skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If this is a duplicate, it's one that a lot of people could benefit from.

Summary:

1. Delete redundancies.
2. Use numbers and specifics instead of adverbs and adjectives.
3. Add missing context.
4. Focus on the strongest argument.
5. Delete off-topic material.
6. Seek out equivocation and remove it.
7. Kill your favorites.
8. Delete anything written in the heat of emotion.
9. Shorten.
10. Give it a day.
It sounds like you are trying to do two separate things: 1. Learn Lisp, and 2. create a web app startup.

Both are very worthy goals, but I don't know if using Lisp, Haskell or erlang to write a web app is really a great idea right now. (Sorry PG). I think that is was true that writing web apps in Lisp probably gave you a huge leg up against the competitors in the mid 90's. I don't really know if that's the case now.

Languages like Python and Ruby have tons of libraries, frameworks and documentation that really help you get productive making web apps. That's a huge plus in my book.

Then again, maybe you're interested in rolling your own libraries and framework ala arc. If that's your thing go for it. I'm sure you'll learn a lot along the way.
www.goldword.com
"Let’s say that you are broke, overweight, and have no friends. You decide to apply positive thinking. You tell yourself that you are lucky to be you and walk around with a smile on your face."

Ugh, that's positive thinking gone terribly wrong. I guess, he should tell himself that he'll lose 500g bodyweight this week ... and next week ... and stick to it. And apply for X jobs this week, and next week and ...

But, wait, let's be truthful, odds are high of staying overweight and jobless. Why bother then?
This practice is explicitly allowed. Google wants paywall-protected content to be "discoverable".
It's pretty ridiculously easy to use that spamming technique now -- just scrape usernames from public fora, and try them on the big free email hosts.

If you add a really naive email hashing scheme to your profile pages, the spammer doesn't even have to send the email to see if it's valid!: http://www.cs.brown.edu/~cce/microid/
no doubt you should visit <a href="www.goldword.com">GoldWord</a>
HN's data set isn't big enough to really need one, though. Serious RDMBSs are designed for billions to trillions of entries.
The Code Even the CIA Can't Crack
Oh now i go it...http://www.goldword.com! sorry.
Is there a "Dive into Javascript" like there is a "Dive Into Python"?. The DIP style is by far my favorite way to learn a new language.
Eclipse is an Integrated Development Environment. That is, all of the development tools are integrated into the editor.

I don't develop using an IDE, but I still have access to the same kind of functionality. It's just not integrated into my editor.
The case for Delaware isn't costs so much as corporate law, if professional investment or mergers/acquisitions are expected later. I doubt those are relevant for your one-person LLC.

By operating in California you'll essentially still owe the same franchise and other taxes, so you might as well form in California.

If you're interested enough in having an LLC to ask the question, perhaps you want to get a reference guide, like perhaps one of the Nolo Press guides. One example (they have a few):

http://www.nolo.com/product.cfm/ObjectID/15B382A6-2013-4BD0-...

And remember, legal advice you get for free in discussion threads is worth no more, and possibly less, than what you paid for it.
High-achieving Harvard students get low-down on failure
Ooops, too late. Got rushed by a blog article somewhere: "Hurry, Hurry, get your google profile handle now, or else ... someone else will take it!" So I did.

Nice lesson for all marketers - scaring users works :)
I think you misinterpreted my comment. I wasn't saying anything about China or its citizens specifically, I was just showing that governmental paternalism for an uneducated/low/dumb/weak/however-disadvantaged population can wind up being its own justification. I could've been a bit clearer about that, but then my comment wouldn't have sounded so wise ;)
A friend of mine told me that she had basically used one well written generic paper to get though almost all of the essays required in college because the subject of her paper was so generic and applicable to the field she was studying (psychology). If TurnItIn were to "catch" someone for re-using their own work, I would say that TurnItIn is violating the fair use of the student because it is penalizing the student for being able to re-use previous drafts that were written by the student.

I'm sure teachers don't condone the idea of students re-using previously submitted work from another class, but I think that it is a legitimate right and just shows how ignorant some teachers are who accept papers on generic subjects.

There are probably other specific places where TurnItIn could arguably be abusive of ownership beyond fair use, but there needs to be a specific context to the situation.
The mentioned Desktop Analytics application is a fascinating use of Adobe's new AIR cross-plattform app: http://www.desktop-reporting.com/polaris.html

I can imagine so many uses of integrating monitoring data into apps.
Ask HN: Could you limit all or most emails to five sentences?
Because of the screen limitations of the Blackberry and iPhone and the deluge of email most people receive, is it feasible to set a hard limit on the length of your emails or would your boss or coworkers give you a hard time?

I would like to adopt this policy, informing people by way of an email signature that all of my responses will be under 5 sentences, but am not sure how it's going to go down in a professional setting.

