can also use this as a means to learn how to develop applications for facebook and OpenSocial. But those are only ideas.

The part that I believe is interesting is open sourcing the filter, as well as providing an API for those that want to implement their own filters.

So, if anyone is interested in such a service (or if you indirectly want to help disqus have more users), please, register at the website, check the filter project repository at http://code.google.com/p/smartnewz, or the trac wiki for more information, in http://trac.communick.com/news.
Ruby descended from lisp, according to matz. So in order to "see what you're missing" by using ruby, take a look at what he removed or changed from lisp. In particular he removed macros and created syntax. As others have commented, macros are a very powerful language feature.

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/...
I remember when Guy Kawasaki started blogging, he made a point about having short, bulleted, easy to digest posts to read. And while that's certainly easier on the readers, it's like eating a lots of junk food: too much of it often leaves me feeling full, yet discontent. And I wasn't sure why at first.

While bulleted points are good in moderation, it's one step away from superstar detection quizzes. Reminds me of quizzes in magazines like Maxim and Cosmo. "Are you having enough hot sex?" quizzes.

I find myself hungering for a good readably long article with new information and good support that makes me think when I see too many of these on hacker news.
Lack of strong typing in a language is usually on purpose (dynamic typing). But sometimes you want it. I like the idea of optional strong typing in a language.

Perl6, may it rest in peace, had that feature in its spec.
It's not that there's something you can do in Lisp that absolutely can't be done in Ruby. It's just that it's more convenient in Lisp, e.g. real closures instead of seven or eight closure-like constructs.

I took a look at that Closures in Ruby page you mentioned.

It says about Ruby: "This is quite a dizzing array of syntactic options, with subtle semantics differences that are not at all obvious, and riddled with minor special cases. It's like a big bear trap from programmers who expect the language to just work."
To each their own, I guess. I like these bullet-pointy articles with quick tips because they're easier to read quickly. There's a place for research paper-length articles as well, of course, but the two don't compete with each other.
Taking Style Tips from Natural Language
How People Are Tracked Via Bittorrent
Well put. Even a basic quiz like this highlights the difficulty to hire for startups where every idea and effort of every individual impacts success (positive or negative).
The current iMac keyboard is a big POS and should be among these. But maybe the reviewers didn't want to include because it looks so pretty.
7 tips to boost profits before you close the box
Some tips and ideas to up and cross-sell.
Fair point. I'm glad I didn't use my original title idea:

13 Ways To Tell If Your Lover Is Cheating, But 14 Ways To Tell If You'd Make A Good Developer For A Startup
For some reason test #6 (You've been impressed with someone else's code at some point in your life)

reminded me of this old PG essay:

http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

:)
Telepresence: A virtual reality business meeting
With Telepresence you can see the entire other side of the conference table, for example, and the people who are sitting across from you appear to be life sized. When another person speaks to you they can look you in the eye. Body language and emotions are easy to detect and the sound of each participant seems to come from his or her direction. You can watch the people who aren't talking to see if they are even paying attention. It really is tele-PRESENCE and the fact that you are looking in a video screen is forgotten after a minute or two.
Google announces faster, more customizable Google experience for iPhone Users
This is the part I found most interesting:

"Thiel is a member of TheVanguard.Org, an internet-based neoconservative pressure group that was set up to attack MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure group that works on the web."

Perhaps that explains MoveOn.org's attack on Facebook and Beacon last year... I always thought it was a little odd they would go after a website that has little to do with politics.
Following your imagination
"1. You're more of a pragmatist than a perfectionist. [Yes/No]"

I've always had a problem with this one. Not really sure why.

I hate the word "perfectionist", but I think that's what I am. Perhaps "precisionist" or "maximizer" would be a better word.

Once I started insisting that my app was just right, I was able to move up to the next level of "hackerdom". Some days I write a thousand lines of code and the next day I will agonize over one little construct because deep in my gut, I know it's not what it needs to be. I don't mind being this way.

Of course, I understand the downside of this thinking. You don't want to obsess so much that you never release. But you don't want to release and come back and fix bad stuff too much, either. Experience, and a gut feeling, oughta tell you how far to push.

One of the things that made me feel much better about this was reading about Woz's obsession with making everything just right when he designed the Apple II. Chapter 3 of "Founders at Work" by Jessica Livingston. Which was Woz, the perfectionist or the pragmatist?

