skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As e certified smug lisper(you get to be one when another smug lisper calls you one :), I would say that there are many of us who just don't care whether or not lisp gets more popular, but I don't think I've ever come across anyone who would intentionally drive away new users(except for obvious trolls, who come to #lisp and ask what it is used for, and get angry when we answer: "Writing software", one even called us cts :).

I don't really mind more popularity, but my definition of a mainstream language is "The non-technical boss prefers it, because of reasons completely unrelated to its technical qualities.", in which case I agree with the snobs, we don't need that at all.

But if by mainstream you mean "It moves up from its current position as 33th most popular language on github", sure, why not. If by mainstream you mean "more companies start using it for useful software that makes money": http://this-plt-life.tumblr.com/post/36425247242/when-i-hear...

I consider Common Lisp to be a tremendous success, some of the coolest software was written or prototyped in it, including many language implementations. Not to mention what a tremendous achievement it is for a modern lisp system to be able to run 4 decades old code with little or no modification. Being mainstream was probably never a design goal, but the things listed above are, and that is probably why many lispers simply don't care about being mainstream, the language is not optimized for that at all. I don't thing that makes lispers snobs, they've just self-selected for people who can work with less community support. It's like a low-econ game of starcraft :)
As always, sort of relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/605/
When you say "too expensive," I'm curious what you mean... Are you including time/labor in your cost-benefit analysis? For me, Heroku allows me to buy more engineering time (and less sys ops complexity) to devote to other problems. From this perspective, do you still consider DO cheaper? If so, at what ~number of dynos, does it become cheaper... (I realize this is an impossible number to pinpoint...)
The negative stigma that is placed on long-term unemployment is an issue that needs to be addressed; measuring how long someone has been unemployed is not really indicative of anything.

The rationalization that "If no one has hired them in X months, there must be a reason not to" is just flat out dumb. And while it may be a red flag when purchasing physical goods or real estate, it's a baseless stat when it comes to measuring how well an individual's expertise & qualities may be suited for a particular position.

In my opinion, there are much better stats an employer can take off a job application, and wouldn't mind the federal/state government passing legislation against this type of discrimination if it gets out of control.
> And no, I don’t have a solution.

AdBlock, duh!
Well if they act irrationally they will be sufficiently punished by the market (no childish fantasy required).

The market does punish shitty corporations, but it happens over years to decades, and most people can't wait that long. How much comfort is it to someone who's unemployed if Microsoft breaks off and falls into the ocean in 2025? These people want jobs now and, as far as I can tell, don't really care what the market does to the companies that won't hire them.

Also, companies are mediocre (refusing to hire unemployed people is moral mediocrity, since no effort is spent finding out why he was long-term unemployed) because most people are morally mediocre. So, while good companies eventually come up and replace bad companies, they're also getting worse as time goes on.

Most of the people these articles are written about don't live in SF or NYC where there are a large number of good companies, so the option of not working for mediocre companies reliant on social-proof bullshit might not be one they have.

My personal thought: long-term unemployed should lie. Yes, I'm under my real name, and I'm still saying that. I don't care. I feel like anyone (even an employer) who relies that much on social proof deserves to be deceived. I've never lied on a resume, but I have no issues with people who lie as pertains to this particular matter. If you've been out for 10 months, make something up.
Ironically, having a child is likely the best possible response to have for why you have a year gap in employment. For the all-male resumes used in this experiment, hr and hiring managers would be more likely to assume the gap was due to work-related reasons (lazy, unskilled, unintelligent, etc) as opposed to the socially accepted and positive reason of childbirth.
I would like to point out that after visiting that link and allowing jsfiddle.net's scripts, my browser locked. Eventually I had to do a hard reset. This is on FF 20, Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS.

Edit:
This is reproducable, but this time I killed firefox pretty soon.
How can javascript hang a browser?
What "war" was the post referring to, then?
US Court Hears Gene Patents Case
Exactly, if you take the position that gains from HFT are basically "stolen" profits from otherwise more productive market participants, then any that can be "stolen back" is a win.
My thought is that even if they are only detecting water and electricity throughput in each building and the temperature and light in each room, they can see hot-spots where too much energy or water is being used. If they have a model of the wiring, piping and heating conduits, then a defective part might be identified or at least a limited set of possibilities be found.

I think MS is one of the greenest IT companies in the world - folks here should give credit where its due. They have also been setting standards for energy conservation in co-lo facilities.
How much time have you spent using CoffeeScript? It might take a week or two to get used to it. I think if you just stick with some basic stuff and write it like Python with less punctuation then it is pretty straightforward and CS classes are very straightforward, what's wrong with them?

