skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"On Seeing A's and Seeing As" by Hofstadter
Still the very first bird, to which we owe Thanksgiving, Hot Wings and Avian Flu.
Do We Know Our Own Minds?
See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=98230

Seems that there was a misspelling of "schmuck" in this previous URL, which lead to the system accept two submits of the same article...
How To Break DRM
irc.macrumorslive.com #macrumors
I am interested foremost in reading a description or specification of Arc, not using an implementation.
Why tables for layout is stupid: problems defined, solutions offered
Bruce Schneier: My Open Wireless Network
"You cannot change the state of a variable once it has been set"
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2007/09/13/introduction-t...

Im not a cool kid.
That's the interesting thing isn't it. With the Scala platform around people have very little incentive to go in and make the improvements to Erlang that would help it to become more mainstream. Particularly on the web.

For instance, what follows is the code to the Scala address book example:

object addressbook {

case class Person(name: String, age: Int)

/** An AddressBook takes a variable number of arguments
* which are accessed as a Sequence
*/
class AddressBook(a: Person*) {
private val people: List[Person] = a.toList

/** Serialize to XHTML. Scala supports XML literals
* which may contain Scala expressions between braces,
* which are replaced by their evaluation
*/
def toXHTML =
<table cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
<th>Last Name</th>
<th>First Name</th>
</tr>
{ for (val p <- people) yield
<tr>
<td> { p.name } </td>
<td> { p.age.toString() } </td>
</tr>
}
</table>;
}

/** We introduce CSS using raw strings (between triple
* quotes). Raw strings may contain newlines and special
* characters (like \) are not interpreted.
*/
val header =
<head>
<title>
{ "My Address Book" }
</title>
<style type="text/css"> {
"""table { border-right: 1px solid #cccccc; }
th { background-color: #cccccc; }
td { border-left: 1px solid #acacac; }
td { border-bottom: 1px solid #acacac;"""}
</style>
</head>;

val people = new AddressBook(
Person("Tom", 20),
Person("Bob", 22),
Person("James", 19));

val page =
<html>
{ header }
<body>
{ people.toXHTML }
</body>
</html>;

def main(args: Array[String]) {
println(page)
}

}

This is so much less scary to people than the Erlang equivalent. EQUALLY complicated, just less scary! So if there are kids out there looking at implementing something new really fast, they will be drawn to Scala.

Remember PERL, it was lightning fast . . . and really scary. Java was less scary. PHP was friendlier still. And, I suspect, the frameworks built using Scala will be downright promiscuous.

It's too bad, I'm an old fart, 36, but I like Erlang.

Maybe the kids will let their religion get the best of them. They are really anti-Java, and Scala is built on Java.

Of course, they love JRuby.

Quel dommage.
To complete the trinity:
hg clone http://ycombinator.com/arc
I am addicted to programming for startups. I have learned from 1st hand experience and from CVS logs that on most projects 99% of the check-ins and real coding is done by at most 2 guys (usually 1) on a 8-10 man project. I would say, even though I haven't done a study, I see the hard facts every time I check-in code. There really are programmers out there 20x-30x more productive than the rest.
The cool kids won't move on to Scala for a number of reasons, the primary of which is that Scala's actors are not as powerful as Erlang processes.

See Virding's First Rule of Programming (http://www.nabble.com/Erlang-concurrency-to14747956.html):

"Any sufficiently complicated concurrent program in another language contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Erlang."
Bah. Using profanity has more to do with the fact that established business doesn't like it. ("Look at me! I can break all the rules and still turn a handsome profit. Maybe someone has been lying to all of you.")

I love stepping on the limits of what is appropriate, just to see how people react... It's never any fun when it happens by accident, but it can be a real blast when I have figured out beforehand just what phrasing will make my counterpart slightly uncomfortable.

Probably this is why the paraphrased subjects use the words "penis" and "kick-ass". And it might also be that it is closer to the way they interact in their daily lives. My life certainly gets easier when I don't have to worry all the time about whether something is appropriate or not.

