skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think hackers are not touched, by definition of aspects like:

“There will be a final push for the enactment of Lisbon Treaty, [..] which would give the European Union massive powers over its member nations, essentially making it a supranational regional government, with each country relegated to more of a provincial status. "

As we are hacking systems, we are hacking the future. And since the new currency is not physical but digital we will be able to hack even a 'world dominance government' if we will consider to.
Georges van Hoegaerden: Harsh Critic of VCs (RWS Interview)
Search Engine Optimization Experts with urls like http://scottsdaleseoservices.com/?page_id=3 ??
Except that Google's monopolies, if they exist, are elsewhere. You get the source code to the whole OS and system - how cool is that for a hacker? So it's sort of like Windows+Linux. I'm waiting for this second generation of hardware to come out and then jumping (from Nokia). Android gives you way more than J2ME, and is definitely nicer to work with than Symbian (from everything I've heard - I've never used the C++ stuff). iPhones are nice, but being a 'hacker', I want open and accessible.
Recognize Sunk Costs And Move On
>> printIfNotNull(foo.getBar().getName()); // pointless method

>> in arc ...
>> ... aif is a macro that expands this code to
>>
>>(let it ((foo 'bar) 'name)
>> (if it
>> (print it)))

Why is a macro not pointless, while a method/function apparently is? I don't think that makes sense personally. Surely a macro is just a function that's been inlined - which may be better, depending on if you're optimizing for speed or size. Anyone explain?

Also, I'm not sure if this was being serious or not:

>> Priorities in language design
>> A Language Should ...

If it was serious, it completely depends on what problem you're trying to solve as to what priorities you're going to have.
The author conveniently forgets to note that putting the company's visual design in a blog does cost something and requres someone that knows things like HTML and CSS.

Using a blog is probably the best choice for many companies, but it's not totally free (unless you want to use on of the standard themes, in which case people who have seen the same design on ten other sites will wonder what's going on - "is this a serious company?").
Is this similar for all the dialects of Lisp? Because if it is, I might start learning one tonight.
(setq custom-file (expand-file-name "~/.emacs.d/custom.el"))
I like the argument, especially using the word "blub" to describe the cruft that is inherent to the language, but I have to question how much it's preaching to the choir, and how much will penetrate people who don't already agree.

Maybe it's indicative of my crowd and not the community at large, but even the smartest people seem to hit up Haskell-for-fun and Python-in-practice over Arc. It's hard to call them blub-programmers, since they're genuinely curious, hard-working people...
Because aif works with any expression, not just print. Granted, in a functional language like JS, one could say:

ifNotNull(foo.getBar().getName(), function (it) { print it; });

but "function (it)" and all of the "().{}" are still blub. As PG points out on the arclanguage forums [1], an even simpler way of putting it is:

(only.print foo!bar!name)

Which, without the Arc-specific syntax sugar, is:

((only print) ((foo 'bar) 'name))

So "only" is a modifier that makes a verb (function) happen only if its argument is truthy (think Python decorators).

Note to PG: the dot operator is undocumented, and f.g.h.3 does not at all what I expect - looks like it does (f g h 3), whereas I expected (f (g (h 3))), in the spirit of Python decorators.

1. http://arclanguage.org/item?id=9350
That's what I was wondering too. Almost all examples use macro. And for this one the argument that you need a temp variable to avoid redundancy is kind of moot since his macro use one too (I'm not familiar with the syntax so I might be wrong)
I never actually look at the new or front pages directly as I only access HN via RSS. Come to think about it, I don't think I've ever upvoted a story as they're already popular by time I find out about them!
The point about string concatenation is, umm, I don't want to say "wrong" because wrong sounds argumentative so I think I'll pick a circumlocution like "contrary to fact" or "a bedtime story to scare CS101 students with, second only to 'use left shift instead of dividing by two, it is faster'".

Also in modern Java (and Ruby) projects you can typically write:

logger.debug("This is a stupidly expensive calculation: " + stupidlyExpensiveCalculation())

and it will get executed regardless and logged only if your logging settings, which are configured elsewhere and can be toggled with a mouseclick, are set to log the debug level.

