skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not a lisp expert, but my understanding is that CLOS uses packages for this.

In CLOS, methods (generic functions) live outside classes. So, like normal functions, their names are qualified by the packages that they are defined in. If you want the 'sum' method declared in package 'foo', you either import it into the package/namespace you're working in, or you fully qualify the name ('foo::sum', I think).

This lets you extend built-in classes within your package without getting in anyone else's way.
That's...a great undergrad blog post that goes into much more detail than necessary (and juggles symbology, IMO), but if you are going to go into so much detail, why not discuss Levenshtein Distance?
I commend you for that, though I have no desire to clean up the messes of others. What would you have me do? Learn Ruby and start rewriting modules? Teach proper metaprogramming to the ignorant masses? The first step to fixing a problem, in this case, is conving people they have one. I'm throwing my hat into that ring.
Wouldn't a VPN suffice? If not - why not?
Ask HN: Please review our RSS feed filtering app
Here's the home page: http://www.ectofeed.com/. We're currently in an invitation-only beta, but our video tour should give you a pretty good picture of what it's all about: http://www.ectofeed.com/tour.

The basic idea is that we allow feeds to be filtered according to your interests. Based on our testing up to this point, the app can save considerable time (and annoyance) in allowing you to filter out items you wouldn't even want to glance at. For a bit more on the philosophy and justification behind it all, check here: http://www.ectofeed.com/about.

It's not very apparent from the video, but any filtered feed (at the folder or feed level), can itself be accessed as an RSS feed. As such, you wouldn't be tied to our reader--you could use Google Reader, Bloglines, or whatever else you'd like.

Our intent is to eventually commercialize the service, so we'd also be interested to know if, assuming it worked for you, you'd be willing to pay a small monthly fee for the service. We might also look at an ad-supported model, so feedback on that idea would also be helpful.

Thanks much,

Todd
Actually, I was just trying to pretend that I'm a kindly old wise man that everybody likes for his civic-minded attention to duty. In reality, I'm just as disgusted as you are and the post title says it all.

It's true that Ruby should provide better tools. But it's also true that a lot of what goes on is avoidable and there's nothing wrong with you pointing that out.
"The difference between us is this: You see something that sickens you and publicly blame and shame others for the mess. I see something sickening and I am trying to clean it up."

I am not sure if I am reading this right, but there seems to be abit of a moralizing tone there. "The difference between us is you [ do something slightly slimy] , I [ do something very noble]".

At least that's the way it reads to me.

I am not sure in a discussion of a technical issue there is much of a difference in practice. Why is "this is sucky" not acceptable unless one has spent significant time trying to clean it up?

Edit : Retracted after reading "Actually, I was just trying to pretend that I'm a kindly old wise man that everybody likes for his civic-minded attention to duty. In reality, I'm just as disgusted as you are and the post title says it all.".

I thought I'll leave it up here as a warning not others not to read too much into something.
I completely agree with you. The only thing that keeps me blogging every other day is that it sharpens my mind. It requires me to think, create and get thoughts onto paper. It's almost like a daily meditation.

My wife does the same thing with politics :)
> I know that there is someone working on Clojure on .Net, but I don't think that really adds much vs the JVM

The .NET CLR supports tail recursion, whereas the JVM doesn't. Don't think it's worth porting simply for that, though.
Thanks for the complete answer !

I found the moving elements on grooveshark to be quite a bit annoying anyway.

Also the database is much less complete than the one of www.deezer.com as of now.
Usually, I would agree, except in this case the title gives absolutely no indication as to the topic of the article. Putting the word metaprogramming somewhere in the title would have been better.
Putting in place the tools to disable infrastructure is an act of war, so is reconnaissance. It may not be an overt action, but it is a real and quantifiable threat.

Of course most of the SCADA systems out there are pretty much hopeless if they are connected to the internet at all.
But you may still profit from increasing x over time. Especially if your subject is learning how to perform what you want better and better. (Compare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaping_(psychology))

If you want to mess with your probands mind, at some point switch silently to a variable time schedule. ("Variable Time (VT) provides reinforcement at an average variable time since last reinforcement, regardless of whether the subject has responded or not." from the Wikipedia article)

By the way, for example computer games usually combine several reinforcement techniques.
Awesome point, although I would hope that their privacy policies would exclude them from that very possibility. Just because Google provides analytics does not mean they should have access to the specific data being collected.
Telemarketing killed landlines? That doesn't seem quite correct...

And spam doesn't really seem to have killed email either, you may rarely use it but the rest of the (connected) world does still seem to.
My team was a YC reject in April '08. My partner and I split and we've each spun out a few ideas independently. I now work as a web programmer at a Windows shop and moonlight in a variety of areas.

