skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That perverse incentive has concerned me for a while, but I'm less worried about it now that I'm living in Argentina. Argentina has a sort of hybrid public/private healthcare system with universal coverage paid by the government, so the perverse incentive in question does exist here. And the government isn't extremely accountable, doesn't work very well, and in some ways is much more intrusive than the US government. Nevertheless, they seem to handle this problem pretty well. If it's not a big problem here, I think it isn't likely to be a big problem in general.
Straight up.

Every FriendFeed account I have seen either pulls data from Twitter or (much smaller number) pushes updates to twitter.

That's not good considering that is their big rival....

I tried friendfeed and didnt like it. If I want to have a discussion about something I prefer to do it on forums and blogs where it gets the right attention. It's useless for twitter-esque updates because twitter does it much more cleanly (KISS) and it's no good for my close personal friendships, Facebook still (just) rules that roost.

FF is trying to be the all-in-one solution: and that never works out well.
I think typesystems span far deeper than most object oriented typesystems go. In fact, I think, it goes even deeper than what haskell does (and I consider Haskells typesystem to be among the most advanced typesystems we have today).

One question for the typesystem is: If I have this object, will it understand message X?

Another question is: If I send this sequence of messages to this object, will the sequence of messages exiting the object be as expected? (Or, much rather: will a certain "interesting" subset of the messages sent by the object (triggered by my messages) be a certain sequence? (In fact, sequence is too restraining. I rather need to know if the messages sent by the object will fulfill a certain predicate)

Another question is: If I conceptually send this message to that object, how do I find the implementation of the handler of this message?

(I am sure that there are more complicated questions around and I just do not know them).

Given these questions, consider what most static type systems do. They answer questions 1). (Dispatch strategies and strong typing answer question 3) )
Guess what unit tests do? They answer question 2).
However, in a dynamically typed language like Python, sending a message to an object that is unable to understand this message (read: there is no implementing method), then an unexpected message will be sent by the object (read: an Exception is thrown). This violates the contract. In other words: checking the contract can answer at least question 1) already!

Thus, I think -- or rather hope -- for major improvements at typesystems, because it appears that things are far, far more complicated than just compile-time vs run-time and strong vs weak. Consider Eiffel. Eiffel does contract checking. Now think about attaching contracts to objects at runtime. This could reduce the amount of of_kind?-checks in the article. Consider roles. Consider things like pythons metaclasses. I really think a lot of problems come from a lack of unterstanding object oriented typing more than we already do. (Maybe this kind of pushed me into a good direction for a master thesis. who knows?)
Bizarre article. I'm British and in analyzing my speaking recently discovered I um and ah a lot and have been trying to conquer it. I hear it a lot in speakers over here too, as much as in American speakers. Not sure about all this British vs American forming words "on the lips" or "in the throat" malarkey..
In response to the parting question from the article, here's an idea: make cool things with Lisp. Make cool things for Lisp.
I think I would have to agree, though I use a couple more, for example

Like yourself I use Facebook for breifly chatting to friends and family, though I predominantly use it for Photos and Events.

Twitter on the other hand I use as a tool for promotion, especially the search function and following users in my niche.

Other than that I use LinkedIn for my professional profile and Posterous for uploading photos to my Facebook & Flickr photo albums from my Iphone.

Im still holding out for a central repository for all my usernames and passwords, I must have about 30 active sites I visit on a daily basis and really struggle to keep up with them
Me, I have already recieved my rejection (i prefer "unsuccessful") notification, but I can assure you, i will push on. Though honestly, the opportunity for YC would have been welcome.
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"Social media consultants" are the snake oil salesmen of Twitter. I try to avoid it, but there's so damn many of them.

Also, recently I've been noticing a bunch of people peddling MLM and other get-rich-quick schemes. It's quite annoying.
Most Mac apps seem to remember its window size when you open a new window: Safari, TextMate, Firefox, Pages etc.

So I make drag these apps into nice grids:
- a small left hand strip for Twitterific, iChat, Skype etc. this strip also pushes the next windows a bit more to the center. Helpful because the 30inch is so wide.
- Safari, Texmate, Firefox etc. is next.My default Safari width is often the width of Apple.com so no scrollbars are shown.
- leftover space is for PDF documentation and when I need 2 windows next to each other e.g. 2 Xcode windows. Plenty of space left for that.