Now, don't get me wrong, Arc's solution of defining a macro which checks to see whether your debug setting, which is defined elsewhere and can be toggled with a mouseclick, is on or not is a good idea. Its just not a revolutionary new idea for us wizened Big Freaking Enterprise App Ugly Language Programmers. Nor was it really that new in the halycon days of yore when Log4j crawled out of the primordial ooze.
Yeah I found that helped me be a bit more mature on online forums. In high school I would use pseudo-anonymous screen names, which perhaps allowed me to say things I wouldn't really want attributed to my real name, even though it was still trivial to link it to my real name. Now I just use my initials + last name, which is a good reminder that you're definitely not really anonymous on the internet.
Frequently. I know for a fact that I'm not as articulate or as clever as half the guys on HN so I figure sometimes it's better to say nothing at all than to say something stupid. If I want to post dumb comments, I go to Reddit ;)
In js, if printIt is a function already defined, you don't need the function(it){}

ifNotNull(foo.getBar().getName(), printIt);

Granted, in java passing functions around is more of a pain.
A deeper look inside Google's O3D API
5% of times I find it so hard to express what I think in English that I give up... it's not exactly a great feeling.
"people shouldn’t make decisions based on past investments." -- seems like hacking the time, as is, baby!
I feel like when they figure out how to get the Cell processor into phones, it'll just swallow up the Android market.
Upvoted your comment just because your puppy is so damn cute!
No relation to Ogre3D, affectionately known as "O3D"

http://www.ogre3d.org/
LG Launches World's 'Thinnest' LCD TV 
LG Display, South Korea's leading electronics manufacturer announced it has developed a crystal display (LCD) television panel, thinner than a pencil, describing it as the world's slimmest.
Hooray, I've been waiting for the day I could run my web servers in a browser and I could get my hardware to work seamlessly by writing firefox to the boot sector.
The macro definition abilities is mostly similar for most popular lisps around, Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure
Irish Waveriders
If it takes X characters to achieve something in language A, and X*4 to achieve the same thing in BLUB, I don't think this means BLUB is 4 times slower to develop in than A.

When I develop software, most of the big delays, and excuses for procrastination are in forcing my brain into action over the higher level concepts. I find a lot of the extra lines of code required when using BLUB can be written at high speed, with little "hurt" to the brain.

I'm not saying BLUB is just as fast to develop with, I'm just saying the benefit isn't as good as number of lines ratio good.
Yep, a lot of the features mentioned in the presentation are possible with just first class functions, although the syntax will be messier (but arguably more consistent).

The strength and danger of macros is in allowing you to create new syntax, skipping all the extra blub that made your code conform (consistently) to the original parser. What I'd like to know though is how much humans depend on that blub.

It's one thing to write your own macros and use them consistently, or even for a group of people to come up with macros and use them consistently. But if people work independently, what happens when you read someone else's code and find they've come up with macros to do the same things as yours do, but with different names and different usage conventions?

Wouldn't that be a bit like having every scientist invent their own jargon?

Either humans can learn to translate that kind of thing on the fly, or they can't, and lisp with heavy macro usage will only ever be useful as a solo (or small group) language.
The unexpected patents of Steve Jobs, from packaging to staircases.
Apparently native support for x86_64 is not in the foreseeable future:

http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/64-bit-s...

Guess I'll be sticking with Firefox for a while yet (or Opera, or Epiphany-webkit, or Midori, or...)
Logically valid, but kind of pedantic though.
Because law is wacky and often counter-intuitive.
no, statistics doesnt work like that (sadly).
We get this for free in Haskell.
> Everyone knows that you should “Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly.”

Not everybody knows this. I learned it by reading the book.
The Apache Licence for example cares only that you keep the name of the product. So it's not a stretch to interpret it this way.
Not exactly free ... laziness and the resulting thunks do use up extra processing time and memory. But in many cases it is a price worth paying.

http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/whyfp.html
For the toy example, sure. But as soon as the example gets at all more complicated, you'll need to throw the function(it){} back in.

Also, it's worthwhile to remember that aif does a bit more - it's semantically the equivalent of cond, which sometimes eliminates a ton of if/else blub.
I just wrote a reply to a comment in this thread - then decided not to post.

I'd say I write as many non-comments as ones I post. :)

(someone else talks about flawed arguments: I have the same thing, often what Gut spews out in response to a comment sounds like total BS to head when you read it back properly :))

And yes, like others, I do the furious edit thing too :D
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The Hg-Git Plugin from GitHub
Haskell isn't exactly blub; between the first class functions and the custom monads it's quite possible to create custom languages. E.g. the parsing library Parsec:

http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/using-parsec.html
point taken. it's possible the issue is more nuanced: some of the benefit comes just from forcing people to be conscientious about how they interact w/ people, and some comes from the specific tips he provides.
I agree, Owen's arrogance is quite startling to me...

What I don't understand is how Hsu wanted to challenge Kasparov for "title match"... World Title matches are managed by chess federation (FIDE), so it's not up to Kasparov or Hsu to decide. All in all, I would take both letters with a big grain of salt.
> I often submit what I think is a great article and it dies on the "new" page without any votes.