The reason for choosing this route was the pressure to be cash-flow positive as an individual through whatever means necessary.
I encourage Ruby programmers to monkey-patch in their "leaf projects." If you want to write Array#sum for your web app, I say go ahead, it's your butt and you are old enough to deal with the consequences. However, when writing gems, plugins, frameworks, any code that others will use is a different story: Now your "clients" suffer the consequences of your choices.

A story about how a web app was broken by installing the Classifier gem due to an Array#sum conflict wouldn't be a story. You change your web app and move along smartly. But who in tarnation is up for patching gems to deal with the conflicts caused by gems patching Array on each other. Ugh.
New Research Finds Business Plans Are Virtually Useless
We looked at Sphinx but ultimately decided to use Solr/Lucene instead. There were a couple reasons:

* We're not doing fulltext search, but searching by a set of tags that we didn't want tokenized/stemmed. Doing this with Lucene was easy, while trying to get Sphinx to work this way really seemed like it was going against the grain.

* The incremental update support seemed a whole lot simpler in Lucene than it was in Sphinx. The exact same stuff might be going on under the hood, but adding new documents seems to "just work" in Solr with less worrying about the implementation details.

From everything I've seen, Sphinx's performance is excellent and it's very well-suited to fulltext search. It just seems a little less flexible than Lucene.
The environment that nurtures creative programmers kills management and marketing types--and vice versa

I disagree with this. True, it kills control freaks, but most management doesn't start out out like this. The problem is that when people who expect to be in charge see that they don't have even a minimal level of control, they start to crack down. And that oppressiveness results in the employees (programmers in this case) fighting back, often with passive-aggressive behavior.

Programmers have to accept that they are a part of the problem to start with. The almost instinctive animosity I see towards management is a sign of this.

Look, you're being managed by someone who doesn't really understand what you do. Failing to communicate properly (and yes, the greater onus is on the highly specialized talent to make an effort to communicate with the unspecialized than vice versa!) means that the person attempting to manage you doesn't know what you're doing, when it will be done and what he can do to alleviate problems. Most halfway decent managers just need enough information to manage. If your response to "when will it be done?" is "dunno" or "it's done when we're ready" or "between 5 days to three weeks" then you're not communicating very well and that person is going to think you're deliberately being vague, even if you're just being honest.

Second: "creative?" C'mon gimme a break. Most programmers work on business applications, how "creative" do they need to be in their day to day work? It's plumbing, not much more. Yes, occasionally you do have serious problems that need out of box thinking, but in the normal day-to-day work of business programming if extended creativity is required, something else is wrong. Programming games or entertainment software or something where you have wide latitude to make changes, absolutely. Insurance and HR applications? not so much.
Customers care of stuff doesn't work. And if Beta Gmail stopped working they'd certainly care enough to call/email me all day crying bloody murder. What option am I left then considering it's only beta software, and free at that?

The beta tag has become like those "void where prohibited", "some restrictions apply", "limited warrenty" statements and the like. It's a cover your ass tactic that has almost no real world meaning anymore.
The School Days of Philip Greenspun.
A language/library designer shouldn't have to think of "all of the short or otherwise possibly overloaded nouns and verbs people might like to use, ever." Being able to say you are going to do a 'sum' which means X in this particular context is very powerful.

In this specific case, what's needed is more abstraction. Consider the approach Haskell takes:

http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/D...
Yup:

> The first sample consisted of 50 start-ups that went public in an initial public offering for which there was a very early business plan. The second sample included all start-ups that went public in 2004.

They only sampled startups that went public... that's a very small sample of all the startups.
In that regard, Google Search should be beta too.
I really don't get this. It seems like the usages are a bit contrived- "$1 @someone for something". It would be easier to just give people a way to twitter their purchases once they make them.
One situation I was even worse; the "senior" programmers were actually juniors with nearly no experience, but who had office politics (i.e. nepotism -- one was the CTO's son) on their side.

Needless to say, the company didn't go far.
Whats the Next and 1st Big Broadband Application?
You have more than one return statement! Go change that.

Yep, that's one of the 38 reasons for my original rejection. Violations of "single entry/single exit" were not promoted into production. I argued and lost. Now I'm glad I did.
True, programmers, scientists, musicians and other artists good enough to get paid for their work, anyone like that has little need for suits.

But while I know shoeless programmers I don't look up to them for their inability to cope with shoes.

A suit is one thing, looking like a hobo another.
I don't think you are remembering that case correctly. The animals are not being used as fertilizer. Instead, they are breaking through fences and contaminating the fields through defecation: http://www.capitalpress.info/main.asp?SectionID=94&SubSe...
One Brilliant Hoax Later, Hotelicopter Joins The Hotel Aggregation Fray
I'm not sure about the quality of Live Search. I do know that I'm starting to find that Google Search gets increasingly more annoying over time. Not in the sense that I start to dislike their interface, but more that their latest "enhancements" actually mess up my search experience.