(If you don't have the book and haven't read it yet, must reading for all aspiring superstars...

http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html)
I thought that Arc is written in Scheme, not in Common Lisp? Are Scheme Macros equally powerful?

Edit: OK, perhaps Arc is written in Scheme, but Arc itself features CL like macros, that would explain it ;-)
lol!

lol!!

lol!!!

lol!!!!

Stay tuned for the next version that counts in gray code.
Ruby has real closures with semantics similar to Lisp: lambda expressions that reference variables from their enclosing lexical scope. It also has a number of constructs that create closures implicitly, and some others that may or may not be implemented that way, but you're not required to use them. You can use closures just like you would in Lisp.
Lisp: The Golden Age Isn't Coming Back, Let's Welcome a Bright Future
I think if anything, its more of a scale. On one side you have people who do it purely as a career, and on the other side you have people who do it purely out of passion, but I think for a lot people it's a mixed bag. I love learning about these amazing machines, but I can't say I'm always salivating to code after a long day of work.
Why is it if you're a lawyer, accountant, banker, or surgeon who insists on precision and correctness, you're called "skilled" or "competent"?

But if you're a hacker who insists on precision and correctness, you're called a "fanatic"?
As far as I know Arc is written on top of MzScheme. Besides its 'clean' macros - MzScheme supports CL like macros, too. But your explanation could be correct as well.
Btw, will Arc ever be open-sourced?

I'd love to just sudo apt-get install arc in this lifetime.
I'm going to go off of everyone else's diagnoses that the ISO is not being properly burnt. If this is indeed the case, Ubuntu has some very clear directions for burning the ISO to disc.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BurningIsoHowto

Hope that helps.

Also, if you still can't burn the CD for some reason, Ubuntu will ship you a CD for free.

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu
With separate voting arrows for the categories?

So you can upvote as an interesting 'hacker' story or for start-up-ness?

Not sure if this would be practical for more than a few categories.

But I guess you aimed at something different anyway.
CSS - Contents and compatibility
Fake Apple Keynote "Leaked" on Wikipedia
Error search engine with a twist: you're asked to provide solutions so the database grows and grows
If it's not real, it's a good fake. It would be a nice day if all of that is announced. I'm really looking forward to the iPhone SDK, as are many I would imagine. I'll be crossing my fingers.
[SF/Oxford] Become a co-founder at a YC winter 08 startup! (Updated)
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We are looking for a startup minded, highly success driven individual to join the team as a co-founder.
This is a once in a lifetime chance to join a YC startup that already has a substantial code base and is getting ready to launch.

What's expected:

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Past startup experience is a plus, but not a strict requirement.

What you get:

- a chance to push forward a company that will have an impact on the future of desktop security

- the full YC experience, including dinners, demo day, and countless opportunities to meet and network with truly amazing people

- a significant share of equity in a YC funded startup

To apply, please email your resume to kuzins at gmail.
Here's a good comparison:

http://markwatson.com/blog/2008/01/cool-common-lisp-elephant...

Performance is a big difference:

"Common Lisp compiled code runs much faster than Ruby: typical benchmark results are about 30 times faster - but Ruby's slowness is mitigated if a lot of processing is performed in native libraries like Ferret."

I don't think Ruby has all of the functionality of CLOS or the Meta Object Protocol. Here's Matz commenting on the lack of multi-methods in Ruby:

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/...

"Most OO langauge includes Ruby see methods as "element of an object" This does not hold for CLOS. You loose the tight relationship but gain a new level of flexibility."

Beyond that, I would say pick a programming methodology and there is probably a CL implementation of it somewhere out there built with macros. That's due to the greater maturity of CL and "real macros" (which have been well covered by others already). And beyond macros, the "code as data" paradigm enabled by s-expressions has other uses (I think Steve Yegge mentioned "executable log files" as an example).
The main difference is that Lisp has macros, no other languages' macro systems come close.

For the cute version of why Lisp macros are so awesome check out chapter 8 of Practical Common Lisp (http://gigamonkeys.com/book/).

For the serious and intense version check out On Lisp (http://paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html).
Loss aversion is a large reason why many of my high school and college friends end up not doing start ups.
I've had some great bosses and some awful bosses.