As far as I can tell (being an outsider) being "professional" in contemporary American business culture means subordinating by wearing a suit and tie, working exactly when the boss tells you to and doing unpaid overtime whenever it is required. That's hardly something to strive for, due to a host of obvious reasons that anyone younger than 30 should be able to figure out. An alternative interpretation would be that being profesional is to serve your customers, but that's not what I hear whenever someone mentiones the word.
Samwer Brothers Invest In Facebook
I don't interview usually but when meeting a fellow programmer - my favorite question is what is your title - e.g. if they say Software Engineer - i ask them if they truly believe software can be engineered.. it's a way to open them up - i like to hear their philosophical views on the construction of software.
We do this thing in PHP with classes. See below. What is the advantage - if any - of namespaces?

class yo
{
function isBig($number)
{
return ($number>1000);
}
}

if (yo::isBig(50)) echo '50 is big';
Well, of course you can't find $100/hr being offered on a random job board. Nobody is crazy enough to hire an unknown quantity off the street at those rates, no matter what the demand is. See Spolsky, Joel: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDeveloper...

The people who are working for $100+/hr are getting those jobs directly from the companies that auditioned them at $40-$80 per hour, or from friends-of-friends of the managers at those companies.
Many companies are penny wise and dollar stupid.
Trader Made Billions on Subprime
Macbook Air - new business laptop?
Apple just announced their Macbook Air.

MacBook Air is 0.16" to 0.76". The thickest part of the MacBook Air is thinner than the thinnest part of the Sony. It fits inside a envelope.

It is insanely tiny, it seems like the perfect laptop for business meetings and traveling.

Thoughts?
isBig(50) is more readable than yo::isBig(50) in my opinion.
Would the news section of such a site be called "The Flood"?
The article about his estranged friend Jeff Greene (who heard his pitch and made the same trades on his own) is good for color:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120036270913390155.html?mod=...

"He bought three jets, most recently a Gulfstream. Though he paid just $2 million for an older model, "I certainly could afford" a $50 million one, he says. He adds, in a telephone interview from his 145-foot yacht: "I tend to be pretty conservative in the way I spend money.""
Major Dreamhost Billing screwup.
There's a reason companies can do this: most people don't bother keeping up on what they're worth in the open market. Inertia's a bitch. Especially after a few years working.

Another way to say that: people's worths tend towards what they get paid. Especially if that's all they get out of work.
5) Build a robust system that won't fail from heavy enterprise use, sadly, Twitter would never make it.

Huh?
Having lugged at least 10 pounds of laptop equipment+chargers, I think svelte and powerful are a good combination. The cons are can it live up to being tossed around a bit - My Dell and previous Compaq/Thinkpads could take a beating.
Ir wouldn't make a difference to most examples, but he could save a few lines by not putting { on a separate line.
Macbook Air - Few Pics
The license should cover patents. If a company adds to the code using patented algorithms, they could perhaps block further development since nobody could use the code? I'm not a lawyer, so perhaps it's not a problem anyway.
where's the reddit alien?
Apple MacBook Air. Thinnest laptop. Ever. 13.3" screen, 1.6Ghz, 2Gb RAM, 80Gb HD, 802.11n
It is easy to look at this guy as the bad guy, but really he just observed that the housing markets were in a massive bubble and bet against it.
Yes, you are an outsider. I haven't seen what you describe as "contemporary American business culture" in at least 10 years.

As far as "stepping on the limits of what is appropriate, just to see how people react" goes, fine. Whatever turns you on. Just don't be surprised when the other person's reaction costs you. It can happen (and probably will).

Personally, I'd rather spend my energy doing great work and succeeding, whatever it takes.
Apple Ad for Macbook Air
OK, now put your classes in a namespace
Apple Stock Tanks During Stevenote
Lots of people short, lots of people long. Nothing special about it. I made a pile of money on Countrywide a few days ago. Am I a genius?

