skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To a person like myself, who knows Perl but doesn't know Haskell, the phrase "overloading semicolon" evokes visions of pure horror, of a world in which C++ has been rewritten in Obfuscated Perl and then ROT13'd.

I think this is the ultimate problem with Perl: it offers you tremendous power, but it teaches you to associate that power with a feeling of impending doom. It's like being introduced to pneumatics and two-stroke engines by watching a Battlebots exhibition. From now on, whenever you see a power tool, a primitive layer of your brain will urge you to run away, because someone's going to abuse it and it's going to explode.

Perhaps it shouldn't surprise me that the invention of Perl was followed by the invention of Java, a language in which every potentially powerful construct comes safely wrapped in seven or eight layers of protective ASCII padding, with warning signs on the outside. An overreaction, but an understandable one.

Fortunately, this article is not only not as terrifying as the title would suggest -- it's actually quite clear and enlightening.
That's a great consolidation of the features offered by typical software in the 'social network' category.

It might also be worthwhile to distinguish the 'network effect' or 'network lock-in' which is when significant parts of the value of a service come from the people already using it.
Arrow of Time FAQ
I was thinking the same thing -- there's also a Lisp for the JVM called Clojure (http://clojure.sourceforge.net/) which he might have found interesting.
I think the real point of the 10% rule and rules like it (here at KU it's a 20% rule), is to make the college decision really easy for those desirable top-of-the-class students. Hell, it worked on me. I was #2 in my HS class, and the fact that I was automatically accepted (and offered scholarships to boot) really made me not want to bother with a real college search. I had better things to do (or so I thought at the time) my senior year than tour colleges and figure out financing.

Think about it. The average state school is not going to be attracting a large population of out-of-state students. Here at KU we attract many for our Journalism/Social Welfare schools and our Med School Campus, but the vast majority are from Kansas or Missouri. It is in the University's interest to try and lock in the local HS talent as soon as possible, before that talent has the chance to look at a brilliant school in California or Boston. Without such rules, said local talent would be less likely to stay local, and state schools would have an even higher ratio of drink-yourself-retarded students to academic all-stars than they already do.
I think, for the first time ever, I wish I could click the up arrow on a comment more than once.

Thanks for that.
"Ten Lessons I wish I Had Been Taught", by Gian-Carlo Rota
Maybe Lush? http://lush.sourceforge.net/lush-manual/f0288067.html

Rather than a Lisp that runs on the JVM, I'd be very interested in knowing a Lisp that somehow runs as Python bytecode. Does such a monster exist?
That's a good point. Even after FriendFeed destroys the network lock-in of the current crop of social networking sites, it's important for people to remember what network lock-in is, to look out for it in the future.
The Internet for Monkeys: why Social Networking Works
Which one of these email addresses is malformed?

fred@emu.edu.com

fred+smith@emu.edu

fred@emu..edu

Which one likely contains a mistake?

Odds are, if you're a programmer, or you've been on the internet for a decent period of time, you have some ability to parse and analyze email-address-like strings. You understand the first part is a user, like a unix shell account name. You understand the @ divides the user from the domain. The domain itself you know contains a variety of hierarchical fields separated by dots, and you know about things like country codes.

This is what email addresses look like to normal people:

234#%##%@#%#oooO.234

OO(#NN#}}{##>>)

##$@#Q$L()))N#@@@

Now, which one of those is well-formed? Which two are equivalent and are likely delivered to the same address?

Instead, you go to your Monkey-Compatible Communications Portal. You click on the face of the person you want to tell. You type. It gets sent.

Social Networking Software is anchored by it's ability to put a human face on communication.

Who's working on a face-based email client?

There are other implications. The "monkeysphere" of 150 people who's lives we can keep track of roughly corresponds to the typical "friends" list. You think about somebody you want to contact who isn't on your list, then you think about who they know that you know, and you "pass through" that person, clicking on the mutual friend to get to the person you want to talk to.

