skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's really funny, because HN is much like slashdot at it's high point (I would argue it's even better). Many parallels exist; for example, people will claim "groupthink" (in this case "bias"), but minimize "inconsistencies" when they disprove their point.

As for need to know, might I be so bold as to suggest that if you haven't learned anything of use at HN, perhaps it's not suited for your interests/profession?
What's the list for Hacker News?
Things are too complicated. There is too much boilerplate. Software is hard.
their product to explode in popularity,
and they fear Lisp would actually hinder that.

I've written systems in Lisp and as far as my clients know it might as well have been written in JSON. They don't care.
I would see haskell very much as the plumbing side of things. The tools available for handling and reasoning about streams are streets ahead of anything I've seen elsewhere. With zeromq and protocol buffers (that's what we use in our stack) you could very nicely separate the plumbing of the data from its consumption. I'd love to see something like this as well!

How would you handle the position sizing part of the algo if you're testing all days in parallel? Wouldn't the trade size depend on the all of the previous day's PNL?
Title is extremely misleading, the original - "Why questionable downloads use rar archives" is better, and more importantly, accurate.

60% of antivirus programs missed viruses hidden in an alternate data stream of a file inside a rar archive, not the simple case of a virus in a rar file.
I wrote a crawler after taking Udacity course
Please contact sales@jetbrains.com. If you buy IntelliJ IDEA I hope sales can help you with getting WebStorm for free (or with a discount). Scala support is part of IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition (which is free), but IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate has additional nice features.
Accidental NoTrueScotsman alert.

If a Googler thinks Go is awesome and builds a bunch of stuff in Go, what happens to that Googler? They become member of the core Go team!
Adapting Flat Design
that gels with my edit above - good designers get the underlying values of the project.
There are still things that would benefit from faster PCs (e.g. VFX).

What I'm looking for is a form factor change to be part of the next wave (Post-PC as Apple says). Something I can carry around and have all my files on and be connected then plug in for bigger screens and more power.

Keeping all my files in the cloud is still a backup thing and not a live thing. Connections cost too much and aren't very reliable.
Do you know whether Go is compatible with Google infrastructure? With protobufs and stuff like SwIG/JNI, why would it not be?
The original post is right: Lisp by itself is an incredibly powerful yet incredibly basic language. It's a functional Assembly for declarative DSLs. The most talked about Lisp nowadays is arguably Clojure, and this is probably so because Clojure provides much more built-ins and libraries out-of-the-box than other Lisps, where you'd have to build these things yourself. At the end of the day, we just want to call "solveMyProblems()", commit that 1 function call, and move on to our next project. The lower-level a language is, the further away from that goal it is, and the less reasons there are to use it.
Excellent list.

7. Never lie to us. We are used to our machines always telling the truth. We insist on no less from other humans.

I've started to think of this as an impedance mismatch between engineers and managers. Our "subordinates" (computers, compilers) tell us we fucked up at our jobs by giving them nonsensical instructions. "Your brackets don't match and I don't know WTF to do. Line 87, fix your shit or I'm doing nothing." Being nonsentient machines, they don't fear getting fired so they tell the truth.

We get a kind of feedback from "subordinates" that managers never, ever get. We program them to come to us speedily with bad news. Managers, on the other hand, program us (by having temper tantrums and occasionally turning off peoples' incomes) as well as each other to do the opposite.
You have it precisely backwards. It is "visionary and extremely well executed" because it got a crazy amount of investment before it became popular. Some rich people in the Valley thought it provided some social value (not to us, but to them). It became good after a ton of money was poured into it. It didn't get a ton of money because it was good....
Functional programming in Java?
If this was a TED talk it would have been in the 1 million plus votes for sure. This man is a genius, the content and the delivery of the content is wonderfully done. I am for sure going to try his methods in the coming days.
So a guy who was wrong last time he said it, says it again. Ho humm.

Thing is I think we all believe that the demand for desktops or high end laptops is probably going to flatline. The classic example is graphics cards for games. 15 years ago, a generation of cards made a massive difference to the quality of the games visuals. Running Half-Life with software rendering was awful compared to my Voodoo2.

Nowadays the progress is purely a small refinement, my desktop from 3 years ago is still more than adequate. Meanwhile the other end of the scale people don't want a proper PC, they want a locked down, does what it can simply, with no side-effects life.

But to suggest the end of Windows is to ignore their core business model.
Oh I completely agree; I'm glad you said that so others don't think it's true. Some people do think they care though, especially for tools targeted at developers.

I knew a game company in Montreal that was building a game development framework in Gambit Scheme. It was awesome, and their designers found the s-expression configuration format incredibly intuitive.
On interesting argument in favour of Haskell, is exactly that it takes the right powers away from you. The powers that allow parts of your programme to screw with other parts: side-effects.
Yeah too bad for the domain.

