skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With the python installed on my phone, the g(5) example does return the correct result 0, not 4 as the author of that blog post claims. So this kills one of his arguments againt tail call eliminaton.
From that example, I'm inclined to conclude that the author doesn't know much about either functional programming nor python. Given that I know who the author claims to be, I think I will just put python on my list of languages to be wary about.

And, by the way, Common Lisp does quite well treating TCO as an optional optimization.
Depends on the business. If A's shorter working hours allow him to offer dramatically lowered costs, then he may succeed.
My new little project aimed at taking the complication and expense out of programatically sending SMS messages.
Indeed, I don't see a reason (other than user complaints) for them to have pulled the app. Sure, it's tasteless, but it does what it says on the tin, isn't pornographic, doesn't screw with your phone or lose battery life or infringe copyrights, and doesn't break a single law in any country that I'm aware of the iPhone being deployed. If you're going to argue that it might encourage someone to shake a baby at some point, think about this: it wouldn't be a horrifying concept for an app, and thus wouldn't have any kind of appeal at all, unless you already knew what shaking babies did to them, and thus knew not to do it. It's not like Little Timmy is going to find this, play it, and then try it on his little sister. If he doesn't know what Shaken Baby Syndrome is, he just wouldn't get it, or why it's funny, and therefore wouldn't buy it.
You are equating growth with head count, which is a common fallacy, but still a fallacy. Our measure of growth and success is profit and growth in profit. For the past many years now, we've had spectacular yearly growth and we've yet managed to avoid destroying the lifestyle we're enjoying.

Preferably we wouldn't hire another person for the next 10 years, but still dramatically increase our profits. To me, there's no growth in just adding to the head count without increasing profits. That's just deadweight.
I don't work for them, I'm not trying to feed you a line. I'm just trying to see it from their perspective. I'm not presenting facts, merely ideas.
Yeah, but cf your copy of The Protestant Work Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism to see this argument brought out in full; I'll also handwave and point out that in general, even when the nitty-gritty specifics of belief systems are the stuff wars are fought over, it's surprisingly common for second-order attudinal-and-behavioral consequences of a particular group's outlook to thoroughly permeate the broader society it's found in.

That's a fancy way of saying that, eg., even though the predestination thing is a mainly Calvinist outlook, the knock-on effects of that belief -- working hard but hoping for some 'answer from above' to arrive in the form of earthly success -- have pretty much permeated the deep subconscious of the American outlook.

You can see it manifest all the time, with people attributing success to innate characteristics -- eg, smarts or talent or whatnot -- and not to the work and training that developed those characteristics; this is a more-rational take on the same basic idea (earthly success == sign of grace, not earthly success == mix of lucky breaks and hard effort).
Oberon - The Mac's Forgotten UI Uncle
Apple: Want A Netbook? Try An iPhone Or iPod Touch (For Now)
Odd... I had the numbered points on separate line, but this site crammed them all into one long, ugly line.

It's too bad I can't edit it.
That definition is flawed. It's possible to run a huge website with 20 people. If you're a top-100 site, and your staff is measured in tens, are you still a lifestyle business?
I guess after we have created and understood intelligence once, we may be able to re-create it on much weaker hardware the second time.

Perhaps one day we'll even be able to e.g. beat the Turing Test on standard 2009 hardware with enough algorithmic knowledge.
Not a book, but I would highly recommend a web dev. plugin for Firefox such as Firebug that lets you view CSS attributes on every element in a page, as well as edit the CSS and see live changes.
"I'm inclined to conclude that the author doesn't know much about ... python."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_van_Rossum
I'm inclined to conclude that the author doesn't know much about either functional programming nor python

I think he knows much about Python. Maybe not much about your "the python". :D
This is a much better idea than the one I presented in a different thread above.
Just saw this interview response by Guido Van Rossum and had to post it.

- What do you think is the most important skill every programmer should posses?