It's pretty simple, really. It's about humanizing communication.
Hyperdistribution for Media Startups
Wouldn't this be the Perl framework Catalyst?
Very insightful.

This post and this article(1) by Clay Shirky should be required reading for anyone building socially-oriented software.

1) http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html Old news to some I guess - but I just found it via a link nostrademons posted in a different thread and it was the most interesting thing I've read all week.
A question to any Americans:

What are your thoughts on Obama? From an outsiders perspective, he seems like the ideal candidate. He is charismatic, intelligent, and quick thinking. He also seems to have the 'right' approach on every subject he speaks about. How is someone like this not going to win by landslide?

On a side note, how are people like Rudy even remotely considered a candidate?
ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 2): URL Routing
I'd be interested in reading this case study and I'm sure others here would. Is it possible to post it here or post a link to it?
I don't know how this compares to URL routing previously in ASP.NET, but compared to something like Django's URL dispatcher it just looks...ugly.

Django:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
(r'^articles/2003/$', 'news.views.special_case_2003'),
(r'^articles/(\d{4})/$', 'news.views.year_archive'),
(r'^articles/(\d{4})/(\d{2})/$', 'news.views.month_archive'),
(r'^articles/(\d{4})/(\d{2})/(\d+)/$', 'news.views.article_detail'),
)

I could see this being yet another situation where someone writes a utility to produce these URL routes for ASP.NET, and makes me wonder why they took such an approach.
Here is my solution: http://fernlabs.com/Problem1Solution.png
Yahoo Top Searches 2007: Please, People, Stop Typing Britney Spears Into Search Boxes
Googling turns up a few lisp-in-python implementations: <a href="http://www.biostat.wisc.edu/~annis/creations/PyLisp/">Pylisp</a>, <a href="http://www.xs4all.nl/~yduppen/site/psyche.html">psyche</a> and <a href="http://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dyoo/python/pyscheme/">pyscheme</a> (the last two being scheme, obviously). Haven't tried using them; maybe I will the next time I feel like frittering away a couple of hours.
clearly html links are the wrong way to go around here ;)
Bic Wants to Flick Your Cell Phone
Google and the 700 MHz auction
> How is someone like this not going to win by landslide?
...
> On a side note, how are people like Rudy even remotely considered a candidate?

Uneducated voters. A lot of people think Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim, and that Rudy is a terrorist fighting 9/11 hero.
Ivan Krsti&#263; on OLPC Security
FoodieBytes Helps You Fill Your Cravings
Constructing Artificial Emotions: A Design Experiment
Too bad Halu Ramen is not on the list: http://foodiebytes.com/search.html?t=item&rad=20&srt...
That's weird. A professor of mine told me about this years ago! OMG, Parrando stole this paradox! oh wait, this article's 8 years old.
Tip from Google: Don't Bet on One "Big Bang"
Thanks a lot! I had googled for that, but couldn't find anything interesting.
Yeah, sucks when the proper privacy controls aren't built-in, doesn't it?
reAnimator: Regular Expression FSA Visualizer
It's a combination of:

1.) They have a pretty good multi-file uploader, so you can take a whole directory of files and upload them at once.

2.) It's free. Many of the other sites with #1 require that you pay for it.

3.) You can tag your friends, and a notification in their news feed will pop up saying they've been tagged in a photo. And all of their friends will see it, usually leading to tags for people you don't know.

4.) Enough of my friends are on it that #3 is useful.

A lot of this is network effects - I think Flickr has all of the above, though some may be premium features. But FaceBook has a critical mass of people that check it regularly, which makes 3 & 4 a lot more useful. If I post to Flickr and tag my friends (can I do that?), there's no guarantee they'll see it.
Without database access, sockets, threads, POSIX, or a portable FFI (which I could at least use to write many of those features), my programs can't talk to the outside world, and that makes them basically useless.

Is this a troll, or did the author simply not do very much research?

CLSQL can talk to MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Oracle and (through ODBC) MS SQL. What database does dking want to access?