Apps like Logic Pro, Aperture, iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes are run maximized/fullscreen.

Terminal.app is indeed ill-equipped when it comes to resizing etc. I usually build a couple of window groups that fit my needs (e.g. four-in-a-square with a wide window for logs) and open-and-close such a window group if the current layout isn't optimal.
How Apple should have implemented the controls on the new iPod Shuffle
>> The parenthesis do require that you have at least a moderately capable editor to navigate them effectively.

I disagree, with a caveat--writing code using a terrible editor requires knowledge of the indentation rules for the language, regardless of whether that language is a lisp, Perl, Ruby, etc.

However (the caveat), although the indentation rules for Perl, C, Python are relatively simple (indent after a '{' or ':', line up arguments), each function/macro in a lisp can have different indenting rules (e.g. in CL compare `let' to `multiple-value-bind' to functions, to lists, to the various `with-*' macros, etc).

Once you know the library for a specific implementation, the indentation rules become more obvious; at this point, using (e.g.) Notepad isn't particularly terrible (until that knowledge is acquired, though, yikes).
Notifications are already out. Me, rejected!!!
You are spot on . Twitter has an asymmetric follow model, whereas Facebook tends to be guided towards smaller closed networks.

Here's where I learnt about "asymmetric follow" : http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2008/12/05/assymetrical-fol...
We were also rejected the first time as well. And were accepted for a different idea in the next batch.
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This is a peeve of mine: It's not "behavioral economics". It's social and organizational psychology. Virtually all the research has been done by psychologists. For example, Daniel Kahneman, Economics Nobel Laureate, is a Psychologist.

"Smart" people and the media have been obsessed with "rationality", (pseudo-)math and quantitative research, until it finally emerged in the economistic world view that people are - surprise, surprise - not that rational; something that psychologists have known for ages.

Right now, economics is sort assimilating a lot of psychological insights, which is good for humanity, but it's not economics, the original creativity stems from psychology.
Lisp was my favorite language when I studied (hrm, long ago).

IMHO, there is quite a lot of support for the argument that modern day scripting languages are getting closer and closer to becoming lisps, except for syntax and the macro system. (Maybe Perl 6 will have meta-language power enough to equal the macro system? I should start learning it.)

I've never really understood why there are no successful projects to transfer code between the S-EXPR parenthesis-based syntax and some Algol-like notation; if that managed to also copy comments between the formats and auto formatted well, it would be an easy introduction for new lispers.
hmm

REST is just using HTTP properly (as a transfer protocol) - if you want to implement RPC go use some other protocol that is actually a transport, instead of raping HTTP simply because it will get you through firewalls.

REST is a far superior approach to developing web apps because it actually respects the style of the underlying protocol. It's not that mystical or complicated.

Oh and stop using front controller patterns, they're stupid.
Notepad is exactly what I'm talking about. With Perl, C, and Ruby, at least, there really aren't any indentation rules - your program will work fine even if you don't put any in at all, or do a hacky job of it. With Lisp, especially when modifying someone else's code you're stuck counting parens.

Oh, also a weird (maybe crackpot?:-) theory of mine: parenthesis, graphically, don't form a nice, rigid vertical line, but sort of point diagonally, possibly making it just that much harder to see how they line up. In any case, 4 or 8 space indented C/Tcl/Ruby/whatever code is certainly more obvious to the eye.
guy doesn't seem to understand that they did this with malicious intent in order to gain profit selling their own accessories or licensing the ability to create headphones to third party manufacturers.

yes they could have implemented controls his way, i'm sure they could have implemented full touch capable OLED panel on it as well, but they wouldn't have made money that way.

they're only in it to make money now.
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Isn't Dylan a sort of lisp-without-parens?
Hang on, this wasn't satire? I wasn't 100% sure so I came to see the comments and.. it seems I'm wrong :)
More than they used to, so that's a step up.

Still, I'd rather see these resource being spent on educating the public on behavioral economics as suppose to using the knowledge to manipulate the public.

It's true that in most situations, indirect persuasion is more effective at influencing someone's behavior than direct preaching. However, at some point, the public needs "grow up" too, and always treating us like five year olds certainly won't stimulate this process.