An experience a week or so ago will nicely illustrate that. I was searching for PHP CMSes that have a tutorial to write modules, so I was searching for "php cms module tutorial" (without the quotes). I got to the search page and started furiously middle-clicking promising results. Once at the end of the page, there was a small note without any specific typesetting saying "Note: The word 'module' was dropped from your search results. Click here to search again with the word included." (Quoted from memory, so I may be a little off.)

Don't do that. If I ask for something, don't give me something else! And definitely don't do it without telling me beforehand.

They're doing something similar where they include a few results for something they think you ought to have searched for, then a horizontal rule, and then the thing you actually searched for. At least there I know it's happening, but it's still not what I asked for.

By all means, give me a suggestion if you think I made a mistake. But give me what I asked for anyway. Without me jumping through hoops for you. It messes up my train of thought :-(
I do believe unless you turn off the option of sharing your data with Google, they do have the ability. I am not a 100% sure, but I think so.
The question is, are the owners of these sites aware that urchin.js won’t be around forever? Are they aware that they are using a legacy script that is no longer being maintained?

No, I had no idea. Google doesn't seem to have notified me of the change, and there is nothing in the UI of Analytics that warns that our code is the old version. A simple "Warning: you are using the old script on your site" banner would have caused me to upgrade immediately. I'm glad I read this article.
More Real Estate Hope
Tweetary.com - a twitter based diary
Let me know how that goes. I've been trying to explain that to the "architects" here, and they don't get it, let alone the other devs.
I also had the idea of robotic luggage or even a baby carriage that follows a person at a short distance... this should be easier to implement, I think.
GoodRelations Annotator - Describe your business
Is there too much music?
How easy is it to tip over?

This is pretty close to the terminator movie robots
App Engine might just be the push that JRuby needs for larger adoption within the Rails community.
I've written a few business plans in my life (3 started companies, 2 sold, current one is Series A funded FWIW).

Every single time, the plans sat on the shelf. Every single time, I looked back at those plans and laughed/cringed at the assumptions I made in them and was amazed at how little my business resembled the picture I painted in those plans.

I think it's a great exercise to run through the sections that are common in biz plans (marketing, etc). Think about 'em, talk about 'em, maybe even through together a spreadsheet or two.

But don't make it formal and don't spend too much time on it-- the more you invest in it, the more it'll feel like a blueprint rather than an exercise.
I don't understand your math. If the birth rate stays lower than replacement, and the average life span does not increase, at what point would the population stabilize?
We do that as well.
The Evils of Cloud Computing
I think Eric Schmidt is pretty much the Meg Whitman of the current generation. Both jumped into hot companies that were destined for greatness and got credit for something that would have happened anyways
Take over a country.
Power of the Peeps: Easter goes geek
From a virtual bunny hunt and a Peep-controlled Wii to a Han Solo in Carbonite chocolate bar and Peep dioramas, there's plenty of geeky Easter fun to go around.
Aargh!! this is what i miss being stuck in Bangalore!!
:-(
Have fun anyone lucky enough to attend!

edit: grammar fix
Where, if at all, did you finally find creative freedom?
Great question. We've actually done a lot of work on this to ensure that there isn't a problem with running the code on various people's machines.

First, Plura actually runs the processPage() function in the restricted java sandbox so there is no way to actually see any data on the user's computer or do anything bad to their computer. Also, the code goes through a short verification process before it is deployed.

For the results, we do have a reasonably sophisticated validation process as well. For someone to change results from one node, they would have to do quite a bit of work.
Every cloud computing service let you run your choice of Linux and has an API. It would be trivial to write a library that talks to all APIs. What's the problem?

(I'm not including Google AppEngine, because despite their branding, their current offering is web hosting, not cloud computing.)
OpenX 2.8 - an even better version of this free ad server software
Ballpark: The better way to send invoices and estimates.
by Orson Scott Card

Wow.
don't be so sure, all the people I know who tried their hand at advertising on facebook all say that the site converts like crap.
This is, by far, the best music site I've been to.
Mostly because of the perfect UI, autoplay and no DRM.
deezer.com, musicme.com pale in comparison
No flaw detected so far, have you found any ?
I don't think global variables were mentioned in the article. Do you mean the global (top-level) namespace? If so, then yeah, "Don't do that" is pretty much the solution.
Sperm bank sued under product liability law
Honestly, it feels a little boring to me. I mean, ok, it's nice to be able to custom rank feed items, but it sounds like a lot of work to do beforehand.

Especially as the most interesting items are most often the ones that I did not anticipate.
thanks a lot backtype!
What is naked recursion?
Yeah I've moved on to Stylous since then. Glad to hear that you are doing well. Keep at it :-)
justin.tv!
"The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid,"

So as to learn what NOT to do?

