skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the solution is pretty accessible.

I don't think that's true. I think you'll find the proof that discharging gives you what you want is pretty impenetrable. And this is a review of a survey paper that doesn't actually give the details.

I guess in this case I know too much about the topic to be able to assess whether it will be interesting to a generic hacker. I think it's pretty content-free. That's probably also the difference between me and a good science writer. Anything I read about something I know seems to be complete content-free fluff. I've tried, but I don't think I'll ever be able to write anything for general consumption.

However, here are a couple of results and/or odd questions:

* Given a Turing Machine one can construct a graph such that 3-coloring the graph is equivalent to running the Turing machine.

>> Since 3-coloring doesn't have a "direction", that means you can effectively run the TM backwards.

>>> That is a direct proof that 3-coloring is NP-complete.

* The set of reals is bigger than the set of integers

* One cannot decide from the axioms of set theory whether there is a set of reals that is bigger than the set of integers, but smaller than the set of reals.

* pi is very closely approximated by 355/113

* Define the sequence k(1)=0, k(2)=2, k(3)=3, k(n)=k(n-2)+k(n-3), and for n>1 ask: Does n divide k(n)? The answer is always "Yes" if n is prime, and almost always "No" if n is composite.

Challenge: find the first 5 cases where it gives the "wrong" answer.

Finally:

* What do you get if you photocopy a mirror?
Same here. I planned on trying it out until I saw the licensing agreement.

I'm going with PhoneGap instead.
Your original web address had 28 characters, and the converted version has 29 characters.

Congrats. I guess I need to update my rant.
Actually, yes... As one example, Jef Raskin pointed out that Click-Drag was an innovation of the Macintosh group (compare to Click-Drag-Click as used by the Star). Also the single button mouse, which while it might have been too far in the one direction, was certainly easier to use for a novice (which everybody was at the time!) than the 3-button Parc brick.

There is more to a GUI than the screenshot, there's also the actions associated with executing operations in the GUI. Consider the PC-GEOS vs. Windows of the time (2.x or 3.x, I think). GEOS was lightning quick, and a good deal of thought had gone into the interfaces for the major tools. The same machine that would run GEOS so sprightly would crawl under the iron heel of Windows. The interfaces looked very similar, but the quality of your interaction with them was entirely different.

So yes, there's been progress -- unfortunately, a lot of it has been backwards!
JamLegend is hiring interns this summer
I found this post interesting. I'd subscribe to your blog if the posts were about things like this.
Asymmetric follow is just part of it. Asymmetric conversation is the other. Fan pages let companies/celebs/etc broadcast, but they don't facilitate conversations the way Twitter does.
What a cool company! JamLegend, that is.
People don't like their labor going to someone else's profit.
I've been using leftparen (a framework written in PLT Scheme) for a project, this would be something like:

(rec-set-prop! userid 'username "joe")
(store-rec! userid)
If it couldn't be done elsewhere, we wouldn't be working on ours in Vancouver. ;-)

Still, if I were 22 and single, I'd start my start-up in the valley without a moments hesitation.

Oh yes, and as for Microsoft--the rules are different for them. (When your revenues dwarf the GDP of some small countries you get a little more latitude.)
MSN Latino
Extensibility in Vim vs. Emacs
it's just not a very intelligent argument, and can probably safely be dismissed as merely uninformed.

Do you mean that people who hate lisp because of its parentheses are uninformed; or do you mean that thinking that this is the reason people hate lisp is uninformed? The first is about languages; the second is
about people.

Assuming the latter, what's the evidence? Many people complain about parentheses, so it seems that it is an active reason, but without a rigorous survey ("Why do you hate lisp?"), it's hard to know.

The issue with parentheses is not about "hate" at all, but confusion. If you are 100% determined to learn something no matter what, you can probably learn it. But in reality, when you start to learn something, you are also assessing if it is worth the effort of learning.

The context of my first experience with lisp was that it was supposed to be more "mathematical" than other languages - and so I assumed the parentheses were used as they are in expressions, that is, for grouping. But they aren't used in that way in Lisp - they mean function call, like f(x), but with yet another syntax. So, my 5 minute cursory foray into Lisp ended with me concluding that Lisp was unexpectedly inconsistent. Since that's against my usability values, I didn't spend further time on it (since then, I have spent further time).

I didn't hate the parentheses; I just found their meaning elusive.
This is idiotic advice. The greatest benefit of using a debugger is to get a holistic view of what is really going on in your program right now, which may not match your preconceived notions of what you think it's doing. There's no way you can make the machine give you that kind of insight. I make it a practice to step through all of my code, even when it works correctly and I've written unit tests for everything. By watching the live view of control flow and variables I often find defects that hadn't yet shown up as visible bugs, or realize that there is a better way to do something.

