skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Clojure deals with this by having strict namespaces. Every function and "global" variable belongs to a namespace. At any time, you can refer to a function by it's fully qualified name. At the top of a namespace declaration, you can import other namespaces and alias (rename) other namespaces. It's a compile error if your declarations create an ambiguous name. i.e.

(ns :foo
(:use classifier)
(:use active-support))

Use allows you to call all of the functions in the namespace without a fully qualified name. In this case, there would be a compile error, because both use statements try to alias a function sum in the current namespace. The alternative would be to use require, which doesn't bring the functions into the current namespace:

(ns :foo
(:require classifier)
(:require [active-support :as as]))

Then you call the two sum functions like

(classifier/sum [1 2 3 4])
(as/sum [1 2 3 4])

The huge advantage is that since there are only functions, there are no methods on objects and every function is subject to namespacing.

If you want to monkey patch, there is a function called binding, which changes the value of a variable, but only within the calling scope, in the current thread. i.e.

(def x 3)
(println "x = " x)
(binding [x 5]
(println "x = " x))
(println "x = " x)

will return

=> 3
=> 5
=> 3

Since named functions are just anonymous functions stored in variables, you can use the binding trick to monkey patch. It's very clean because you can't interfere with any other code.

Binding affects fully qualified vars, which makes it very difficult to stomp on someone else's function.
I'm sure in some cases (personally, many cases), the Idee Multicolr Search Lab, which searches purely by color, is still more powerful.

http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolr/#

Also note that if you search for a white, then black, the url becomes [...multicolr/#colors=ffffff,000000;]. Your color choices are actually 16,777,216 - however well you know your web colors.

This can be more useful if you want a more specific hue, compared to generic 'red'. Subject matter, however, is a different issue.
Amen to that last sentence. You gotta do what you gotta do to make shit happen!
it's in beta because they are still working out how to charge for it. When they do, it will be 'released'. My guess is they will charge for POP3 access and other little luxuries.
Can you give some examples? (Not doubting. I don't know much about Clojure and I'm curious.)
What I do in class
News publishers' misdirected online anger
I tried searching for "pink horse" and "horse" with pink color option and got slightly different result sets. It seems like the first search returns anything related to "pink horse", including titles and captions. Whereas the second option seems like it's searching for "horse", then filter that out and returning only pink images.

ps
I don't see the "All Colors" drop down in my blue bar. But you can do the same search by appending "&imgcolor=yellow" to the url.

[edit] It didn't show up on Firefox, but showed up fine when I used Chrome.
I don't like the convention where I have to decide whether or not something I write is suitable for other people. They should read the code and decide for themselves.
> I’m amazed that you noticed our margins Neil.

Why is that amazing? Isn't it plainly obvious?
Microsoft, FUD and the netbook market
A Test-Infected Culture
So one of our VC-backed clients accidentally showed me his investment deck. Turns out his investors were valuing his company at $7.50 times number of members.

It's part of a game that some VC-backed startups are involved with.

I bet their VC's had numbers that showed they could take the company public at $10 times number of members.
Securing Currency Exchange in an Open Environment
Banner, what is that?
I'm surprised that people don't look at financials beyond the top and/or bottom line.
How about me. I'm founding a startup with a friend, we've been bootstrapped for 6 months.

We applied for YC, but didn't get in.

We dont need YC -- but it would have been great. We had other offers on the table (good offers, they wanted us to go thru YC and they'd invest with/during/after) -- those offers still stand post rejection so we're going to close very soon. Some of those investors are pretty big names in the tech world, so we're really excited.

If I was to informally tell you the roadmap of our startup it'd be: (now) small round (~$50k) of funding, prove our worth and take a larger round (~$300k) in ~12 months, go from there.

I'm 21, my co-founder is 28. We're young, we haven't done startups before -- we understand its a huge risk, so we're trying to break it down so everyone wins.