The only distinction of a fund manager is that they slimed their way into using other people's money.
Suzanne the 1000th Malone
It sounds weird at first to have variables that don't really vary, but it works out quite nicely.
Mozilla hiring Aza Raskin and two others from Humanized
Hi!
I'm a "9 to 6" web developer in a telecom, and i'm also rolling with a nice WEB 2.0 personal project at home.
The only way i found to get motivation to keep developing at home after all those boring 8 hours is smoking some weed.
And what you said about "different perspectives" is completely right.
Sometimes i drink some wine, but just a glass, more can make me sleepy and disturbed.
How good is Arcs underflow checking?
It's not a question of cool or not; it just seems you haven't been exposed to functional programming yet.

Here's an introduction if you've got an imperative/OO background: http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/fp.html
You aren't going to be 5-10 times more productive by avoiding the nightmare that is System.out.println(), or any of the other things he mentions. For instance, I can't believe this warrants attention:

if ( a > b )
{
a = b;
b = c;
}

if a > b :
a = b
b = c

Why he thinks the Python example is better here I won't speculate upon--why he thinks the Python example would contribute to a 5x or more productivity increase I will attribute to foolishness--but it did give him a chance to gloss over meaningful whitespace, something that should have died with FORTRAN.

a number of influential voices in the programming community have been expressing serious doubts about the supposed advantages of static typing.

Ooh, an argument from authority. Well, I'm convinced. I could just as easily say that "IBM supports Java"--well, IBM is full of influencial voices, yes?

Each top-level public class must be defined in its own file. If your application has 15 such classes, it has 15 files.

Again, pure foolishness to think that this contributes to productivity. "Woe is me, I have to make another file." At any rate, I'm not sure "top-level" is an important distinction. I can put as many private or public static classes in the same file as I want. Do this enough, and you will find out why it is a bad idea.

You discover that F must throw exception SpecialException, and it must be caught by A.

False. To avoid this unmitigated nightmare, simply throw the exception up, or only use RuntimeExceptions.

Java doesn't have first-class functions. That's its biggest problem.
There are tasks that are strictly defined from the outset: there is an existing code base and tech stack, and you must conform to certain company conventions, and the requirements are strict. I would guess this work constitutes 90% of paid development (and ~2% of useful code). I don't think your argument really applies to those tasks.
All the hard-earned money people pay on mortgage interest rates ultimately goes to people like him.
If I recall correctly, yes, they've only been using OpenSolaris over Solaris.
because colons are ugly. yo.isBig(50) is much more readable.

Now, assuming somebody else decides to have a function called isBig(), which does something very different.

The only way to use both in php, would be if they had different names (hence the countless of functions that do very similiar things, but have different names).

While in languages that have a propper namespace you can do:
numModule.isBig(50)
floatModule.isBig(50) --etc

Also, in java you can import a class directly.

You can use com.mycompany.numClass.isBig(50)

or
import com.mycompany.numClass;

and use numClass.isBig(50)

if there are two classes with the same name, from totally different packages (namespaces), then you will have to use one of them the long way ( com.mycompany.numClass.isBig(50) ) in order to avoid namespaces conflicts.

Java does a decent job in all this. Python is even less strict (you can import a module with (import as)a nd name it something different, when you use it), which allows for great flexibility, but also more confusion if you don't know what you are doing.
But if people adere to the python mantra to keep things flat, than it should not be a problem.

So, overrall namespaces are very useful, especially in any large app. But, you haven't seen them on php yet, as the php crowd could care less for them. Plus Php was ment just for simple page processing and apps, and nothing too complicated.
I second zlib. It's slightly more restrictive than MIT, but in a very sensible way. I don't think preventing modified sources from masquerading as the original Arc, or maintaining author attribution will impede adoption overly much.
There is no such thing as public domain for software. If you simply give your software away, it's still your copyrighted work...just without a license for other people to use it.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6225
Now that is a sweet looking machine.
http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/m/monty.html
Macworld 2008 Keynote
very good post. I see this happening all the time, and it happened to me with my last company.
10x improvement in battery life?
"Also key: Mr. Paulson didn't turn bearish too early. Some close students of the housing market did just that, investing for a downturn years ago -- only to suffer such painful losses waiting for a collapse that they finally unwound their bearish bets. Mr. Paulson, whose investment specialty lay elsewhere, turned his attention to the housing market more recently, and got bearish at just about the right time."