In my experience, the programmers who don't like or use interactive debuggers have never learned to use a really good one.
You're actually taking the quote out of context. Getting a C in an art class is different from getting a C in macroeconomics. "Everything" doesn't refer to, say, athletic ability, I'm sure. There's some limitation to the set of abilities involved, centered around mental abilities, and art skills might be outside that limit, in the quotee's mind.

I mean, it's really easy to imagine a "good student" branching out, taking an art class, and getting a C, but it's hard to imagine a "good student" branching out, trying macroeconomics, and struggling.
Android is also like what non-techy users really want. But the iPhone in its present form is even more so!
That Brian Kernighan quote is from 30 years ago. We have better tools now.
To be fair, small business incubators have existed for decades. And yes, I know that YCombinator is not an incubator per se, but the fundamental idea of nurturing a new cohort of startups each year with standardized terms is not exactly new.
Attracting Customers with promotional bags
This site gave me a cool idea to promote my company with promotional bags. I gave bags to all of my employees and my clients. This way my company name is all around the city.
Social production and demographic changes
Well, first, the core Scheme spec is tiny. Tons of people have written at least half-complete Scheme interpreters (self included, in OCaml). It's a fun project, and it teaches you a lot about programming, even if you don't do the tricky parts (like full continuations). This seems to feed a strong "just fork your own" sentiment in the community, though, and that probably leads directly to a mishmash of incompatible libraries. That's Scheme, though, not Common Lisp; CL was an attempt to reign in several divergent Lisp dialects.

Also, I think people overuse macros. Certain people have put a lot of time into promoting them as the biggest asset of the language, which tends to encourage people to use them where they're not only unnecessary, but likely to make code harder to understand / maintain. (See, for instance, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=542746. Especially: "Q: What do you get when programmers design a language while trying to get something else done? A: PHP")

While I'm not knowledgeable enough about Ruby to say for certain, I could see making a big deal about "monkeypatching" causing similar problems there. Maybe the Ruby community encourages more restraint, though. Anybody?
Interesting business model: Ulitzer to Pay 200% AdSense Revenue to Its Authors
How come people aren't looking at this from the other angle: a twitter client could pre-preemptively look up URLs from url shortening services and annotate the tweets with the full URLs?

For that matter, how about a twitter client with a memory? One that keeps dossiers on the people you follow?

How about a twitter client that isn't written in AIR?
"Yes, but unless you're implementing the language you can really almost ignore the concepts you don't like."

Or unless you are reading other people's code.
Someone could write an App that pretends to be an old Hayes modem.
I run a social financial news site. Although my vision for my site is slightly different than Tip'd, I do admire their ability to promote the site.

I also kind of wonder about how social the site really is, when front page articles have titles such as "6 Easy Steps to Make money from Cash Reward Credit Cards or Point Rewards Credit Cards" with 21 votes and no comments. Someone is likely gaming the system.
Agreed. It's not rocket science to follow any short urls and provide the full url in the title attribute.
It seems odd to me, and very dangerous business wise, that Google would reject someone because of their lack of a degree.

I'm a writer, and my experience in journalism is that editors actively screen out people with degrees in journalism because it teaches them bad practices (In all actuality it teaches them good [read: old] practices, but kills personal voice which is now everything, praise Hunter S. Thompson!). 1+ years experience writing always beats 4+ years in a degree program with 0+ years experience actually writing.

I've always thought programming was akin to writing, it's all about putting pieces together to make the whole work better. My brother went the programming way and I went the writing way (I tried programming, but I quickly realized I couldn't do it as a day-to-day 9-5 job). So I don't really get why Google would require a degree, because surely the most important thing is if someones code is elegant.
Invite Boston HN: Startup party on April 15 
Our startup just won an online poll with Inc. magazine. They're throwing us a party at Temple Bar in Central Square on the evening of April 15th and we wanted to use this opportunity to bring together some fellow web entrepreneurs and hackers in the area.

If you plan on making it, shoot me an email at justin@lingtlanguage.com.

Hope to see you there.
I like the layout of the JamLegend page on Snaptalent. The job is something I'm interested in and Snaptalent seems to do a good job aggregating info about JamLegend.

One quick question though. What are the benefits to signing up? The sign up ad could be read as implying that signing up would be beneficial to me in applying to JamLegend. Are you offering any services, like resume review? Or is this page all that a logged in user would see, and account benefits are more general things like search access?
No offense but I don't think you get the concept of batteries included. Python has batteries included, Clojure has batteries available.

Even the clojure contrib jar is not included by default and has to be downloaded separately and then clojure needs to be launched with extra command line arguments to setup the classpath properly (or you need to fiddle with the classpath from within clojure), the same goes for any Java library that you want to use.
The Business of Software 2009 speaker lineup
Excellent article, well worth a read.