Just leave out the outer parenthesis and put them in after that.
Well, in that case the analogy is virtually meaningless, since "witch hunts" have always occurred.
He started a war on libya without congress approval, right?
> Since a hard fork would require agreement from essentially everyone involved in Bitcoin, there's essentially no chance of this limit being increased.

The bitcoin network underwent a hard fork a couple weeks ago due to a bug in the implementation of the on-disk database.

The developers reached out to the mining pools and got the vast majority downgraded within 8 or 12 hours. A day or two later a new version was pushed out that mimicked the old behavior up until the point that a supermajority of nodes were upgraded, and then switched to the new behavior.

Forks have happened before, and the community is close-knit enough to resolve them. Everyone's primary goals are a) being ideologically neutral and b) keeping the network running, in equal measure.
I don't understand why so many members here leave their profiles completely blank. HN is populated with a lot of really intelligent people with interesting views. It'd be nice to be able to follow-up (off-line) on their comments and posts.
Long term unemployment is unfortunately a signal of low productivity. While being long term unemployed doesn't necessarily unproductive, it is highly correlated with low productivity.

The same thing happens for race,unfortunately.

http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
This is the closest he's come to keeping his campaign pledges to reverse the idiocy of the Bush era, but he failed, and then he even reversed his own executive order in 2011. Like suspension of habeas rights, like warrantless wiretaps, like drone warfare, like the TSA, President Obama didn't make these things, but he still chooses to use them. A lot.

Obama was the only hope people like me saw for reversing the 9/11 death spiral, and he blew it. End the war in the Middle East? Naw, let's escalate it instead. Reform the Patriot Act? How about I reauthorize it as-is. End indefinite detention of Americans without trial? No, continue indefinite detentions without trial and/or execute Americans without a trial. Transparent government? How about secret laws instead. Stop rousting foreigners? Nope, let's ICE record numbers of immigrants. Veto NDAA? Sign NDAA! Veto CISPA?

The trends in the Obama administration are the exact opposite of what people voted for. His legacy is more power for ICE and TSA; more power for national security agencies; more intrusive government; more war; more unprincipled, reactionary policy making. Zero upside.

I get why people defend their candidates in the face of conflicting evidence. Obviously people believe their candidate, no matter how bad, is better than the alternative. But Obama's a lame duck. There's no reason to shield him or blame this on someone else who's already out of office, though don't get me wrong here: Bush was a truly horrible President. It doesn't solve the core problem, which is the we need a leader in 2016 who will lead us out of this spiral. Unfortunately neither party is worth a damn right now.
Then Obama was counting on many people not to understand politics when he chose to make promises on things he wouldn't have the power to change.
I believe Redstar is too.
Yes, you're right. I started coding when I got a Sinclair ZX81, back in 1981. At that time there were lots of really affordable computers starting to come onto the market, but previously it would have been difficult to learn to program unless you had access to university data centre.
If this decision is so clearly and unequivocally not his to make, why did he promise to do it in the first place? Is he stupid or a liar? I don't think he's stupid.
> but also for writing tools that work with the language.

What I've seen from go's tooling today: a very crude debugger and zero IDE support.

The bar for "good tooling" in 2013 is quite a bit higher than it was in 1999.
It's a choice in the sense that everything is a choice. You can choose paying taxes or going to jail. Or, maybe you could be successful as a fugitive. Still, you're making the choice to pay taxes, even if that choice is based on likely consequences.
Checkout http://www.stylate.com/ - cool concept - Logo + domain for $250
My apologies, "junked" is slang for downvoting on another forum I visit.
This site also makes interesting use of the Javascript console. Viewable here if you can't see it for any reason: http://pastebin.ca/2359993
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination

Why is feigned ignorance of a basic, well-understood word such a common approach to argument on HN? I've seen this many times now, where people seem to want to insist "problem X is unsolvable because you can't even define Y".
Your point about the difficulty in establishing one or another result as objectively better is a good one - though somewhat weakened by then arguing that the online service is better.

However, it is not as if pdftohtml is obscure. It is a common component of a great number of GNU/Linux distributions and has been for many years. So setting aside the merits of the top result, the lower results are still problematic.

Unlike the top result, neither Pdftohtml nor the high ranking results are SaaS - they're downloads for offline use. What differentiates them is their value propositions. They are in opposition between Google and the lay person and the results are caveat emptor solely for Google's benefit.

Elsewhere, I have used a better example, "weather". The top results are advertising revenue driven. The best result? In most cases, the National Weather Service point data - advertising free, updated regularly, and generated by Phd meteorologists, not pretty faces for TV.