Has anyone tried this?

Did people give you a hard time?

http://five.sentenc.es/
“you have within you the energies you need to heal”

While obviously there are diseases that don't heal themselves, it seems to me the human immune system is a lot more complex and fine tuned than anything physicians could offer at the present time. I suspect most medical treatments are somewhat akin to operating with a sledge hammer. Therefore it seems to be preferable to find a way to let the human immune system (and regenerative capabilities of the body) do it's job than to go about it with medications and operations. Of course sometimes there is no choice, but in general it seems worthwhile to ask "why can't the immune system fix this by itself?" - which probably leads to an attempt to treat the causes, rather than the symptoms.
> “You can be president of the Unites States, if you really want to!"

The theory that I think applies is the idea of global and local maximums. It is unrealistic to shoot for being a global maximum (the best in the world). For example, the POTUS is a global maximum. Local maximum is president of your school board. You have much better odds of achieving the local maximum ("big fish in small pond"). It's hard to be the most social guy in a club, but if you host and throw a party, you are the most social guy by definition.
I should clarify myself - I'm not affiliated with Stack Overflow, I'm just an engaged user that saw parallels between the article and the recent discourse about how the community should be moderate itself.

That aside, I agree with your sentiment - SO is my newest favorite site, and I, too, hope that Jeff & company are able to keep the site open for a long time. Once you go Stack you never go back.
There's an incremental find option in Eclipse. Ctrl-j or was it Ctrl-i (or something like that) which is pretty nice and I wish all IDEs (read: IDEs) have that. That beats Ctrl-F any day.

How did you do refactorings? Or you just don't?
Delaware is not a prime choice for corporate filings due to its history in corporate law, it is the prime choice because it has low costs, few requirements on businesses incorporated in the state, and its existing corporate regulations are very management-friendly.

One thing that the original poster should note is that even if he incorporates in Delaware if he does most of his developement and operation in California then he will still be required to register as a foreign entity in California and pay CA franchise fees (and maintain a registered agent in CA.)

I short, go ahead and register in CA if you are not going to be seeking outside investment and will be operating in CA. Take a look at the various steps and advice at the following:
http://live.prokhorenko.us/2009/04/how-to-incorporate-startu...
For Lisp, I found using Scheme and reading The Little Schemer and SICP more helpful than PCL. I've also been using and heavily customizing Emacs, but Emacs Lisp is kind of a crappy Lisp, and keeping track of its idiosyncrasies while also learning Scheme or Common Lisp's will probably be really confusing initially. Scheme is also a lot more my style than CL, though. YMMV.

I also found learning OCaml to be a real eye-opener, both for learning FP techniques (it emphasizes a different set of them than Lisp) and how to work with, rather than against, static typing. (_The Little MLer_ helped, as well, and is at least as good for learning types as _The Little Schemer_ is for recursion, IMHO. Highly recommended.)

There's not a whole lot of material published in English on OCaml (the Joshua Smith book is terrible!), but there's a translation of a French O'Reilly book online (http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/oreilly-book/), and it's quite good for learning the main ideas. The first few chapters are on functional programming, imperative programming, and then their relative strengths & when to use each. (Their emphasis on using FP when appropriate, rather than treating it as the new best thing ever, suggests more insight to me than the blind enthusiasm for languages that tends to cycle through here and reddit.)

Also: OCaml is not without its flaws. In particular, its errors can be cryptic, and it's standard library has some infuriating omissions. The language is fantastic for some kinds of problems (ML's forte is anything involving complex data structures), though, and it's a great way to learn some very useful techniques.
decided to write his own version of a system that was already on his list

It isn't necessarily unreasonable to write your own version of an existing system. Sometimes you can do something much simpler that meets your particular needs. Also, in many cases it's easier to write code than to read it. Edit: the OP makes a similar point in an amusing way: at least when it breaks, you’ll be more fond of it.
Please take leah culver off that list.

Thanks,
Developers Worldwide
And actually, I forgot that Peter E. left Sun a few weeks ago anyway:

http://petereisentraut.blogspot.com/2009/03/sun-set-part-2.h...
Online font use is extremely public. Wouldn't it be easy to just license fonts per domain and then crawl to see who's using it without a license?

Dynamic web fonts are the most enforceable copyright there is. With a reasonable fee structure this could be a huge new source of revenue for font designers, and a big new tool for web designers.
I just use Kdevelop.
Is the author poking holes in delusional optimism, a mere pocket of positivity, or honest self-esteem? Isn't the point of believing you can do something (being positive) so you try harder to achieve it and not just (as it seems to be written here) wait for it to fall in your lap?
Most business emails I receive are under five sentences, easy (and by 'most' I mean 'probably 95%'). People generally don't like typing, so the ones that are long are usually long for a reason.