I like to think in a year we'll be in exactly the same position as if we had taken YC. We'll see, I really want to email them saying "we just closed Series A, wish we could have worked together, no hard feelings and I'd still love to buy you guys beers"
great,thanks!
You should check out LLVM. It generates really fast code and has a JIT compiler. I don't know much about Parrot, but it seems heavily skewed toward making dynamic languages fast whereas I believe LLVM aims more toward static languages. Not that you couldn't implement any language on top of either, but take for example the fact that Apple's support of LLVM was (I think) in part so they could use it as a JIT compiler for OpenGL shaders in their software-fallback drivers. It has good support for cross-platform SIMD instructions and such, which will benefit numerical computation greatly.

-------------

Also, why don't you both use something like flex and bison? Is writing a lexer/parser by hand still that much of a nerd rite-of-passage? That's the most banal part of implementing a language. You could spend your summer writing an optimizer instead.
Either that or you take on things you (and your competition) don't understand and you explore it until you understand it completely and now you have a leg up on the competion.

I work in a safety-critical industry and this is how progress is made: dream up the technology, implement it and debug it fully until you can show the risks have been eliminated and then release.

In our industry the people who take dangerous risks will probably be sued into the ground if they're not shut down by the FDA before that happens.
Well... spin up would improve, sure, but the much bigger issue is that a system quickly becomes bloated by code, cloned for a significant number of java processes. And the number of processes will only be increasing because of multiplying CPU cores.

I think the biggest innovation in systems programming would be to merge a VM with Linux kernel, i.e. the kernel should have a garbage collector and byte code compiler built-in. This would bring tremendous performance gains and programmer's productivity improvements.

Microsoft is slowly moving towards that direction: .NET is already tightly integrated into the OS: at least all standard .NET libraries are pre-compiled, and shared across processes: using C or C++ on Windows makes absolutely no sense right now. By introducing GC into Obj-C Apple is doing the same thing. Next step for them would be to bring in LLVM and suddenly JVM on OSX will look even weirder than it does now.
Agreed. I don't think there was any intentional deception either.

However, don't forget the influence of the lobbyists hired by the security industry. Additionally, "non-profit" organizations involved with information security that see a potential cybersecurity boom as beneficial to their membership and influence in the field.
“'You don’t understand,' he told me. 'If I ran ads in it, it would taint my work.'

There were a bunch of email newsletter guys who felt that way. In their stupidity, I found an opportunity."

Amazing, they're stupid because they care more about the product than making money off the product. I wish most companies were that stupid, there would be a lot better products out there.
Reminds me of pg's article on PR campaigns: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
As an author of articles I can say I get annoyed that all the comments from my readers (I do this socially not professionally - so mainly my friends) are stuck in facebook, google reader or twitter and not on my site. These big apps by go away but I've had my "blog" for almost 10 years, I'd rather be in control or have a copy of the discussion.
"It takes roughly 150 hours of accumulated game play to earn the first 2 million experience points but players on average are able to earn another 8 million experience points in the next 150 hours of accumulated game play. Even though, within the game, experience points become more difficult to acquire as you advance, World of Warcraft players are improving their performance four times faster as they continue to play the game."

I don't think that's right. Don't you get experience faster as you level, but you level slower because the gaps between levels are farther?
Possibly http://github.com/raganwald/rewrite_rails/tree/master
Sure. We're using it for a couple things.

It scales relatively well, though I wish we were getting sub-minute indexing, I'm pretty pleased with the 45 minute timespan we're seeing on a pretty large dataset.

Responses are quick, though I'm having a some problems with memory usage on my MBP, I've mostly fixed that with careful configuration.

Biggest problem is that django-sphinx is a piece of trash. I had to hack together a custom wrapper that we might consider open sourcing at some point.
FUD? Ahem:
"a safe, virus free environment without having to run expensive anti-virus software that slows PCs down"

This is misleading. While Ubuntu-targeted viruses are exceedingly rare, there's far more to safety than this. There are plenty of vulnerabilities due to the software running on the OS.