In this case, Pdftohtml shows the way in which Google drives us toward online rather than offline solutions. It drives us away from using our CPU cycles and towards consuming bandwidth, and absent that toward tools which pay for advertising.
Agreed. While the trend away from 3rd party cookies is at present and will probably continue to be a thorn in my side in the coming years as a coder, I think that most internet users will be happier in a world where they are mostly not supported. If you just read through the list of companies that signed (lots of media this and that), I think most normal folks would hardly be sorry not to be able to be "tracked" (whatever that turns out to mean in practice) by them.

In general reminds me of the movie business that gouges customers on ticket prices and concessions, then complains when the customers start watching movies elsewhere.
There's probably a button called 'power cycle' or 'manually open/close'
Are we ready to forgive?
> It's fine to be a "race traitor" or gender traitor if yours dominates.

Your use of the word "dominates" is disingenuous. Let's imagine:

- - -

There exists a country in which 95% of all leadership in government and industry is male. There are a few women here and there, but for the most part, it's all men at the top. And at the top, people are pretty protected. They can generally get away with whatever they want, as is often the case.

This country has gender roles. Legally enforced gender roles. Women are viewed as more fragile caregivers. Men are viewed as sturdier providers. People at the top of society are pretty insulated, but for everyone else, these gender roles are a fact of life.

For a given crime, men are held to higher standards, and they are subjected to more brutal punishments. Men overwhelmingly find themselves in dangerous, thankless jobs.

Young men tend to work menial jobs, while young women tend to attend university.

Men do not live as long in this society. An overwhelming amount of public money and attention is spent on issues that primarily affect women.

And when a woman is perceived to be slighted, men and women are expected (and socially rewarded) for rushing to her aid. Men, being sturdier, are expected to fend for themselves.

- - -

Every well-off feminist man I've encountered would say that men in that society are not victims of sexism—they are simply victims of patriarchy.

Why on Earth would one call that system "patriarchy"? Aside from the top of society, men have it worse in this society. Men have it much worse. Why lump the men at the top in with the men at the bottom just because they all have penises?

Please realize that men can be sexist toward other men. Men can actively oppress other men on the basis of their gender. Men love competing with other men. Men love one-upping other men. Men love protecting women from those other, less civilized men. In short: Many men love oppressing other men.

For poorer, underprivileged men, it's incredibly marginalizing to hear a hyper-privileged man display his plumage and say it's alright to hate males, because males "dominate" society.

Unfortunately, repeating that mantra costs that hyper-privileged man nothing, yet it can potentially increase his social standing among other hyper-privileged men. So why wouldn't he?
The nuclear option is for Obama to give a presidential pardon to each of the prisoners on his way out of Office. I could respect that.
I'm fairly amazed by some of the choices - in particular the single huge user table that is hit on every profile page view to map url to shard. I'm guessing it has hot backups and similar - but wow - talk about a single point of failure. I guess having it like that actually makes it easier. If it fails, it should be trivial to get it back up quickly on a backup machine.

The whole setup seems a lot simpler than nearly every 'web scale' solution I've heard discussed.

EDIT: I'm not saying that is a bad thing - it's a good thing. Most of the articles around scaling on HN often deal with very complex Cassandra style technical solutions. This article is the opposite with a very 'just do it the simplest way' feel to it. One big mysql table for all users (probably with some memcache in front) is the sort of thing you can put together in an hour or two - yet it is the very core of their system.

I (and I bet a lot of other engineers reading HN) try to focus too much on perfect implementations - if someone asked me to design the shard look-up for something as heavily hit as this, I'd probably reach for a distributed in-memory DB with broadcasted updates - and I'd probably be wrong to do so. The mysql/memcache approach is just going to be simpler to keep running.
I think this is likely to be a sleight of hand analysis on the HuffPo columnist's part. Firms with fewer than ten employees, which the column alludes to when talking about small businesses, make up just 5% of employer firms. Census doesn't define "small business", and SBA defines it in the context of specific verticals, so that a small manufacturer might have 500 employees while a small law firm might have far fewer. Whatever the case, firms with 500+ employees represent by far the largest segment of all employer firms, by just about 3x the number of employees of any other bracket.

(Caveat: I may be misreading some of this.)
There are people who have done precisely that in places like South Korea where there is very overt discrimination against educated women returning to the work force after their children are a little older. If I were starting my own firm that's exactly what I'd do (and some day, I might).

There are some places in New York that at least have the right idea (I don't know about the implementation): http://www.cravath.com/benefits ("We have an associate re-entry program that is designed to foster a connection between the Firm and those associates who leave the Firm for primarily family-related reasons... we hope that these former associates will consider returning to the Firm if they decide to practice law again.").
Hands on research
Great post, Jon.

A few months ago there was a thread about a new operating system some people wanted to develop that would rely heavily on aesthetics. The mockups/prototypes I saw for it were weak and mostly stolen concepts from OS X. When I asked - as a designer - how I would get involved in these projects before they begin (because designing after-the-fact is no fun for anyone), I was told simply to try to get in touch with someone on the existing project. Unfortunately, tearing up what they'd already done so far didn't really sound appealing to me as I did not want to ruffle any feathers with whoever was currently designing or developing it.