Guido Van Rossum:
Your questions are rather general and hard to answer. :-) I guess being able to cook an egg for breakfast is invaluable.

http://www.stifflog.com/2006/10/16/stiff-asks-great-programm...
LG Outsources Some R&D to the Masses
Perhaps the phone is old enough that it doesn't use SIM technology? I had a phone just last year that didn't (or at least, that's what they told me when I asked my next provider after that why I couldn't transition it to their network.)
(Note - on HN it's considered polite to put additions to your original comment after an [edit] statement, or alternatively you can create a new reply)
The range is a price thing. Tesla has shown you can squeeze serious range out of an EV - and design a commodity car for quick battery swaps. But all of that costs money. Aptera is undercutting Tesla's second car with their first, they can't afford to gold plate it, so they have to make the best of old tech.

Economies of scale acting on EV battery packs should make their jobs easier after 2010.
Without a head count growth though, you're just supporting a lifestyle. Surely. That's great, and it depends on your priorities.

But as far as I see it, that's the definition of a lifestyle business - sacrificing growth of the business (In terms of head count), for 'lifestyle'. With a very small team, that profit seems quite risky to me.

(I would also say plentyoffish is a lifestyle business at the moment from what I know about it). From what I've read, there's a very small team, not growing in head count, making a lot of money.

>> To me, there's no growth in just adding to the head count without increasing profits. That's just deadweight.

I think it's a good thing to employ more people, if it's going to work in the long term. Sacrificing 'lifestyle' now, to build a big company.

You can either take the profit, or you can reinvest it in people for the long term, and build something big.

>> "Our measure of growth and success is profit and growth in profit."

Which is more risky? 1 person earning $10m a year, or 10 people earning $1m each a year within the same company?
When selling software internationally, how do you collect taxes for each country?
This is in reference to selling software via the internet.

Which countries require you to collect taxes? What is the process involved?
Trascending CSS
Nokia says they're not aware of any software vulnerability, and I believe them. But if some essential information is transmitted in clear and can be read out or blocked via a small hack to the phone's PCB, then it would be a hardware vulnerability, no? People like hard-modding old digital synthesizers, and a phone is just another kind of DSP device.
He responded directly to a comment I made on yesterday's blog post:

I hate that Python doesn't have Tail-Call Optimization,
though it does have the best stack traces of any language
I've seen, which mostly makes up for it.

Not being able to cleverly recurse isn't so bad when you
never have to deal with anonymous "you tried to get the
head of an empty list" exceptions!
I would say so, yeah. If you only have 10 people, I'd say it's still kinda risky. Your company could disappear very quickly.

As I say, I'd rate plentyOfFish as a lifestyle business. It's not a derogatory term in any way shape or form. Just means that instead of growing the company (Headcount, diversifying, etc), they are maintaining their own lifestyle.
This is good news. It means that, given enough competition, prices can fall pretty fast. Even better news is that the E-Ink display makes up most of the cost, so if the prices on those go down, it could make a big difference.
There's a long history of people trolling/baiting Guido (just on whitespace alone!), but one commenter on this blog post had me giggling for quite a while:

How very pythonic of you to make up stupid reasons for not implementing a very simple optimization.
This is very pythonic because it shows poor decision making, poor performance and immature ideology.
"Without a head count growth though, you're just supporting a lifestyle. "

I don't understand how you can come to that conclusion. Business success is defined by profits, not ever-increasing headcount.
I haven't done professional work in C++ only my thesis project which was relatively self contained and simple, so maybe I am underestimating the importance of preprocessor/template/linking magic. There is certainly a rather large barrier to entry for vim/emacs for the average developer.
Don't let me put words in other mouths, but the reason tomsaffell is saying that if MS sells a $y-priced version of Windows for netbooks that they'll end up losing $(x-y)(# of non-netbook PCs) is this: if there is a fully-functional* Windows version on the market then all contemporary Windows versions will tend to that price. Users will say "why do I pay $x for Windows when John Q. Otherguy got it for $y on his netbook?".