A cursory search turns up a list (http://preview.tinyurl.com/dzaq6x ), including Firefox vulnerabilities like this: http://www.doecirc.energy.gov/ciac/bulletins/t-092.shtml

It may be that Ubuntu offers superior safety, but hyperbole like this article presents is only going to turn off any skeptic that's not already in the Linux camp.
You know, when the MBA degree started, it was intended to teach business skills to experienced engineers as they were promoted into management roles. The idea of a "pure manager" MBA who hasn't ever actually done the "real work" his organization does to make money is a relatively recent one. And that is the problem with MBAs. Similarly, in many companies, it is possible to be a project manager having never done any of the projects you are managing. This usually ends in tears because practitioners never bother to mention "obvious" things so the PMs lose track of cross-functional dependencies.
Anyone have a link / pointer to the journal article?

It's a surprising conclusion (but hard to react without seeing the article).

My anecdotal experience: most successful startups change strategy & business plans a few times. The ones that fail are the ones that cling to the original plan in the face of changing assumptions.

My Fundamental Theory of Startups: "A startup is about staying in business long enough to get to the third version of the idea."
Attribution and Affiliation on All Things Digital
"Metaprogramming headaches: we've solved this before"
Better title: Silicon Valley Goes from Libertarian to Corrupt

The full quote: "Silicon Valley used to be libertarian, but we are all Keynesians now...Everybody is trying to stick their snouts in the flow of pork."

This isn't Keynesian economics, this is just corruption and opportunism.
Amazing PDF Search Engine – Tons of Free eBooks
Yep. Clojure is designed around the JVM and libraries written in Java-the-language. If you ported it, by the time you took out the Java-y stuff and added things like TCO and call/cc, it would be a new lisp.

And I think new mid-sized lisps are what we need. If Parrot brings a wave of lisps bigger than Scheme but smaller than CL, designed for Unix and the internet, competing with Clojure and Arc, everyone wins. If they can call each other's libraries, it'll be wonderful.

We should be looking way beyond Clojure.
"What I do at work.."
I think you've successfully avoided the problem through rigorous adherence to a design pattern.

A full solution would be to synthesize that design pattern into a language feature so its use is enforced by the language, not programmer discipline. This, I think, is what Raganwald is calling for.
Are you sure it is designed specifically around the JVM? Rich used to maintain side-by-side versions that ran on .Net and the JVM.
Besides Snow Leopard, are any OpenCL runtimes available?
I wasn't doing it to prove anything or even to get a working language to use... it just seemed like a fun problem to solve. I've done a bit with yacc and lex before, and had a lot of fun back in the day with the Metacircular Evaluator in SICP.
No based on how the question was framed. If a response is "questionable" then I have to question whether or not I should make that questionable response.

Most of the time I post under my real name (actually, I don't know why I'm using a pseudonym on HN, frankly, just reflex when I first joined).

The exceptions are:
Discussions on Politics or Religion.
I don't want my name associated with any religious (or atheist) group nor do I want it associated with any particular political party.
I have worked for people that once they discovered my political views, I was treated differently because we either agreed or disagreed.
I know that my name is going to be googled the next time I apply for a job and could run into someone who will toss out my resume simply because I'm conservative, liberal or other.

If a site is overly political, or it's associated with a political cause, I will always keep only one ID on that site. If the site allows anonymous posting, I'll use my real name and post anonymously when broaching a subject that is controversial. If the site does not allow anonymous posting, I'll keep two IDs handy for when I want to join into discussions that would identify my political or (non/religious) affiliation.
I've seen it go both ways. In some cases people come to rely on this person's intervention, but in others it's seen as a badge of failure to have to call in the "firefighter". I think it all comes down to how management handles the situation, as well as the dynamics of the group itself.
I don't think there's any fundamental change here. Silicon Valley's traditional libertarian position is largely based on the fact that regulation of new technology tends to be Bad and Wrong. If there's money flowing, people in the tech industry will want to get a share as much as anybody else. In both cases, it's simple self-interest.
Yeah, they didn't want to make money doing what they love. How smart.
BumpTop: an intuitive 3D desktop for windows
If Apple can do it in their hugely successful Mac vs. PC ads, I see no reason why Canonical can't deal in the same hyperbole themselves. Apple's posturing hardly turned off people from buying Macs.
I have a cron job running on my workstation that curls my app engine. Does about the same thing as this.
Ah sorry. You said "I wrote it by hand" and he said "it's a pain in the ass" so I mistakenly thought you felt the same way. One person's banal is another's fun.
Short version: You missed nothing.
I have just one account.