I'll be the one to remark on what a shame it is that Douglas Adams left us in such an untimely manner, since no one else has done so yet. I'd love to read his point of view on how things are evolving now, in another five years, or in a few decades.
Have a read of our homepage: http://snaptalent.com/

If you have any more questions email me directly: sumon [at] snaptalent [dot] com
Am I missing something?

he was getting confused. It was so unlike Daniel, I was
surprised. We got into a little bit of debt." After a year,
she found out why: Daniel was diagnosed with a brain tumour.
It's not so easy to predict murder - do the maths
It was only easy for Google because the had tons of cash to hire people when everyone was getting laid off in the tech bust. They owned the market for top people because of the rare event that many top people were on the market.
Weekly releases: the first thing that came to my mind was that you need features that can be done in a week.

If they can't be, you need to subdivide them. Subdividing is the way to tackle any difficult problem, so maybe it's good to be forced into it anyway.

I've been putting off a release, because it (looks like it) requires some fundamental changes. If I found a way to subdivide it, and release it, that would be a great way to move forward.
My reading of the parent post was that the commenter was implying a causation by suggesting the difference between the percentage of college attendees in the general population vs the percentage of college attendees in the population of billionaires was conclusive of something significant ("despite that...").

If readers didn't understand the parent and grandparent posts to imply something more significant than basic math, I doubt the posts would have received so many upvotes.
So the real question is which one drowns and which one gets to use the corpse as a life raft?
I agree, but if a language doesn't teach you things you can use outside of it, that's a really bad sign. This is in no way unique to Lisp.

(I've been meaning to write about things I've learned from the dozen or so languages I've at least dabbled in, but haven't had the time.)
How much is Google trying to establish a cult of success?

Other companies accused of cult-of-elitism are Goldman Sachs & Consulting firms like Bain. They are considered to actively encourage "Only the best may enter, the rest can fk off" policies.

The assertion is that these firms specifically try to attract the talent who need to be told continually that they are succeeding in life. Some cynics say that these results-driven over-acheivers had difficult relationships with their father. They thus crave paternal approval, and the companies exploits this by filling that Paternal role.

This can be only through continual challenges, and with some of their peers 'not making it'. So the success hounds focus so much on meeting the standards that they ignore the fact they are being slave driven.

The assertion continues that these very hard working people strive for years with 95% of the grind work, while the top of the pyramid attend boozy lunches. When the hard milked remainder reach the senior levels, they perpetuate the grind for the lower tiers.

--Disclaimer

These subjective and speculative theories tend to depend on whether you are Inside or Outside of the chosen few. I will say I am firmly on the outside... my Pass Conceded in Signal Processing ensured that!! This would put me in the bitter&twisted group rather than the unseeing wage slave group.
The (Manual) Netflix Process
Because I didn't know how to code:)

I had been in the aerospace engineering program. I had used computers, and knew a little LOGO and BASIC. Eventually I was able to get a job in tech support due to my communications skills and willingness to learn. Once I had that job, I learned Java, and the rest is history:)
And I'm pretty sure that the definition of cool is that not everyone is using. If everyone is using something, it ceases to be mildly exclusive. I've never heard of a school where all the kids consider everyone to be in the cool group.
Oh. Gosh. <fx: blush>

I might have to think about getting a blog, then ...
Yeah, I know you're serious. I'm just pointing out that there's a difference (and evidently one that is important psychologically) between a situation where there is only one possibility and a situation where there are many possibilities, but somebody else chooses for you. I know people who stayed angry for years because their parents made them go to a certain college or their boss canceled a product line they created.
Wired Less: Disconnected in Urban America
* loopt

* xobni

* zecter

* heroku

* wundrbar

* http://www.picwing.com/frame
It sounds like you would do better on my site, friendbinder.com (invite code: HN)

We get your friends list from Flickr, Facebook, flickr etc. so managing of your "imaginary friends" is minimal. Your friends don't need to join or even know that you use friendbinder.

P.S. Any feedback about the site is useful.
It looks like a wheel chair... I'm predicting epic fail. Segways are not practical and GM should invent the hover-board if they are going to do anything.
I up voted him because I thought the statistics showed an interesting correlation.
Lets Go Deep - Meet The D List In The 2009 All American Home Run Derby contest
I read it as he thought he was getting a bonus which would cover the debt, but it didn't cover it. The government was notified automatically about him leaving his job.
This one will get you more chicks:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gss-600.jpg

and hit 90 on the highway.

On the other hand, if you get the electric wheelchair you could save HUNDREDS of dollars per year.
Mother Jones Magazine: http://www.motherjones.com/
I used to have one of those. I like touring/funduro style bikes but they definitely aren't babe magnets... unless you're trying to pick up lesbian retirees.
Do you mean that people who hate lisp because of its parentheses are uninformed; or do you mean that thinking that this is the reason people hate lisp is uninformed?