Interesting that this article was posted by "blackswan" -- this could be a case study in Fooled by Randomness.

Six months earlier or later, and this guy might well have busted; I don't think we would be reading about him.
I just checked SBCL (Lisp), and they support Mac OS X :)
I don't know, but what's the big hoopla about it? It is very thin, and light, but at $1,800 you are paying very dearly for a machine like that it is not that powerful.
Yah, I assumed they were doing something fancy, not knowing what they actually are doing.

I'm told a great place to read good code, both Python and C, is to read the code that makes Python.
I've given up on trying to understand the dynamics of AAPL.
That's odd. A foundation buying a software co?
The power of it is being able to easily take it wherever you want. Right now I have a very powerful Dell Inpiron 9400, and it is heavy. I only take it on major trips. With the Mac Air, I can easily take it with me whenever I need it without a second thought. Also, I want to use if for remote coding, and with sbcl/emacs/slime, it is plenty powerful.

Killer feature: extreme portablility with very good power.

And.. It is simply beautiful. It looks like a dream from a futuristic scifi movie. In fact, this may be the most beautiful computer to date - but I have to see it in person to confirm. (I still remember going crazy over the Next computer when it came out)
I bet with the optional solid state drive, it will seem very, very fast compared to the other Macbooks.
Quines
Boom predicted for GPS-enabled handsets
There are two! One in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern.
Really? What path does the money take from them to him?
"While we never made a subprime loan and are not predatory lenders, we think a lot of homeowners have been victimized," Mr. Paulson says.
Which Linux should I install?
Hi everyone:

I've decided to install Linux on a hand-me-down laptop I just got. I'm debating which one to install and since everyone here is pretty smart I thought I'd see what you all recommend. The only requirement I have is that it's free.

What do you use?
Macworld Keynote Page: Broken In Safari
The "Watch The Keynote Address" button doesn't work (or even show up) in Safari, but does work in Firefox. lol
FDA OKs meat, milk from most cloned animals
Again, pure foolishness to think that this contributes to productivity.

That aspect of Java can be very painful when you need to refactor your hierarchy if you don't have the appropriate tools. But that is not necessairly a fault of Java. Refactoring class hierarchies too often likely indicates a problem in the requirements, the design or the specific developer team.
Erick Schonfeld was a little off; he edited the article after a statement from the Mozilla CEO.

Mozilla has hired 3 of the principals from Humanized. They will be joining the Mozilla Labs team on January 16, 2008. We expect a lot of innovation work from them, some Firefox-related, some broader, just like everything else in Mozilla Labs. This was not an acquisition. No premium was paid and no intellectual property was acquired by Mozilla.

The work done by the Humanized principals speaks for itself -- there are lots of great, web-relevant ideas in their work and we're excited to have them join Mozilla. --Mozilla CEO John Lilly
The language's language?
I've been thinking about an ideal working setup. Lots of people fantasize about these things.

I used to have two 24" monitors with a pansy dell laptop to power them.

Now I have just a 17" MacBookPro. It's excellent, but I could use more pixels.

The ideal setup would be a MacPro with 2 30" screens, with something like MacBook Air setup to mirror my configuration.

It would be docked like my iPhone, auto-install software that I install on the desktop, auto-configure to match the relevant system settings, auto-update the local repository that I'm developing, etc.

Any time, when you need portability, you could take the Air.

I'm sure a simple script could get most of this done on a local wireless network. Too bad I don't have $13K to spend on it ... yet.
Twitter Might Not Need a Business Model But Apparently They Need More Servers
Archaic - The foreign-function interface.
I would recommend ubuntu dapper.
"Comics resort to it because they're desperate; they can't get laughs any other way."