I'm pretty sure all the major Lisps provide a socket interface. Usocket standardizes it.

I think the commercial Lisps provide threads. SBCL and CMUCL have threads on certain platforms, especially x86 Linux.

POSIX is available through the FFI, but some Lisps provide their own POSIX package. I think there's some work being done on a more portable library.

CFFI and UFFI are both good FFIs portable between all the major Lisps.

Everything the author asks for is easy to find. Many of these libraries are the first hit for a reasonable google search (e.g. "lisp sql"). I've had issues finding good Lisp libraries on occasion, but the situation is much better than the author suggests.
Almost none of my friends know about RSS, though. The point of photo sharing's to share photos, which is harder when your friends don't check...
Check out http://programming.nu. It has pretty much everything that this guy says he was missing.
HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray is a way bigger blunder than VHS/betamax. The advantages of VHS over giant film projectors were enormous. With the move to videotape, you didn't need to show a split-screen comparison to sell people on the new format.
My parents are pretty computer illiterate and very active on Flickr. They would be confused by FaceBook.

Real photosharing penetrates demographics where people don't understand computers, not just people who don't understand RSS. My point about RSS is that Flickr is the best for non-technies and techies alike.
Just skimming over the article, it seems to me that the framework authors are trying to do something similar to Routes in Rails or Pylons (http://routes.groovie.org/).

Actually, I find Routes' much clearer and easier to use (regular expressions and readability don't go very well together, IMO) than Django's URL-scheme. The url-generation feature of Routes comes in handy, too... don't know if Django has something equivalent.
Granted, regular expressions may be more powerful, but I am willing to sacrifice some expressiveness in exchange for ease of use and improved readability.
So, I can see why the framework authors ported that functionality (sort of).
This guy is an idiot.
Who clicks on ads? "Middle America"
Generating coherent noise
Why I prefer Darcs over Subversion
You find those routes easier to read than a list of regexs?

Interesting, I assumed the django list would make sense what it was doing at a glance to anyone.

I am just picturing a list of ~25 routes, and it being impossible to get an idea of the sitemap.
The Neverending (Background Image) Story
Please, let's not start talking about politics here...
Economists have studied this as signalling in the labor market.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_%28economics%29#The_...
Basically, employees tend to get more education than they really need just as a way to stand out from the crowd and signal their value to employers.
Why Do (Internet) Businesses Fail?
Ask 37signals: Installable software?
Would we feel proud of living off of a business model that targets the poor?

Sloppy. He doesn't make a hard distinction between gray-area fraudulent "sweepstakes" ads and legitimate ads. The above quote makes it sound like selling products/services to the poor is somehow wrong...obviously false. If the sweepstakes ads are clicked on by poor people more often than rich people, well, that's not a big surprise, but it has nothing to do with advertising in general.
Lush is great for numerical prototyping, much better than MATLAB/Octave. Its matrix/tensor engine is one of the most awesome (as in being in awe) pieces of software I've ever come across. It is definitely mature and well-tested in that niche. It was created by leading neural network researchers.

Outside of its niche, it's pretty useless.
I wonder how much of internet advertising is driven by "scammers":

http://tinyurl.com/yonmpm
Google 700MHz Spectrum Bid a Bluff?
Please, check http://cliki.net, http://common-lisp.net and http://cl-user.net. There are packages to all the things commented.

About SQL, for example, I'm using Submarine (ORM) with Postmodern and it's running like a charm. For Web development, there are Hunchentoot, AllegroServe and interesting frameworks like UCW or Weblocks (each one I'm using right now).

Maybe the guy didn't tried enough, more 5 min. at google would be enough ;-)
Sorry, didn't realize this was against the rules...