I hope these guys see that.
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Your users will tell you whether you are creating something of value for them or not, YC isn't always capable of seeing that! So trust your users, in yourself, and move on!
I think the acceptance MD5 is 88c23f22dc832d010564b4bcc3e2271c
Consider libraries in dynamic languages, there's no way to know beforehand the type of the argument a function is called with.
I belong to those people who tried to get into lisp and gave up, because the confusion to navigate per potential advantage over my major language (python) was too large.
My background is a knowledge in C, Python and Java, using Python mostly.
I mostly looked into lisp, because I kept encountering something I call the syntactic barrier when I tried to remove duplication from my code, and I knew: lisp had macros. Macros could break this barrier. So looking into lisp looked promising.

I didn't care too much about the syntax, a good editor fixes this without a problem and it was a good opportunity to look into emacs a bit (usually, I use vim). Surfing through the chapters of practical common lisp when pretty well and understanding was not exactly hard.

However after that, I was faced with confusion. There is a boatload of lisp dialects, each with a boatload of implementations and each implementation as another boatload of libraries that do something looking similar to what other implementations libraries do without being the same or compatible. How am I supposed to select any of these without having a clue?
After a few days of back and forth, I decided to close the book lisp for me, because I could not find a way through this wall of selections -- at least not without investing a lot of time. Too much time for too little benefit over python.

HTH,
Tetha
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So bluetooth file transfer at 28kbps with some old school modem hackery, awesome :)
I've been programming in Common Lisp for about a year and I consider myself an intermediate beginner. Someone made a terrific comment in response to Ron Garret's post earlier: the way you get productive in today's environment is primarily through libraries.

Thus the situation is inescapable. You need tons of libraries to be productive. You need tons of programmers to write these libraries. You need an easy learning curve and appealing features to get these programmers. The bottom line is that you need the bad coders as well.

As a beginner, I can safely say that it took a while before I finally got reasonably productive in Lisp. I still consider it 'the best' programming language. But the learning curve is much steeper than Python.

Lisp will get nowhere without all the bad programmers. This may sound cynical, but the reason is that academically minded programmers won't spend time writing things like a download library for youtube videos, which many people find useful. These programmers are now all over Python.

So why is Lisp difficult to learn? The most severe in my opinion is assignment. People find it intuitive to make temporary variables and store intermediate results in these. This is done by 'let' in CL, but if the previous style of programming is assumed, 'let' is clumsy and inconvenient to use.

Another achilles heal I would like to mention is the lack of an editor with propper auto-completion. Yes, slime does this, but using emacs is too geeky for many programmers (remember you need these people) and this creates an additional stumbling block.

Yet another problem is the CL websites. Remember that many people are in a hurry. The Python website is ripe with snippets that lets you do stuff fast without understanding much. In contrst, CL gives you some of the most monotone autogenerated documentation sites I've ever seen. Again, fine for people who already know Lisp, tedious for people that want to try stuff out as beginners.

Faced with these realities I don't blame anyone who just want to get things done and run with Python. Unfortunately.
In a positive thinking / karmic kind of sense - that's a good way to look at it. From a TRUTH perspective - it's just wrong - the applications are all looked at.
what google needed was a sexy device to give them market penetration.

all the cool "under the hood" stuff doesn't make a bit of difference to mainstream users, and you just can't push out the sales comparable to an Apple device when your phone looks like an shipping container.

android is neat and all, but sales would have been through the roof had it released on HTC HDTouch
I agree that the "crazy parentheses" might not be the core reason people who hate Lisp hate Lisp, but it certainly doesn't help advocacy for management types. It's definitely knee-jerk, but lots of people make their decisions in a "blink" and it definitely helps when code looks like "User.find_or_create_by_name(john)". Usually the people who hate lisp, have never done a significant project in it, and never will simply because of the syntax. In a way, it's like trying to learn Korean as an English speaker. Korean is a very modern alphabet based language, but the random strokes in their alphabet would probably make anyone take one look and say "jeez, that looks chinese to me"
Turn off location services, that added about one day to my battery.