For me, it boils down to this: a goal of the site is to improve quality of discussion.

There are two main parties to discussion: "you", and "everyone else".

When "you" post: if you already suspect that your topic will earn down-votes, then why post it (from any account)? Apparently the topic is not something interesting to this group.

When "everyone else" down-votes: they have a responsibility to be smart, and not childish. It's shallow to click the down-arrow simply for disagreeing with somebody or not liking them personally. If there is a general feeling that down-votes are always for legitimate reason, I think people would be less likely to "hide" behind anonymous accounts.
I was thinking specifically of unintentional variable capture causing name collisions in non-hygienic Common Lisp macros. While people can certainly write macros correctly and avoid them, this takes experience, and minor mistakes can introduce some really subtle bugs.

[edit: noted that I'm talking specifically about Common Lisp]
There is no doubt a combination of solid sales guy and solid technical guy is important in a start-up. The last start-up I worked at was missing the sales guy. I'm now thinking of starting something up, and that is weighing heavily on my mind.
What percentage of his success was do to technical innovation/invention vs. business/product innovation? I'd agree that his brother is critical, but I'm not sure that's the secret sauce here.

http://venturehacks.com/articles/vertical-markets
Read that (especially the technical risk versus market risk section).

I think these guys beat market risks and had relatively few technical risks.
The use of a market system, like Inkling, would be an interesting approach to corporate credit ratings.
4 year old calls 911 for math help
You do know that the "relational" model refers to relations, not relationships, right?
I'm not sure it's hypocritical to go after this money. After all, paying taxes is not a choice. So you could say: I'm opposed to a plan where the government taxes and borrows to fund startups - but if this happens regardless of how I feel about it, I may as well get the benefit I can.
A.P. Exec Doesn’t Know It Has A YouTube Channel, Threatens Affiliate For Embedding Videos
In Scheme, it's basically impossible to write a non-hygienic macro, and in Clojure, there are no name collisions and it takes extra work to variable capture.
This very consideration led me to redefine nil? on an inner class in my SafeNestedHash gem. It's definitely ugly and weird, but I needed a method that existed on object so I can guarantee it's everywhere. Any other thoughts on how to solve this problem?

http://github.com/dasil003/safe-nested-hash/tree/master
Agreed [1]. But the two notions are inseparable really. To the extent that Keynesian economics demands that the government get involved at every turn to 'fix' things, the only possible outcome is corruption, corporatism, and (if you dare to use the word) fascism.

[1] though I prefer to hold the politicians responsible
really? I wasn't there, but it sounds more like running ads would ruin the product to them so it wouldn't be something they loved anymore.
I'm amazed that the idea one should make money is so novel . . . it's like breathing, it should be assumed, how else does something sustain itself? The focus should be on greatness, making something better, pushing something forward (with the assumption that it should be able to pay its own way), not simply how to angle an extra dollar.
> . or for that matter how would we go about to teach the animals how to reproduce? Are they to live among animals or similar character while they are young?

Most lower animals are ruled by instinct. A bird never 'learns' from his parents how to make a nest.

For interest sake, this was done for a while with a completely different species. Domesticated cows were implanted with fertilized Buffalo eggs (this was because Buffalo's carried Bovine TB and a TB free Buffalo is worth a lot more $$).
The bit about News Feed is the most important to me.