Just some last parting words: It also feels really empowering. You see something that is wrong, you can fix it. That is not something you can do with closed software, you have to cope with whatever the vendor has decided to handle the issue.

The closest I've seen to this in the design world is people doing site re-designs and posting them on their own blog. It shows the world an alternative to the existing design but then it's no a direct path to updating the actual site like we could do in software. I wish there was a solution for that.

EDIT: It reminds me, the Amaya browser which only a few have heard of supports of writing back the changes of a page if the server supports it: http://www.w3.org/Amaya/
HFT is like a million tiny trolls underneath the bridge trying to extract their tax.
This is why Instapaper and similar services have a market. We should be thankful that enough of the web is parseable for these tools to work and not stuck in something like a Flash file.
In a way - note how the regions around the metropolitan cities of Bombay, Madras, Calcutta and New Delhi (using the old names here) are all lightly colored. These were and still remain the major trading and financial centers of the country.
In my experience, we Canadians fly our national flag and wear flag-themed garb much, much more than Americans. Even more than in Texas, where people usually fly the American flag because they think it'd be rude to fly the Texas flag solo.

I suspect this Canadian flag-waving has more to do with our insecurities than it does with our comparative level of patriotism - we're not all that different from Americans, so we go out of our way to emphasize what differences we do have.
You don't necessarily have to have "smart" friends but it is a good idea to always include people outside your domain that might bring their own ideas. It avoids the issue of you drinking your own kool-aid. Similar to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink
Kevin Miller
Hi fawce, I'm a big fan of quantopian but didn't realize that zipline was a separated project. Will have a good scout around the project and see what you guys are up to :)
Modernizr Server Fork: Adding Test Values to the Client Page Too
If I were charitable, I would say that the Go version supports horozontal scaling and external caching and queue buffers in a way that the BIND does not.
Of course, they are also not supposed to use a tablet UI on the desktop...
"What if prospective students, taking a campus tour, pick up the Touchstone and see a column about crappy food or bad policies?"

The prospective students would know that they were visiting an institution that values the free expression of ideas and criticism, over the college's marketing image.
Because it makes them look weak.

If the US president can close Guantanamo over the objections of sabre rattling congressmen who keep doing local town halls where they tell their constituents "we lock the bad guys up forever", then it makes clear to those local folks that their congressman are actually pretty impotent.

There are plenty of "he wanted to close Guantanamo bay and let terrorists go, like Obama" commercials that aired during the election.

As the parent said, doing this to congressman, be they republican or blue dog democrat, would make him completely and totally ineffective in getting bills passed.

There is usually a broad difference between the posturing you hear about on TV, and the actual way they act in closed door meetings.
In one case, they have to appear that way to keep their constituents happy. By and large, congressmen are not stupid (or at least, not egregiously so), they are just good at acting.

If you do something that is going to seriously threaten their apparent power position, however, it will no longer be acting.
SetTimeout(f,1) has a 4ms timeout
I remember working for Accenture and never having a good place to think.

I was in a R&D group for the company and I was tasked with leading a small team to prototype some innovative ways to collaborate. We were coming up very short.

I went into the bathroom and locked myself in a stall for 45 minutes, because that's the only place I could find with zero people for awhile.

And in that solitude some ideas finally started to percolate. I finally had that lightbulb moment. I ended up getting a patent on the very thing I came up with that day in the bathroom stall. http://www.google.com/patents/US20040183829 (Of course a lot of BS in this patent, but it was pretty novel at the time.)

I don't think it's any surprise why we get so many great ideas in the shower. It's because we're finally alone.
Oculus Rift VR headset convincing enough for one 90-year-old
The algo is only one part of a real trading organization. Granted it's the one that gets all of the credit, and is perceived as the sexy side but operations and reporting is easily as important. If you had the best algo, but you kept making mistakes or mis-reporting because your platform was crap, you'd be out of business as fast as if your algo didn't make money. I'm talking here of hedge funds where assets under management are all import and generally external. It might be a different story in a market maker or prop shop where getting research into production fast is all important.
Inside Pixar's Headquarters
I think one of most severe abuses is renting apartments to workers.

You buy apartments and charge people significant part of their earnings for the privilege of having a roof over their heads.

Why is that bad?

As an owner you don't live there yourself so you only have an incentive to keep the place in shape good enough to be rented. Which is usually pretty low.

The worst part is that if you can't find the people to occupy your apartment your costs are pretty low (you don't have a profit but that's not the same as money being drained from your account). So you can buy and hold apartment for years at very low cost. This creates artificial scarcity (in addition to actual scarcity) of places to live that keeps the prices up.

I think progressive property tax would enliven real estate trade. Prices would drop and more ordinary people could afford to buy one on credit instead of renting. This could save working people a lot of money so they can actually start their lives instead of slaving on their first job with just enough money to pay the rent.