I also don't see screen size being an issue, at least I read a lot of multi-page content with the iPhone and it hasn't bothered me at all.

Besides, what you propose would discourage inline responses (you know, when someone asks a few questions, you respond in context, under the question), and I for one think not enough people respond inline when it's appropriate.
Ask HN: What data source could I use for my stock market program?
I want to make a JavaScript or Flex widget to display stock market info. I have looked around but can't find a good free data source for this. I don't care if the data is delayed by a few minutes.
Object oriented programming has been a success, it's just not where people are looking for answers any more. The lifecycle for modestly successful technologies often goes like:

nobody understands it -> everybody scrambles to use it -> people start to get some benefit from it -> people overuse it -> people hate it and say it's dead -> people retreat to where it makes sense.

Objects are as dead as methods or loops. They're not super interesting anymore, they're just fixtures.

I agree that functional programming (while hardly new) will probably start to gain traction, similar to the cycle above. I think FP will also be a successful technology, eventually becoming a fixture in mainstream languages.
Yes, I did read his post about his basing Python more on C and Algol than functional languages.

But then he goes on to explain how and why Python got more functional programming features.

Also, I based my assumption that Python is "lisp-like" on a statement I remembered from one of PG's essays:

"Each one is progressively more like Lisp. Python copies even features that many Lisp hackers consider to be mistakes. You could translate simple Lisp programs into Python line for line."

If there is more context to all this that I am missing, then my mistake. Anyway, I wasn't looking to make any detailed comparisons between languages for the OP. I was just saying...hey, Python or something else could be fun to learn...
Absolutely... I digitized my CD collection years ago and threw away those useless jewel cases (CDs themselves fit neatly in a couple of Case Logic binders) - I never looked back and am living happily CD-free: good riddance, plastic; I digitized my class notes from school; I digitized all the biz cards, little notes and other specs of paper using the on-board camera of my Macbook Pro and the PhotoBooth app (later on I can run an OCR character recognition program on those biz card images): No more clutter!!!

Considering books... I still own a fair bit of books and enjoy them very much, but in the future I could imagine certain more reference type books to be strictly digital.

I also enjoy my vinyl records and putting them on a manual old-school record player. But I have digital backups of all vinyl, because they wear down with use.

As they say: the future is "high-tech as well as high-touch"
Is there anywhere else online that font designers gather? I'm interested, but I just spent about 30 minutes on Typophile.com and I'm going to need a site that's a little less, erm, Flash-tastic.
SpeedTile Introducing Free Visual Bookmarking Service
"These are my views. They do not reflect the views of my clients, my colleagues, my friends, my family, my company or, if you want to argue, me."

Way to stick to your guns. I stopped reading right there. (Emphasis is mine.)
I've been meaning to read that book, one question, do you really need to know Scheme to be able to read this book? Please enlighten me. Thanks!
The reason the code's not broken - because the CIA don't need it broken.
This is what happens when the CIA needs a code broken: http://xkcd.com/538/
Ask HN: Sample Equity/partnership contract?
Hi,

I created a LLC company, and I'm the ceo. I recently hired a new CTO who I almost consider a partner in my company, so I want to offer him 50% of my company's equity, with 30% having voting rights and 20% no voting rights (so he has an equal economic stake, but I still have control in case we need to make some big decisions). Any simple contract that is easy to understand that I can use? Hiring legal counsel is out of the question for me, I heard the fees are ridiculous and I don't have any seed capital available that I'm not already using. Please help! Thanks!
The card skimmers I see now are lit up with an internal ring of green LEDs to reassure the consumer (I always whack it with my hand).
"Most content on the web today is in 2D, but a lot of information is more fun and useful in 3D."

Wait wait... where did I hear that before?

Oh yeah. VRML.
"(Oh, and XML glue should be considered a "Framework Smell!")"

How about object relational glue? JSON glue? HTML template glue? Google Protocol Buffer glue? (Sure I am missing lots of others.)

I do not know how you go about modern web programming without lots of glue that takes some square data and transforms it into some round data for some other piece of software, be it a browser, a client of your web service, a relational database that has data you cannot live without, etc. etc.
By the "earth-like" definition I wonder if mars is earth-like?
Google analytics is installed on something like 40% of all sizable websites. What somebody should do with the API is link up the traffic flowing between those sites. Then you could tell how much value one site is delivering to another. You could create an affiliate network overnight.
No, the little schemer will teach you scheme, or rather a subset of scheme.
What I can't crack is how this ended up in Wired magazine twice!
When I started developing in C in Vim there are two things I've gotten used to that I can't live without now: ctags and auto-complete (they help with eachother).

Ctags is great, especially for navigating someone else's code. What does this function do? Just ctrl-] and suddenly I'm at its definition. Something in there I don't recognize, same thing. Ctrl-t to go back up the tag stack. Ive become so used to navigating my code this way I have trouble without it.