Counter example: Gaping Void. Cartoons like this just wouldn't be the same without profanity: http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/004409.html
It will also seem very, very expensive.
Agreed. But I wish they would stop mentioning how thick it is at the edge.
It's impressive how well they've handled it. They posted an immediate, transparent blog post, and gave regular updates.
Theinfo.org - for people with large data sets
Perfection is difficult :)
To be technically correct, the ideal monitor setup is N M" screens, where N is 1 greater than your current number, each currently (M-2)"
Yes, it's portable, but I'm kinda curious about how it would be to work with it over long periods of time. Considering how thin it is, I would think that there would be a pretty serious learning curve when it comes to typing. If, in fact, the keyboard is implemented so that you don't feel like you're typing on the tabletop, this will probably be a winner due to the weight savings. I could care less if they make it any smaller, if the regular MacBook only weighed a couple pounds, I would probably own one right now.
Twitter Fails Macworld Keynote Test
The funny thing is that this would be the least expensive laptop I've ever bought to date. My first laptop cost $5000, as did the following 3. My very powerful dell was around $3000.
It's pretty well established in the psychology literature that the effects of money on happiness are relative. You're happy (for some short time) if you make more than you expected, and you're (often) happy if you make more than your peers. Absolute quantity of money doesn't really do much for us humans, and I think the "irrational" test subjects were aware of that.
Bill Gates last day at Microsoft
This guy is translating "Programming Collective Intelligence" from Python to Ruby
Arguably the bets this guy made resulted in the banks' losses on each of their sub-prime mortgage loans being greater; ultimately this will raise the cost of mortgage borrowing as banks price risk higher.

On the other hand, this guy probably helped to make the bubble burst sooner -- and thus before the banks could make even more sub-prime mortgage loans -- and that would have the effect of reducing the banks' ultimate losses (and resulting in them applying less of a risk premium to mortgages).

Trying to figure out which of these effects is larger would be pure speculation.
It's the Sony Vaio as an Apple.

Seriously, I think I liked the whole "Something's in the air" thing when FSJ suggested it was a reference to Woz's flatulance back in the garage days. "You could barely work with the guy."
Any flavor of ubuntu ought to work well for a beginner. I would get the latest stable version, but be ready to have some possible driver issues. It's become better over time, but the laptop driver scene is still kind of dicey for Linux. What kind of laptop is it?
Introducing theinfo.org
> Scala's actors are not as powerful as Erlang processes.

How so? I know Erlang reasonably well, but haven't messed with Scala at all.
I see one major downside to this machine: it has memory soldered to the motherboard. In my experience, memory is a fairly high-failure item, and I've seen more than one laptop bricked by onboard memory failing. It's potentially worse with a very thin machine since the memory is less protected.

If you're planning to keep one of these beyond the warranty period, know somebody with SMT soldering equipment.
No, shorting mortgage-backed securities doesn't cause losses for mortage lenders. And it was not just banks that were issuing mortgages.
I see now that it is $3100 for the laptop including the 64GB flash memory - not an additional $3100 as the original article said. So it's not as expensive as I thought.
Ubuntu +1. You can look here for stuff that doesn't work with Linux:

http://www.leenooks.com
I've used FreeBSD or OpenBSD on my laptops for years but I've recently given up; while they're both nice operating systems (including on the desktop, especially if you use DesktopBSD) they lack some things I need (mostly embedded software development tools and easy support for things such as flash video).
So I'm now a Kubuntu user (it's like Ubuntu but with the K Desktop Environment instead of Gnome). I like the way all KDE applications interoperate with each other (well, this works if you use KDE applications; fortunately there are a lot of great KDE applications including a full office suite, an IDE, the wonderful Amarok audio player, etc.) It may not be as good as Mac OS X but I think it's a decent alternative. And KDE is very configurable and overall well designed.

Now, the bad thing about Kubuntu is that the out-of-the-box experience could be better. You actually have to install support for proprietary codecs and things like that yourself (but it's easy).

A final thing: I've experienced the FreeBSD ports system, the NetBSD pkgsrc system, the OpenBSD ports system and, while they're all good systems, I have to say that the apt system shipped with (k)Ubuntu is by far the best. It just works.