I was just talking about a subject related to the video posted.
So are we taking this to the next level or not? Where's the Reddit/Digg buttons?
I've been looking at that one, as well as Armed Bear Common Lisp. Shortly after writing that article I started reading up a lot on Erlang which I've come to like and now have some projects in it (notably wrotit.com, where the submitter probably found this article, since that's the domain on which this was submitted to reddit a few hours ago). I didn't discover ABCL or Closure until after I started using Erlang, so both are a bit of a back-burner educational thing at this point.
Submitter: thanks for submitting the (original) ketralnis.com article. The same article was submitted under my experimental domain wrotit.com to reddit, and I'd much prefer to reduce the incoming links to that domain until I've made final decisions about the link and URL structure over there :)
Are you smarter than a young chimp?
Joel Spolsky's talk at Yale, part 1
Outsourcing actively growing and changing websites is such a bad idea. I know, because I build such sites for clients, and on all the dynamic, growing sites, it always ends with clients being frustrated with the slow responsiveness to updates, fixes, and changes.

It isn't intentional. When the billing has to cross between companies, and detailed requirements have to be agreed upon by multiple layers, the response time just can't be there.

Of course, hiring the right developers who can handle a large site efficiently is an equally frustrating challenge..
LOL. why not selecting contacts from a list of names? they are easier to recognize and lookup :)
> Is this a troll, or did the author simply not do very much research?

It's not a troll, and I did do some research. I wrote this a few months ago (this is its second round on news.yc, and I'd make some addenda to it if it weren't actively linked to at the moment). My biggest problem was that I was insisting on portability across implementations, because that's something that I got for free in languages like Ruby that I didn't want to give up. Reading around, it looks like most Lisp users didn't have such a requirement, and mine was largely engineered because of bias given to me by the implementations of the other languages I was using.

When it comes down to it, I needed an implementation with those things that would work with FreeBSD, OS X, and Linux, and maybe sometimes Windows, and support threads, WebDAV, and some other stuff. While I still can't find a WebDAV client library, it looks like my requirements for portability across implementations may have been unfounded.

Since then I've gotten into Erlang, but if I were to try Lisp again it would probably be a Scheme after reading around.
USD$188 per pupil isn't exactly chump change. Hopefully the increase in volume from early customers like Uruguay will reduce the price for future customers.
Scientists Get Rare Look at Dinosaur Soft Tissue
Sounds good. What's the model number?
Why? So you have access to the Python libraries from Lisp? That would probably be better accomplished by writing a layer that used the Python/C API to fbnd the functions into Lisp, rather than compiling the whole program to run on the (slow) python interpreter.
Portability between implementations is a bit of a red herring (as you seem to have discovered); most libraries you'd actually want to use run on most implementations you'd actually want to use. Ruby and Python don't give you this either, but they do give you a standard implementation. I suspect a lot of Ruby code you might want to run doesn't work with JRuby or IronRuby.

Portability between operating systems is a more serious problem. I think ECL is the only free implementation that does this well, and most libraries don't seem to be tested on it.
I'll say here what I said on reddit:

CPC is actually only smallish percentage of the online ad marketplace. The real dollars are in CPM ads - display / brand advertising, the stuff you see in the big skyscrapers and 300x400s on high-traffic pages.

It's about brand awareness, not clicks or conversions.

Those placements run at pre-negotiated rates, and represent the bulk of ad revenue.
Instead of "Would you?", I think the question should be, "Why would you?"
The Crunchies... Nominate Now
About 6 months ago, I've seen a usability study of a downloadable app (P2P/Bittorrent app to download movies, music) and they tested in on 5 people. Users had to download the app, install it and then use the site to start the downloads. Out of 5 people, not a single person managed to complete the task because everyone was suspicious of installing anything.

The aversion to install anything and fear of viruses and spyware is absolutely amazing.
Time to flood the site with YC votes.... I'm voting FuzzWich... in all categories.
The problem is that, if I see a 40-foot advertisement on a city bus, "Drink Buzz Cola", I know that the Buzz corporation has elected to spend serious dollars and the risk of public exposure on their brand. Internet advertising still has a smarmy one-on-one private feel to it:

"How do I trust this 'Buzz Cola' who have spent .01 cents for a 4 inch ad on MY facebook page?"