The only way that users won't say that is if the "Windows for Netbooks" is lousy in some way or another.

*(Means something like "works the same, except for feature Z" where Z is sufficiently obscure)
The examples that 37 signals are relying on are ones where there is already the opportunity to outsource business processes - order fulfilment to Amazon etc. This is all well and good where you're doing something which is not too different from what is being done before (and at a similiar scale to what has been done before).

But what about the people trying to do something new? You're going to have to invest a lot more time for two simple reasons: a) You may not have external systems you can simply outsource to, because they may not exist, or may not fill the exact need of your business, and b) if you are doing something new, there's a whole heap more experimentation, research and trial and error involved to get a working product that has traction in the marketplace, as no-one's made the mistakes with a similiar product before which you can learn from. You gotta make those mistakes yourself.
No way. 10 people creating a 100M business isn't at risk of disappearing. 10 people creating a 1M business might be.

The issue is profits, not headcount.
Have you looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MonetDB ?

It exposes some of the DB guts at a different layer while leaving a SQL "porcelain" feature available for people who desire that.
What I mean by 'integrating Linux' is providing hardware and platforms that are very well integrated and provide a bit more of a lightweight interface.

Have a look at the stuff HP have done with MIE atop Ubuntu providing a slick and easy UI for netbook stuff. Some of the work Intel's doing on Moblin too. Two second boot times are insane.

Of course, there's also a danger we'll have a raft of dozens of half-baked 'easy' UIs running atop of OEMs custom distributions.
Poll HN: IDE (eclipse) or plain editor (vim, emacs) ?
I recently got into a discussion about whether using an IDE really speeds up development time. If you were confronted with a large project and barring organizational constraints, do you believe using an IDE (Visual Studio, Eclipse) will make you significantly more productive than a good editor (vim, emacs) ? I separated the options out to be language specific, so select your language of expertise.
Java - IDEs rock! Eclipse forever...
Java - Editors are the best! Long Live vim!
C++ - IDEs are my best friend!
C++ - Editors do everything I need, forget your IDE!
C - IDEs ! insert clever comment...
C - editors ! but IDEs may make my code readable?
Ruby - IDEs ! I am really out of jokes...
Rudy - editors !
Good to hear something other than delays, bugs and losses from AMD. The current 4-core Opteron is outclassed by the latest Nehalem-based Xeons, even in the historically strong FP performance metrics. So the 6-core Opteron is arriving just in time...
Most users have no idea how much of their PC purchase went towards a Windows license.
"The acts of software installation and loading into memory become identical."

Uh, that's already how software loading works. Shared libraries and executables get mapped into memory space and can be lazily loaded (though that's not always a good idea) through bog-standard VM systems. You'll note this has not solved the boot problem. It doesn't matter how cleverly disk-mapped memory is implemented if your critical path is 100MB of stuff that must be pulled from the disk before your system can be used.
I decided to put up a poll about this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=574697 maybe enough people will answer to be interesting?
My "the python" is Python 2.2.2 on symbian_s60, which definitely doesn't show the buggy behaviour the author describes as the established semantics of python.

And I started the next sentence with "Given that I know who the author claims to be" for a reason.
Maybe I should have ended that sentence with a "¡", which according to wikipedia looks almost like the ethiopian sarcasm mark (if nobody mangles the encoding). (Sorry, no link, apple isn't the only phone manufacturer that can't implement cut and paste.)
I don't have any data with which to back this up, but as far as I can tell it's a little faster and it has better multithreading guarantees and performance. Oh, and it's open source (mostly. sigh.) and has some pretty cutting-edge languages, e.g. Clojure and Scala.

Mono is one to watch, though.
This wouldn't prove consciousness is physical. I'm not saying I'm a dualist, but pragmatically, the only thing I can say is that I'm conscious. It doesn't matter if scientists showed me a conscious computer, that event is still happening in my consciousness. Why believe a computer the computer is conscious, when I can't even prove other humans are conscious?