Tax should be constructed in such way that holding even large apartment, or even two or three would pose no burden or almost no burden, but you might be better of selling your fifth apartment even at 50% below market price than holding it for a year.
Aside from all the other points raised against this, there's also the fact that the timing on HFT is so close that it requires close colocation of the physical hardware to the trading systems. Only big boys get to have access to those racks.
Blind drivers at the steering wheel
Funny, these things are often seen hanging in pairs in Dutch household windows. I never thought there was anything peculiar about these things.

Mind you, these kind of drops are more stylized straight versions, so I'm not sure if they do have the same properties.
People said the same things about MySpace and their lunch was eaten by Facebook.

I use Facebook because most of my friends and family are on Facebook--true. But there was a time when I did not use Facebook, but still kept in touch with friends and family. I transitioned to Facebook because it worked better than the previous technologies I used (snail mail, phone, email, MySpace, etc.).

There was nothing magically unique about that transition; it could happen again if someone makes something better than Facebook.

I actually don't think Facebook is a great example of rent-seeking because Facebook makes so little rent...Zuckerberg is rich on paper because of how he played the investment market, not the rent he charges on his product. Facebook's profits are very small.

Microsoft or Apple are probably better examples, but even those fail the typical definition of "rent-seeking", which is economic activity that is captured by regulatory exclusion. Neither Microsoft nor Apple achieved their position because the government mandated that everyone must use Windows or iTunes. They achieved their position by out-competing the alternatives.

It's true that once they were on top, they were harder to defeat. But that does not make them rent-seekers. And historically this sort of advantage tends to be pretty temporary. History is full of dominant companies that are no longer around. I remember a time when Microsoft was the feared 800 lb gorilla that no one could beat...people don't think that anymore.
I'm using Windows 8 with the aftermarket StarDock start menu, and I've pretty much forgotten that I'm not using Win7 until I accidentally blunder back into Metro. I thought Metro was really neat for the first 20 minutes after I upgraded - until I realized that the mail indicator inexplicably doesn't connect to Outlook. It works with Windows Live/Outlook.com/Hotmail, but not Microsoft's flagship office software suite.
How to Secure a Credit Card Number
To be clear: a broken product that was actively annoying users and that no one knew how or had energy to fix, got fixed by a Go dev, and you are saying that is NOT a point in Go's favor?

Maybe if Reader were written in Go, it wouldn't have been killed.
I really like JetBrain's stuff, I use it every day.

That said, one annoyance with it:

When you have a personal license, it does a network check to ensure that the license is only in use on one machine on the LAN and locks out other instances popping up a 'reactivation' dialog in them. The check is fine and reasonable, I just wish it worked a different way as it messes with my workflow on a regular basis.

I work primarily from home and like switching between my laptop and my desktop regularly. I may use my laptop outside when its nice or just sit on the couch for a change in position then sit my desktop for awhile or maybe I need more horsepower or screen space than a macbook air can provide. I generally just like to change things up periodically.

The fact that it completely locks out the other IDE almost instantly can get really annoying. I sync code through github but if I forget to sync something, I then play whack-a-mole with the dialogs to get back to work. Another annoying thing is when I close my laptop then move to my desktop but want to check on something on the laptop completely unrelated and as soon as I open the lid, boom desktop is locked out.

I really wish it had some sort of timeout, read only mode or just allowed 2 instances as I can't imagine my situation is all that unique.
Yes, the OS with +90% market share is done. Idiot....
26 Things to Note Before You Develop a Website
How many Golden Eagles, Perigan Falcons, and Owls Do cats kill?
Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
Verizon Wireless broke my brand new Chromebook Pixel LTE
yes. Julia looks like a quality language but suffers the usual new kid on teh block hassles - very few packages so you have to spend too long rolling your own.
Boy 'lived as a robot' for two months [video]
Why do NEW PHP projects insist on not using namespaces?

Also, why on earth would your autoload class need to handle the case when a class is already defined? Thats the whole point of autoloading - to load a class file when the class is not defined.

Of course, if projects adopted namespaces and sensible file naming, they wouldn't need their own autoload classes at all - SPL handles it out of the box with between one and three lines of code:

set_include_path(get_include_path() . PATH_SEPARATOR . MY_INCLUDE_ROOT); // if your include path needs to be set specifically
spl_autoload_extensions('.class.php,.interface.php,' . spl_autoload_extensions()); // if you prefer class/interface files to have a suffix
spl_autoload_register('spl_autoload', false);

That's it. You need to lowercase your filenames, and namespaces translate to directories - both completely logical IMO.
I saw meaningful comments. Don't sure what you propose... there is "tripe" on HN too.
People need a whole article to realise this?
Not sure you are right there, speaking as a Brit. Torture was used on internees, as detailed in the book Cruel Britannia by Ian Cobain. I believe that torture also took place in Guantanamo, but I don't know whether it was worse. (Black prisons in other places like Baghram are another matter.)