Also, if you have rooted phone, you can try scp (or samba) over wifi. I know, it is not obex over bluetooth, but should be faster.
What do you guys use for your payment processing? Very slick. I love dropbox, and will definately be upgrading our account for NewsCred.
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Yes. That's what fan pages allow - asymmetric follow. I think we'll see facebook pushing the fan page model for certain users (facebook.com/person_name)
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one of the Boxee "mission statements" is to never use capital letters. It is surprisingly hard to read.
Every single successful startup has experienced at least one defeat as large as a YC rejection

A YC rejection is not a large defeat.

I'd say that most successful people (start-ups are shorter-lived and may skip this) have experienced many situations where they thought they had it all, everything was going their way, they were at the peak of their game, and suddenly everything came crashing down disastrously and unexpectedly.

What made these people successful isn't the defeat, but it's that they then picked themselves up and started again from the bottom.
You should really look into Nu, the language I mentioned in my parent post. It is a "glue" language for Objective-C and allows you to write code using typical lisp prefix-notation (+ 1 2) or infix (1 + 2). Reason being ObjC is mostly object oriented with infix & named parameters, so it fits in both worlds.

For example, if you're typically a lisp guy, you would probably write code like this:
(init (alloc ApplicationDelegate))

But if you're an ObjC person, you'd do this:
((ApplicationDelegate alloc) init))

And strangely, if you replaced the parentheses with normal square brackets, you'd be looking at syntactically correct ObjC code! In Nu you can mix and match your sexprs and algol-like notations as long as you know what you're doing. The finished code would be something a lisp developer and ObjC developer could both understand without knowing too much of the underlying details.
"phones" will start replacing credit cards soon.

probably driver's licenses, social security cards, all that sort of thing as well
Do you need to build a legal entity to go out and talk to people etc? A lot of people over here at least get warned against incorporating until they absolutely need to.
Don't waste your time. I spent weeks struggling with this software. The documentation is non-existent, the only support is through the google user group. You have to run your own name servers which is the wrong approach for this kind of software and a serious time sink if you've never set up a name server before. Then you have to maintain it.

Once you actually get it running, you'll iterate through a hundred deployments before working out all the quirks and bugs. In the end, I actually got it working but, somewhat ironically, didn't end up using it because managing it was more difficult than just deploying and scaling manually. Kind of sad if you ask me.

Your experience might be different if you choose to pay Scalr for their services, since they know all the quirks and probably have fantastic internal documentation. They, understandably, don't have much motivation to help you use the software yourself.

They were supposed to be the "cost-effective" alternative to RightScale, but I'd pay $500/month to get out of using Scalr. All of my money is riding on Amazon's own load-balancing/auto-scaling solution that should be coming out in the next 6 months to one year.

Sorry if this post is overly negative...I got my YC rejection letter this morning.
Tracking what happens online is a lot easier than you might think thanks to a host of tools available.

Then the article goes on to just list Google and Twitter, basically... are they enough?

(disclaimer, yes i'm commercially interested in the answer to this question.)
(Ok, but I will say there's a clear correlation between mediocre ideas and ease of pitch.)

yeah, "index all of the world's information" is such a mediocre idea, even though it is a very easy pitch, those Google guys will never make any money.
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you can block Google via robots.txt though?
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> Or, to put it in terms more fitting Digg or Reddit: Lurk Moar!

Or to put it in hacker news terms, flag the article (it's about politics and doesn't belong here) and move on.
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The 'long run' is a lot longer than the short time mobile phones have been very hackable at all.
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I actuallly think that the YC rejects aint a bad idea. We could all work togather there like we would if we got accepted. I mean that would be really cool. We could prepare ourselves and stuff. Generally, we'd be a huge team working on different projects.
Once again I am glad that Apple does not do what it supposedly "should" do. Current design has some advantages: namely your controls are always more or less in the same place. You don't have to reach in your pockets, grab around yourself looking where did you clip that damn shuffle — just grab the wire and you are done.
Proposed design has more flaws than advantages, not to mention the cost of such interface.
My suggestion for anyone wanting to make Lisp popular: make a Lisp analogue of Mark Pilgrim's "Dive Into Python". Or at least consider whether it is possible to write such a book for Lisp in its current state.
I really like this design - the controls are far more intuitive than those actually present on the new Shuffle. They also permit the use of non-Apple headphones, or other speaker systems, a major criticism of the current system.

That said, the headphone controls should also be kept as an optional extra - they are easier to use when you're running, wearing a heavy coat etc).