I don't necessarily believe the above, but no one mentioned this point.

Also, the multiverse makes this an odder issue. If the simplest algorithm is to output all possible universes, what's stopping a universe from having just one observer?
It's a lot easier when you have a strong brand (corporate and personal). It's not so easy when you don't. Granted, they had no brand when they started (which was in a different climate than the climate facing startups today), but I think they've forgotten what it's like to be brandless, moneyless, etc.

If they want to prove their constant mantra of "anyone can do it!," then they should try this: Start a new company with a new company name, use aliases for their own names, live on ramen noodles for eight months (or many more), and see if they can repeat their success. If they can do it, then I'll be the first to sing their praises.

They've created exactly one successful company (a huge achievement to be sure). However, that doesn't qualify them to spread general wisdom about how anyone can do the same.

I'm not saying that their ideas for creating products people love are bad or wrong. They're actually quite good (and perhaps even intuitive to anyone who sits down and really thinks about it instead of just wanting to read about it). But one can't extrapolate broad patterns from a single macro datapoint.

Of course anyone is free to say whatever they want and I'm not suggesting that they or anyone else should stop expressing their opinions -- opinions are what make the Internet great. :-)
News Corp. Considers Replacing Top Executives at MySpace
I haven't a clue this was like 99-01, it wasn't just edit distance algorithm but also all the UI code surrounding it and optimizing things for learning a foreign language. Basically it was a quiz program in (e.g.) German which compared the student's answer to the proper answer and then generated suggestions when appropriate. We did a lot of tweaking of that code, iterating through versions starting with an attempt to just port some C code and onward - I was pretty green at that time and it wasn't a full time job, so it's not like implementing edit distance took you know, 70 man weeks...
Users don't know how much OEMs pay for the copy of Windows that's on their machines. MS just simply wouldn't sell it to end users at that price, just like they don't sell regular Windows to end users at OEM prices now.
Interestingly this might just be a result of the perceived dual consciousness of the brain - see http://neuropolitics.org/Conservative-Left-Brain-Liberal-Rig... and others
I did like both books by Cederholm, so I also recommend Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook
Christopher Blizzard: Canvas 3D vs. Google 3D
I don't see why that would be the case. Profit doesn't really mean anything unless it's sustainable (Apart from providing a lifestyle). To be sustainable, it's worth diversifying, and that means increasing head count.

Measuring a company in terms of profit is really short term. How about the long term lasting effect of the company?
Just because a crazy person writes an unreadable book or hypes a kookoo vaporware doesn't make them an acceptable target for mockery. They exist in the fringes of computing, every comp.* newsgroup has a resident bat-shit-insane guy who writes volumes of nonsensical gibberish. Some might even take out an ad in a trade publication.

The tell-tale signs are pseudo-mathematics coupled with rich imagery, obsession with patterns and directed-edges, active verbs that don't make sense, agent-based AI and a vocabulary that is borrowed back from Victorian-era science.
The definition axod gave reads, "Lifestyle Businesses typically have limited scalability and potential for growth because such growth would destroy the very lifestyle for which their owner-managers set them up."

So I can see what you're saying comatose_kid, but if we're talking about lifestyle businesses it makes sense to talk about organizational growth rather than profit growth. How would making more money destroy your lifestyle? And why would a lifestyle business's owners be afraid of making more money?
His point about composability is not a complaint about what sql does. It's merely a complaint that he thinks that function composition should be used to combine predicates, but that isn't how sql works.

I.e., he wants "SELECT * from X where P(x)" to be a function acting in X. It isn't a function (or at least should not be thought of that way), it's a description of a set:

{x : x in X, P(x)}

The predicates ARE composable:

{x : x in X, P(x)} intersect {x : x in X, Q(x)} == {x : x in X, P(x) and Q(x)}
huh. so how many people just start out with the actual price, rather than fucking around?
Justin.tv is looking for a Graphic Designer - Advertising & Marketing
I realized that this was from long long ago only when I got to the part where Stevey said he liked Java.