In any case, in Guantanamo, the detention without trial is almost worse and more disgraceful than the torture. How can the democracies hold our heads up if this is how we behave?
Ok, I'll bite. How would we go about empirically measuring whether too much power" is harmful?

Do we give 100 teams a task to accomplish in Lisp, but tell 50 of them that they can't write their own macros? Or tell 50 of them that they can't use continuations?

If continuations correlated negatively with success, how would we know whether continuations are "too powerful," or merely "poorly designed?" (There is a lot of talk these days about whether continuations are a "Turing Tar Pit" and that a better mechanism needs to be invented)

Or perhaps our 100 programmers are merely unfamiliar with them, and as a result don't use the features well?

My feeling when I consider thought experiments like this is that it is very difficult to define expressions like "too powerful" with precision. This imprecision leads to the effect where we twist our explanations to suit ur biases.

So if we think Lisp is "too powerful" and that it failed in some sense, the lack of precision around "power" and "failure" allow us to draw whatever conclusion we like about the relationship between the terms.
> actually, you'd be surprised - i think those people who don't consider themselves upper-class are probably right in their judgement

I completely respect your opinion, but the fact that you think that doesn't "surprise" me, it's in fact the very phenomenon I was pointing out. Do you think that curve looks any different in India or Colombia?
COBOL, Fortran, C++, Ada... were the scripting languages of what exactly?

If I were staying in your argument, then Lisp was the language of symbolic AI. The language where things like symbolic mathematics (Macsyma, Reduce, ...), planners, theorem provers, natural language understanding, reasoning systems, expert systems, knowledge-based systems (Cyc, ...) were explored and first tried to commercialize (mid 80s). Symbolic AI funding went away with the cold war ending...

Lisp was actually invented and designed for this. John McCarthy was designing Lisp as a vehicle for (his) AI research.

There might still be a lot of Lisp users. Even among AI researchers (and related domains) there are many using Lisp tools which you probably have never heard of - like ACL2 (a theorem prover), PVS (a theorem prover used at NASA), ACT-R (a cognitive architecture with more publications written about then you can ever read). The usage of Lisp may even be constant in these domains. There was an explosion of programming in general. Outside these domains Lisp never really participated in this explosion (with a few exceptions like Lisp in Autocad, Lisp in Emacs, ...).

But should it? Lisp's almost unbounded flexibility is obviously not needed by the average programmer. It is actually a something which makes a bad programmer worse.

'Lisp Machines' were just one development/deployment platform - 10000 sold in a decade. Lisp was used before Lisp Machines and after Lisp Machines.

> It never became the scripting language of something else that was exploding in popularity.

Autocad sold millions of copies and is still widely used today. Several Autocad 'clones' support the use of Lisp for CAD scripting.
Lambda View: getting an app cross datacenter
How should we measure "power", though? I mean, Turing completeness is Turing completeness. You can do in one what you can do in another. So is power conciseness, then? Is it clarity? Is it maintainability? All/None of the above?
I've thought this for years. Something like Flattr, except, y'know, that works and people use.
JsFiddle: Display Demo from Github Repository
Good Algorithms Beat SuperComputers
Site works for me. Looks very cool too! How does this differ from pistachio, which launched here as well, IIRC?
I understand where you are coming from but...

...this attitude is indicative of a lot of engineers that end up being resented by the rest of the team -- expecting to be treated differently than others, secretly believing their skills make them superior.
I think you strongly misunderstand what drives the political system. You are nowhere near cynical enough ;)

There is no real good and bad anymore. Doing good and stopping bad is not what drives folks in DC.

I was once like this. I thought people in DC were, by and large, doing things for the right reasons, and they mostly just had better info than I did.

After living in DC for 13 years, and being privy to a lot of the inner workings of some of this stuff, I no longer believe that. I've seen how too much sausage is made.
I believe what you think would have been true once, but simply isn't anymore.

That isn't to say there aren't young, idealistic folks in government. There are plenty.
There just aren't any old, idealistic folks in power anymore ;)
definitely. I intend to move all of that code into haskell once I get a handle on whether the algo design is on the right track.
Technically, even if you render outside the visible area you still incur reflows/repaints. A fragment isn't rendered at all, but lets you build the entire collection as HTML once then do just one reflow/repaint to add the whole fragment to the DOM.
As the famous "Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages" [1] essay puts it, Lisp's key techniques are "recursion and condescension".

[1] http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-m...
I would like to see one of these tools start supporting some other hosting option than Github.
Teaching GDB and Ruby to play nice together
Taking the Pain Out of Debugging With Live Programming