In the last two big nor'easters I've spent half a week without electricity each. That's not what I would consider first world infrastructure. Winter happens - predictably so, it's time we stop being surprised by it.
That's pretty cool. Thinking aloud then, if I wanted to say pull out all the adjectives from results matching $foo, I'd end up getting that data back and then have to pipe that into storage myself - costing me both bandwidth in and bandwidth out. Thought about cutting out the middleman and letting people write to S3 direct? (Yes, I have no idea how complicated this might be.)
Ask HN: What is your favorite charity?
I am curious as to if Hackers commonly donate to charitable organizations. The thread listed at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552647 questions donating to OSS groups, but I wanted to open the question a little wider.

I personally donate to the ACLU and EFF regularly. Where do you donate?
"Hope" that Google would not use information that it has within its own walls to its business advantage is not a wise strategy.

I see nothing in Analytics' written TOS or Google's general Privacy Policy (because Analytics has no Privacy Policy of its own) that would prevent Google management/business-development from looking at Analytics data to evaluate any participating site. The same goes whether they are researching that site as an acquisition, competitor, or source of potential ideas.

In fact, I see nothing in their written policies suggesting any limits on the use of any information within Google at all, as long as such use has anything to do with "providing our services" or "developing new services".

The same thing goes for Toolbar and AdSense data, with respect to websites or individuals.

So, for example, if applying for a job at Google, there's nothing in their public policies that say they couldn't correlate your Google login with AdSense/Analytics/Toolbar data to examine your browsing history. I don't know that they've ever done that, and I would expect a big backlash if it became known that they did, but it's an example of something that doesn't violate their stated policies.
Blog link doesn't work, just opens a new window and loads the main GS page.
Yes, the same niche that buys iPods and iPhones. Minimalism is about usability, not lack of functionality.
They only people that would run afoul of the law would be the good folks at Grooveshark. Use it (without worry) while it lasts.
This is probably due to a longer trend going on since the 70s, where the rise of the M.B.A., accountant and lawyer started. They don't care about the product. In general, why would you want a beancounter running a non-commodity producing company??? I hope this changes soon and these M.B.A. factories stop churning out people.
Is there a Firefox plugin so I could see conversations about whatever page I happen to be browsing now?
Hi there, just checked out your site, a few questions for you:

1. When did you launch the site?
2. and you mentioned the traffic is growing, can you share more about the rate on how it's growing,
3. and where does the growth come from (referal, direct or google search)?
4. Do you use google analytics and analyze the data it showed you?
Also the "delete from queue" button is tough to get to (being on the right of that pop up div), I'd consider adding it either to the middle of that div, or on the main thumbnail in the queue.
I personally donated to worldvision.com
Well, I could say "I'm sick of this metaproggraming shit." But I'm not sick of the metaprogramming, I'm sick of the conflicts. Or there's "I'm sick of the conflicts between other people's metaproggraming shit." That's closer to it, but doesn't capture my disappointment in the lack of progress in writing better tools. So there's "I'm sick of the lack of really cool metaproggraming shit" which is actually what bothers me and has the informal profanity I was going for.

So... Please feel free to fork my repo and retitle it I'm sick of the lack of really cool metaprogramming shit with my blessing.
Here's how it was done: http://jeffreyfalstrom.com/

When someone close to you passes away, you are distraught and have a lot of things to take care of. Maybe you don't want to register a domain and do design and stuff (most people aren't designers afterall). So they set you up with a nice memorial and take care of the details in a tasteful way. Think of it as a specialized CMS.
Writing a little application which takes two words of equal length and prints the valid words path from one the other is a great exercise. Staring with the first word, change one letter at a time, so as to end up with a valid word in the language of choice, until you have the other word.
Try turning "comic" into "flair".

This is difficult for a human to do. So do doing it code is interesting and revealing.
The Internet and Cell Phones killed the landline. Once voice calls became just another packet of data, the end was established.

SPAM won't kill email, it'll be another new communication platform with major advantages.
What about that practice of copy & paste good code?
I've yet to meet a superb marketer or manager who thrives in a stifling environment.

That repeated stereotype among techies reflects the closed-mindedness of cliques rather than some supposed 'liberated' viewpoint of hackers.
The app lives on a dedicated server, running a "secure by default" OS (hint hint), on a private network. The network firewall is configured to only allow inbound connections for one protocol from two public IP addresses. All other public traffic is outbound-only.
cmon, let's just call it Web 3.0 ;)
@streety: Didn't mean to break new ground, just recommend the best plugin I found so people don't have to go looking around for themselves.

@philjr: Some of the flash/javascript that does copy & paste without pulling the numbers doesn't work in Google Reader and many other aggregators.
That's a great idea. Airports could buy them and then people would only rent them while they are at the airport.