I'm a lot more interested in raising my hand before work is already underway to say "Hey, I'm here. Here's what I've done in the past and here's what I'm interested in doing in the future." To this point, I wish Github had a section for designers who truly want to contribute to open-source so people could get in touch with them right on the site they would be hosting those projects on. I guess I could put something in my Dribbble profile about that, but I don't think that's where devs wanting free work are looking.
The side building tools to resist surveillance, tyranny, violence, and war. You know, the one trying to prevent all the stuff his boss is up to.
So you're saying this person or anyone should put on their resume, rather than

[last position] [last company] [long time ago - 8 months ago]

they should put

Personal Marketing Assistant Me, Myself and I 8 months ago - Present
* Analyzed potential job contracts with future employers
* Bid for relevant contracts using specialized letters of qualifications
* Proselytized Mr. John Do to applicable markets using word of mouth and print
techniques

[last position] [last company] [long time ago - 8 months ago]

?

Employers, how would you see this?
I'm Glad Google Is Retiring Reader
But doesn't your point #2 conflict with #1?

This is obviously industry-specific but assuming you have the skills, doing contract programming requires only trivial up-front cost (a domain name and server, but most who work with the web would have that already) and it's certainly not a $15/hr job.

As one of my siblings comments says, it's your responsibility to have a safety net of your own (6 months of all your expenses is a pretty standard number). Not doing so is simply irresponsible unless you're struggling to keep food on the table as it is.
Is this an analysis the experiment actually did, or your presumption about how hiring managers view time taken off for child care?
You may want to read further about the Buttercoin project. The promise is an open source exchange software that runs on commodity servers. It's still in the early days, but seems pretty possible. If this project were successful, then multiple exchanges could sit on top of this software and in effect decentralize the exchanges.
"When you're unemployed, finding work should become your full-time job."

This assumes there's enough of a job market "out there" that after more than 6 months you can still burn 40 hours per week on it.

"This is not possible if you're dicking around with ... volunteer work."

This doesn't even make sense. Most volunteer work doesn't require much money. You may be confusing setting up a charity or donating to a charity with volunteer work at a charity. Even something "time consuming" like serving soup at the church soup kitchen can't burn more than a couple hours.
A link to an unapproved /. submission. Fascinating choice.
Generate 3D maps of rooms with your Kinect
Is there any confirmation on this?

[edit] Just looked at twitter, this tweet doesn't look good: https://twitter.com/Jamiesingleton/status/322730588459114500

But it may just be random coincidence.

[edit again]

Links from slashdot article:

IRC chat:
http://turtle.dereferenced.org/~nenolod/linode/linode-abridg...

Link in IRC chat (i think it is of linode.com's web directory):
https://bin.defuse.ca/hq0Ay8RzpKdR6vQwYxnmhc
If your business model is built on a widely disliked revenue stream (read: online ads), perhaps it would be wiser to revisit your business model than to write open letters asking the disliked behavior to be continued.
Don't most large software companies have a 'campus' feel to their headquarters? I would imagine back in the 80's when they were designed/created, nobody wanted to go work inside a towering, souless, black glass skyscraper for 10 hours a day.

A lot of people would kill for a view of water and trees and the ability to walk outside at lunch.
some of the faqs are ridiculous; apparently blocking some 3rd party cookies by default goes against users freedom of choice yet enabling them by default is great for user choice!
First, I would return my nobel peace .
How do you feel about...

http://raganwald.posterous.com/the-keep
As someone with zero debt, minimal financial needs and enough savings to take voluntarily more than a few months off work, this is downright scary. I guess if it comes down to this, I'll just have to fudge the hell out of it in my resume.
So if it's just a video. How does the "avoid each other" work?
I've spent plenty of time with CoffeeScript, and I don't like it. It's not explicit enough, and the syntax is too permissive. It's easy to get bitten by things like omitting parentheses when calling a function, which creates hard-to-spot bugs. CoffeeScript also creates poorly performing code by default, by treating everything as an expression and returning it unless you tell it not to.
It seems that from a hiring manager point of view the logic is this:

-Good people are hard to find

-If I find a good person, I snap them up right away

-Other hiring managers in my industry probably do the same

-If someone hasn't been working for 6 months they've probably been on a bunch of interviews

-In those interviews, no one thought the candidate was good enough to hire

-Odds are the candidate probably isn't worth hiring

Real world example, one of my co-workers was hired less than a week after his large corporate investment bank employer collapsed. Main reason was that it was obvious that he was smart, hard working and organized.