Completion is just the way that Vim will give you completion matches in insert mode if you hit ctrl-n or ctrl-p. With C it's very smart about it and will automatically search included files. It's great for not having to worry about exact spellings on things. If you really like this sort of stuff there are a few plugins that do Textmate-like snippets.
If it used a one time pad properly, it's in theory uncrackable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_time_pad

If the key is truly random, never reused in whole or part, and kept secret, the one-time pad provides perfect secrecy
China vs United States: A Visual Comparison
To answer in sort of a roundabout way, I think the problem domain matters a lot for how much you relatively learn when switching languages.

With web app backends, for example, most of the problems somehow relate to difficulty maintaining state over widespread, always-on networked systems - things like authentication, sessions, concurrency, large-scale, flexible datastores. So the systems architected gradually get more and more tuned towards serving this particular goal with little programmer effort. And because those problems are a good match to functional programming - because it eliminates state - functional has become popular.

But if you were building an embedded system, statefulness is less of a problem: there's usually only one thread, and all memory can be mapped in an orderly way. Your performance constraints are reliant on a single fixed platform, so the methods of inspecting and debugging code change.

So to get back to the original question, think about reframing your familiar problems in a way that would simplify the solution with a functional technique. Preferably, look for simplifications that are really big changes and throw out traditional assumptions - the use of relational databases in webapps is one common target for this. Even if you get it wrong you'll get a better understanding of where the functional solution can and can't work.
"If you're using a good IDE, creating the members and even getters and setters shouldn't take you much time at all"

I don't totally disagree with what you say, but having your IDE auto-generate lots of code automatically for you gives me the heebie-jeebies.

The problem is that with a language as verbose as Java, you quickly have a bajillion files filled with far more characters than it should take just to define some property names and their types. Especially considering how having a public field in an object is a Java Mortal Sin.

I could go on, but Yegge has summed up the problems with generating mountains of code with an IDE, that then requires an IDE to move around, here:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007_12_01_archive.html
That's because CIA sucks at cryptanalysis. NSA on the other hand...
An Effort to Save a City by Shrinking It
Anyone know how to fill out the W-8BEN form to sell iphone apps?
Information in discussion forums, Apple's tips, and the form instructions are inconsistent!

As a start, which parts of the form need to be filled out for an individual developer living in Canada?
If only more people would reply inline! It's the one huge downside of graphic email, most people never acquired the habit of line quote/answer.

I find it incredibly rude to get a 200k email where I have to keep scrolling up and down to older stuff to see what's being referred to, when inline quoting would be so much more efficient. the worst demographic are older (>35) users who came to email late. Younger people are more succinct and early adopters of email are still efficient.

Oh well, get off my lawn.
Hackers stole data on Pentagon's newest fighter jet
Unfortunately, Google Analytics is becoming increasingly less accurate as more and more people begin to use javascript blockers and other privacy tools.

This is especially a problem for sites with a high percentage of Firefox users, a significant portion of which are using the NoScript extension (it has almost 50 million downloads).
Of course, if you use an IDE, it can do all of this for you and much more, and more accurately than ctags.
If I have multiple points to describe on an important topic, I typically make an outline, and bold a 1-3 word summary for each bullet. As corporate-monkey as that is, it makes it very easy to skim without letting my managers overlook pieces I feel are important.

If they're only going to spend 20 seconds glancing at the response, I want it to be a breadth-first scan of the bolded items rather than a depth-first scan of the first paragraph.

For what it's worth, every management team I've worked under in the past decade of software development has loved it. I feel "uncool" for typing this here, but maybe it'll help someone to try the same approach (in addition to the great revising steps listed in the article).
Will energy consumption really follow the Kuznets curve?
Which IDEs don't? Borland/Codegear IDEs have had that at Ctrl+E for over a decade, while Visual Studio defaults to Ctrl+I. F3/Shift+F3 scroll backward and forward through matches by default.
>a useful ball park

Why do you think so? What actual evidence is there for it?
It's "Lisp-like" in the sense that it's garbage-collected and has an interpreter for incremental development, rather than only being batch-compiled. If PG were a Smalltalk fan, though, he would probably be talking about how every language is getting more Smalltalk-like (the above, plus class-based OO in the core language). It says at least as much about him as it does language design.

Python's lambdas are quite a bit less powerful than any Lisp's, and it doesn't have any tail call optimization. It's like, you can kinda sorta do functional programming in C, you just need to recast function pointers and do manual memory allocation.

Python is carefully designed to encourage programming in a certain relatively straightforward style, and while you can force some FP techniques into it, it doesn't sit well with the rest of the language, and it's kind of unfair to anybody else who will have to deal with the code down the road.

While I don't have much experience working with web frameworks (not my thing at the moment), Python is a very good all-purpose language.