News Feed. The news feed was by far the most revolutionary thing that Facebook ever did. It not only changed the way people interact with Facebook, but really with the web as a whole. It’s probably the most copied feature of Facebook, and for good reason. Facebook is nothing today without the News Feed.
The video is interesting.

Unfortunately, I have yet to meet a claimed atheist in person who has not presented me with the ironic spectacle of beating me over the head about how wrong I am because I have beliefs which they do not share.
Game designer Will Wright leaves Electronic Arts to start Stupid Fun Club
Sorry, I made a mistake: I was thinking you are producing sound when the player hits a key - but you aren't. I think that's not part of the "guitar hero" concept anyway (it is in a drum version I saw in an arcade; a different story).

Anyway, I found that java can play user-triggered sounds instantly (or perceived as such), whereas Flash can't. I experimented with this in Flash, researched it/asked about it on FlashKit - and all the Flash music games I found with triggered sounds suffered from this same problem. So it's very likely true, but not relevant for you. :-)
sleeping?
I rent, but if I buy, I'm buy a generator along with house.

However, I've heard pretty much the same story about predictable outages from other parts of the country like the Midwest.

Obviously the south has hurricanes, but I'm not sure even hurricanes should cause long term outages.
None of this is very notable, but there was also Wirehog: a web app Zuck (et. al.) wrote to share files over Facebook.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehog
Credit ratings are already crowdsourced by the stock market. This article is actually talking about crowdsourcing credit rating _models_, which is actually quite different and may be a good idea. I don't buy all the hype in the article though..

>Even while Moody’s gave Lehman a clean bill of health, the alternative model showed the company was basically DOA. Andersen: The Lehman score was the lowest score we’ve ever seen.

In fact, I can't stand this type of backtesting analysis on credit risk. The reason that the model works and gives a low rating score is likely that it places a high value on the factors that caused the current recession, factors that are not likely to be the cause of the next major correction.

The real genius credit rating models are the ones that are predictive, rather than reactionary
The Pirate Bay's Anonymity Service Signs 100,000 Users Pre-Launch
What does this have to do with HN? This story isn't about HN or even tangentially related to it. Keep this on Digg!
My guess is that these things ebb and flow. The arrival of a new genre or subgenre can spark a lot of interest and passion, and sales (think grunge and alternative). A long period of stagnation can cause sales to decline (think mainstream rock in the late 90s - early 00s).

Of course, this is all anecdotal opinion, so take it with a grain of salt.
Yikes: Gun Sales up 39% this year
My prediction, routine cloning within 30 years.
But Keynesian economics doesn't demand anything of the sort. It suggests that, in a recessive economy, when monetary policy reaches its zero lower bound, temporary fiscal stimulus can make up the output gap.
Maybe the fact that is actually a pic of HN?..
Why Reddit uses Python
Modern popular music is ear-candy, all calories and no nutrients. It requires little effort for the listener to enjoy. In exchange it provides constant small doses of pleasure, heavily optimized to be as addictive as possible. In that respect, it is much like the internet, TV, or smoking.

It is one of the many shiny, bright, loud, or tasty super-stimuli that we savanna apes must struggle with in the modern world.
Tail call optimization is an example of something that Clojure doesn't have because the JVM makes it hard, although it's easy (I'm told) on the .NET system.
A touch of salesmanship exuberance.
No.

Everything I post, I'd be OK seeing it on the 6 o'clock news. But then, I'd expect that as I ran for election last November.
The title misleads: a Bezos is "not applicable" to mainstream publishing processes. As much as I like how well Amz meets my needs for a major discount off cover prices of books, it does scare me.
I don't want to see publishing dominated by one company the way PC operating systems have been dominated by MSFT (or AV media begins to be dominated by Apple).

I don't know about solutions to any of these things, but the www, that great leveler of digital communications, seems to be getting carved up into a few huge chunks by the likes of GOOG, AMZ, Face, Twit, etc.

I don't know about the rest of you, but this "likes me not."
Stephen Wolfram Speaks About His New Question Answering Engine