Nevertheless a good informative read.
Agreed. And, a lot of passions.

Beside, i think most people that Matt points out is still quite exceptional. For one thing, John Gruber and Jason Kottke know what they are talking about more than majority of people. In fact, the act of starting itself (let alone know more than most people) is already a difficult thing to achieve. As i can testify, my friend who told me he want to be pro-blogger months ago, hasn't even started now.

So, i would probably say Matt's post is more exception rather than rule.
I'm on board with the term "lifestyle business" if we make it imply "very profitable business that continues to grow revenues without adding additional cost". I would think that's the nirvana description of any business, though.

"Which is more risky? 1 person earning $10m a year, or 10 people earning $1m each a year within the same company?", that simply doesn't compute. If all those 10 guys are making their $1 million each from selling web ads where as the 1 guy is making his $10 million selling subscription software, I know who I'd want to place my money with right now.
Maybe it's good news as long as it doesn't get techcrunched?
It's not a "bug" if the behavior is intended.

I just tested the example with Version 2.5, and it returns 4. Version 2.2.2 is over six years old: http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.2.2/
No matter what happens, people will continue making music because a whole lot of people like making music. What value do the record companies add to that, which we can't get by other, less harmful means?
Message Manipulation - How To Get Thought Leaders To Sing Your Praises
Okay see I remember seeing the article that made the berry link. Like actual honest to god degree holding scientists (of some discipline) were willing to be quoted on that hypothesis. A hypothesis that I, completely out of my field, just poked a half a dozen major holes in.

I didn't "It's unlikely that women have higher red-resolution because that claim is made by misogynists," I said the berry explanation may have been made by misogynists. I suspect at the very least it was made by morons.

But despite your seeming distaste for Women's Studies, academia has a well documented history of misogyny that needs to be remembered anytime an argument is made that is so close to "women are physically adapted to housework." Particularly when, like I said above, a lack of evidence for some claim is blatantly obvious.
Author here. I was thinking in terms of an entire query being a function that returns data.

Also notice that your set notation demonstrates composability, but the equivalent SQL does not.
I have one of these in a drawer--it's a bog-standard GSM phone that takes SIM cards.
I second that. I also pick and implement depends on what is need at the time. Example of when i need list: http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listutorial/
I'd place mine firmly with the web ads ;)

I agree @ keep costs low, but I still think the definition of a lifestyle business is one that isn't growing in terms of the business.

If you liken it to a house rental. You could have the best house in the world, and be able to rent it out for $5m a year. That'd give you a great lifestyle, but even if you can manage to rent it out for $6m the next year, that's not business growth. business growth would be renting out 2 properties, 3, etc etc. Reinvesting the profit into the business in order to provide sustainable long term growth.

>> "I would think that's the nirvana description of any business, though."

So I'd disagree with this. Not every business wants profits over future growth.
I once heard that as much as 93.6% of all statistics are just made up on the spot.

I hope that never happens here.
I just don't see the use for it - presumably one could create a random number generator to generate all sorts of codes, and have all hackers be occupied indefinitely? There are so many open problems whose solution would actually increase the body of human knowledge.

Still, if you want to play, play. It probably is a good problem to practice cryptography with.
Very cool. Does anyone know what level of global illumination they are able to reach? I noticed they did have an ambient occlusion setting which produced some noisy-looking shadows (though that could've been a video artifact). Obviously difficult (i.e. highly indirect) lighting situations will seriously impact the framerate, but it would still kick ass if they could hardware accelerate it. Given that they use GLSL to define their surface properties, I'd be interested in how they figure out where to cast their random rays.

Baking this into an ASIC instead of an FPGA would be awesome. But I'm sure they're already onto that.