One of my favorites was the dev manager for a team doing web application development at a large company. I was the tech lead for the team. His opinion was that a good team manager was much like the manager of a band. It was his job to run interference for us with the suits (corporate business types or label execs/concert promoters), get us what we needed in order to take care of business (time, software, hardware or instruments and a van), help with high level scheduling (releases or tour dates), and stay out of our way. If we didn't do our job (coding or practicing) then we weren't suited for the team, and would be let go. It was a great approach imho. Wouldn't work so well for folks who NEED to be micromanaged, but if you're running a team of A list folks you just need to get them what they need and stay out of the way.
Solutioneering, a Problem Enhanced by Tech Specialists?
Is Craigslist Worth the Time? Tips to Stay Profitable
Arc is written in Scheme in the sense that it compiles into Scheme, and uses the Scheme read, numbers, etc. But Arc macros are not Scheme macros.
I've been using linux off and on since 1995-1996 (gosh, has it been that long?).

It's only been in the last couple years that I feel confortable enough to use it day to day as a primary OS (actually put it on my wife's laptop and she's fine with it surprisingly enough).

So all the seat time you've got with Windows? You don't have that with Linux and you're going to have problems.

Anyone that says the switch is painless blah blah is high on the rock.

Y creo que hay algo que no esta configurado correctamente en su BIOS (para boot desde el DVD). Tambien es posible que el disco no fue quemado (burned) correctamente....
The IE6 Deathblow, a Study
I just entered this variant into the server's repl so everyone can see the range of choices:

(defop topcolors req
(minipage "Custom Colors"
(tab
(each c (dedup (map downcase (trues [uvar _ topcolor] (keys profs*))))
(tr (td c) (tdcolor (hex>color c) (hspace 30)))))))

Defopa means only admins can use something, but since this is defined with defop, everyone can see this page: http://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors.
Actually, it's "only" a little over $100k from 4 years of school. The problem is that it's become a b*tch to get loans under 10% without a co-signer. I couldn't...
I think this nails the challenge of getting started with Common Lisp:

'With Lisp, newbies say "How do I get started?" and instead of a URL, they get "Lisp is a family of languages, with the primary branches being Common Lisp and Scheme. But these are just language standards with a number of implementations. Which implementation is best for you depends on your platform and computing needs." Huh?'

I think SBCL is closest to being the default CL implementation, but the functionality on Mac/Windows still isn't quite caught up to the Linux version. Threading seems to be the biggest sticking point.

If you have a Mac, the best starting point I know of is ReadyLisp:

http://www.newartisans.com/software/readylisp.html
> Assume for the moment that prices of goods and services will stay the same.

Assuming that your popularity, social power, and possibly getting laid a whole lot less are worth nothing to you? The question fails to capture total value, it seems.

Still a very interesting topic. People reason about money in strange ass ways.
News flash: it's not very enlightening to say that someone isn't rational because they aren't efficient at reaching goals you would prefer they have. You may think it's silly to want what they want, but that just means you don't want what they want. Big deal. Goals cannot be chosen rationally unless they're subordinate to some other goal.
That calls for the feature to enable color picking by clicking on the colors ;-)
Here are all the colors chosen by at least one person: http://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors.
This is obviously fake, so why are people making such a big deal about it? Waste of time, don't bother.
Rand,

Great to see you here. I'm working on a "all startups, all the time" social news site as an extension to OnStartups.com

Stay tuned...

If someone here would like to be the community manager for the new site, drop me a line (I'd even be willing to pay a modest amount, in terms of compensating for your time).
I stopped reading the Haskell tutorial when I came to the part where arrays have to be homogeneous (or something like that, basically all elements in the array have to have the same type, if I remember correctly). That is one of the things that is most annoying in Java, so why put up with it in another language?

In a similar vein, I wonder about the Erlang hype - some things are really impractical to do in Erlang, for lack of syntactic sugar and the immutable memory constraint. People were always bickering about the constraints in Java (no multiple inheritance and stuff like that), so why choose another language with impractical constraints instead?
Less content, but more focused will definately be more hellpful.

PG: I vote that we go back to ycombinator news and drop the hacker stuff. I would rather just focus on startup/business stuff. That's the reason I joined your news site in the first place.
Evolutionary psychology crap. Ugh.
If it is a fake...well played.

If it is real, that is truly disappointing. Like your older brother telling you your presents on Christmas Eve.