Both, actually. But moreso the folks who complain about parentheses. I suspect that anyone who uses that as their reason for not learning or liking Lisp simply would never consider Lisp long enough to know anything more about the language. I just think it's more likely because they like "industry standard" languages, and have no obvious on-the-job use for Lisp, but they don't want to say "I am intellectually incurious about languages and different programming paradigms". I think those same people would never learn Lua or Haskell, despite a distinct lack of crazy parentheses.

Many people complain about parentheses

Many people complain about significant whitespace in Python and sigils in Perl. Either one has orders of magnitude more developers and more code being written in it on a daily basis. It is a triviality, and the kind of folks who pick out trivialities to complain about are not the kind of folks you can convert. They're not going to learn your favorite language, unless you make it look exactly like their favorite language. Since Lisp can't look like Java or C# or C or Visual Basic or PHP, without losing a lot of what makes Lisp Lisp, that's not a useful pursuit.

So, I'm simply saying that talking over parentheses over and over again is ignoring the real problems and focusing on the one that everyone knows won't change. It's a perfect flame war talking point, but it's not what's keeping people away from Lisp.
Actually, buggy whip manufacturers are still in business:

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

I like to read my newspaper while eating lunch. Don't want to use a WiFi laptop for the same purpose. It doesn't fit very well on the table.
What happens when you have twi.bz point to tinyurl, and tinyurl point to bit.ly, and bit.ly point back to the original twi.bz link? :P

Can I create a URL shortener infinite loop?
Server Virtualization Transforms Two Weeks
Server virtualization from Evolving Solutions eliminates two-week long server provisioning process for United Sugars. Read the full success story to learn how.
I'm curious though why you found it interesting. Without further data or analysis, the statements have no substantial meaning unless one conflates correlation with causation. You could just as easily say "people who go to college are more likely to have straight teeth."
Thanks for the response. I decided to sign up for an account.

If anyone else was wondering what the Sign Up button does when logged in, the button turns into an I'm Interested button. This lets SnapTalent release your contact info, and since your resume and other info is in your profile, Snap Talent is saying that this an easier way to apply for a job.
It's possible to grow quite quickly if you put ethical scruples aside and take advantage of a large pool of what is effectively slave labor.

A middle eastern friend explained the situation: "we just stepped off the camel and into the mercedes." It took Europe quite a long time to reach the level of civilization it sports today, but there's no reason to repeat the mistakes and not learn.
Sony Ericsson P1i Silver Black Unlocked
Sony Ericsson P1i is modernized phone of Sony Ericsson by most up-to-date characteristics and applications and the receiver has move toward out through wonderful appear. 3G features facilitate elevated velocity data transfer.
Actually your contact info remains private until both sides are interested. Then you get introduced directly to the company hiring.
Thanks Bcater. Please spread the word to those who want to join us in revolutionizing music gaming, the people we bring on will have HUGE impact on products that our users will immediately use.
The newly released Nambu Twitter client does just this. Does the decode inline though. Free too.
Twitter Gets A TV Ad For Free As New Users Get Their First Taste Of Fail Whale
Any HN folks planning on attending? I spoke at last year's event (and am speaking again this year). It was a great event.

Tad on the expensive side, but well managed and organized.
Very misleading title. They're not saying take our content, they're saying reference us however you want.

They even state in the article, that they've had a problem with someone taking their RSS feed and uploading the entire thing to their own site. So it's definitely not how the title here states it.
Few debuggers are as good as the VisualWorks Smalltalk debugger.

I've also seen people get into loops when not using the debugger. I think the rule is to 1) understand as much as you can 2) when you get stuck, switch.

Also, monkeypatching is one of the most awesome debugging tools! Your code fails only for that one Profile object? Then monkeypatch it with a special debugging version of a method.

Debugging does hand in hand with dynamic languages. It's like Smalltalk/Ruby/Python are just giamongous debuggers.
it does not mean college 'enable' the 80% counterpart
Idea. If you return the 'www.' instead of 'http://' at the beginning, you save 3 chars, and I think most of the Twitter clients and Twitter web create a link too.
Yes, hence "almost." Of course, this is true regardless of the language. In C, for example, even though the language does not include linked links, I've parsed through lots of programs using linked list in C (with the added treat that each program is reimplementing the concept differently).
Great point. There seems to be an assumption that companies want founder types as employees. Fact is, they probably do make good employees, but only for the 1 year they actually stick around before starting up on their own.
AP May Now Mean “All Paid”
yup, or even: how many college drop-outs don't become billionaires?
alphalab looks pretty cool, hate that it's in pittsburgh but worth applying.
Yep. Perhaps a financial news site is doing well because of the recession, not in spite of it. How could this not occur to the author?