...people don't get a sense that the ad campaign is city-wide, nation-wide, international, whatever, and is being shown to millions of people...even when it is. And so the brand-building ("everybody's doing it!") doesn't work the same at a psychological level.
answer is 20.
parallel line to line AB in D point gives us F point, after some work we get EF=FD and angle FED=50, but angle AEB=30.
So, here is the result angle DEA = FEB - AEB = 20 : )
Lisp the Platonic ideal is powerful and important. Particular dialects like Common Lisp and particular implementations are akward because the ANSI standard is intentionally silent about common network, I/O, etc. stuff.

Old news.
1) Performance. Which begs the question, "Does performance matter?" I think it does for Id, Blizzard, EA, etc., and not many others.

2) The need to access hardware, especially external devices.

3) A more straightforward business model, viz, "Buy my software for 20 dollars."

4) Avoiding the intrinsic hackery of the "Web Application". This problem is going away.

5) Security concerns on the part of the customer. Oddly, people are more worried about trojans stealing data than they are about trusting their data to XYZ corporation's web servers.
43 points? Damn you Paul for "Hacker News"!
Most people don't go through this mental process. Brand awareness happens beneath the level of cognition anyway. You can show people unfamiliar brands repetitively in an unobtrusive context and then when you put them all together and deliberately show the person and ask, "how many of these have you seen before?", the answer will usually be "none". But if, before this, you ask them to rate a group of brands, including the ones they've been shown along with some truly new ones -- they will rate the shown group higher on various metrics even though they think they've never seen them before.
Great Video Lectures on the Theory of Computation
XOR Linked List: A Curious List Structure
Clojure: A Lisp Worth Talking About
How adding more RAM to your PC can hurt Windows performance
Hydra Project: Rails based, anti-piracy proof private bit torrent tracker project
On Noise, by Arthur Schopenhauer
Microsoft Buys Video Social Networking Startup, WebFives.com
Video Lectures on Computer Architecture given by David A. Patterson (pioneer of RISC, RAID)
Nominate Top Startups For The Crunchies
Bored of hacking in the Valley? Come to New York and do it in the back of a cab
Sometimes, innovation can be harmful
>When it comes down to it, I needed an implementation with those things that would work with FreeBSD, OS X, and Linux, and maybe sometimes Windows, and support threads, WebDAV, and some other stuff. While I still can't find a WebDAV client library, it looks like my requirements for portability across implementations may have been unfounded.

That kind of support is basically only provided by the JVM...unless I am mistaken.
Neat, but not very practical/useful unless you are very constrained by memory and need a doubly linked list that you will always traverse starting at one end (much like stream ciphers, you can't just jump to the middle, since the next/prev pointer depends on the last one, which depends on the one before that, all the way back to the first)

Though I do love the XOR operator, and this just adds one more reason why (like the XOR swap trick http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XOR_swap_algorithm or XOR's extensive use in cryptography).
Mozilla scoffs at vulnerability study rating IE superior to Firefox
Internet set to overtake magazines as world's third largest advertising medium
I'm visiting the Bay area this week- What should I see?
I'm going to be visiting the Bay area this week, and I'd love some advice on what to see.

Darkened Sky is Boston based, so I've never spent much time in SF.. I thought that while I'm out there it might be worth the time to stop by a few places to get the lay of the land.

I know there's a lot of news.yc folk who have lived there before, or have moved there to work on their Startups- What would you recommend?

Are there any interesting startup events going on this week? What places should I be sure to stop at? Any hotels you'd recommend, or recommend avoiding at all costs? Are there any bars or restaurants that are worth patronizing?

-Colin
Amazon's Startup-a-Thon
Splosky's elitism would be easier to take if his company weren't so pedestrian.
Stealing a Page from Google's Playbook
"This problem is going away."

What made Wayne Gretsky such a great hockey player? He didn't skate to where the puck WAS, he skated to where it was GOING TO BE.