I made a few self submissions of things I thought were great, interesting concepts and which garnered no interest at all.

Those interest me more than a strong debate TBH, there was plenty of click through but no real interest in my thoughts. It's a non-starter. These things are good to know!

HN taught me a lot about how hard you have to work to have a respected opinion. Which is good :)
Past decisions might affect future decisions, though. For example, suppose you invested some time in learning Ruby in the past. Then when deciding which programming language to use in the future, Ruby is a cheaper option because you already know it, whereas other languages would have additional costs for learning them.
The Berne Convention is much too old to specifically address the bare licenses used for open-source software. However one of the provisions of the convention is that any creative work is protected under copyright law without requiring explicit registration. This creates a problem for declaring something in the public domain since there is not really an established legal procedure for a copyright owner to waive or forfeit the exclusive rights which have been automatically granted to them.
Yes I would agree as most of the advice in the book is more common sense than groundbreaking. When I got to the part about not telling people "You're wrong" and directly criticizing mistakes I didn't need to be convinced. Rather I immediately realized that I do tend to do this often and I should probably make an effort to do it less.

Before reading the book though, I had never once examined that aspect of my personality and how I interact with others.
In that case though, you can do the analysis with your present abilities: you know Ruby well right now. Perhaps it's a subtle distinction, but it's not about the sunk costs, but about your current 'assets', and the costs of acquiring new abilities.
College is not so much about knowledge, it's about developing intellectually.
Wouldn't that be a bit like having every scientist invent their own jargon?

I don't know about "all scientists", but mathematicians do precisely this all the time! Each paper and each textbook begins by defining what symbols mean what, and which terms are used how. But a textbook is about as big a consistent block of terminology as you'll be able to find. In a grander sense, terms are constantly re-purposed and evolving over time [1].

Something as simple as "⊂" will mean "subset" in one book, and "strict subset" in another. In my experience, the older the book, the more divergent it'll be from current usage. This suggests that the language of mathematics evolves over time, precisely because every practitioner can change the language and push for her own terminology. There is no "Mathematics corporation" which creates languages people would be forced to choose from - no mathematician, no matter how great, would suggest that he would know what the "eternally right way" of expressing mathematics is.

This is especially apparent in more exploratory parts, where definitions start being named after their authors. I, personally, look forward to a time when I get to choose between a Norvig-garbage-collection and Graham-garbage-collection for each object in my code.

We're in this ridiculous stage of software engineering, where, if you're using Java, you have to do garbage collection The Java Way (you get to set a couple of settings, but that's it). No mathematician would ever be forced to make the decisions that Sun's engineers were forced to make when designing Java, because nobody could make those decisions correctly - how programs must interact with the call stack, the mechanics of method invocation, etc.

1. "Compactification" comes to mind as an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compactification_%28mathematics...
Netscape also made this statement. Remember them?
The Three Sexy Skills of Data Geeks
One of the points the article makes is not that it can be done (by whatever shell) but that any context dependent completion that happens with current shells needs to manually track details of each command to some degree.
Bing: “But It’s Not Google”
Android Developer Challenge II
Startup 125: Term Sheet - Liquidation Preferences
"As for why lisp has been left behind in favor of other languages? Well, it's pretty much the same reason as why few people in America wear bowler hats these days, they're out of fashion."

But wait, I'm not understanding what you're trying to say. Bowler hats are a fashion, yes. But if I do wear a bowler hat, other than getting ridiculed, there is no effect on my life. I'm not suddenly three times smarter or more effective at work. If bowler hats made you three times smarter, even if they were out of fashion, I'm sure plenty of people would wear them. If LISP doesn't make me three times as efficient as $LANGUAGE, then, yes, it's merely a matter of fashion that it is not more popular -- but maybe it's also no big deal. Is that the point you were trying to make? Because if it isn't, blaming "fashion" is not advancing your case.
This is the second in a series of posts about VC term sheets. After valuation, Liquidation Preferences can be very dilutive. Liquidation Preferences sound like a preference for who has the right to drink from the water cooler first. And metaphorically, that is correct. They say who drinks from the proceeds from the sale of a company first.
Rather than mentally mapping REST verbs onto traditional CRUD verbs, I recall a quote from TBL to the effect of "Uniform Resource Locator is the term you get when you squeeze 'remote object reference' through a standards process". I think of PUT as being like Python's __init__ method, constructing a new instance with the given details; DELETE is like Python's __del__ method, cleaning up references and removing it; GET is like Python's __str__ method, returning a readable representation of the object's state, and POST is like Python's __call__, invoking the object as a function with some given arguments and who-knows-what side-effects.
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Thank you, Bush administration. You brought us so many wonderful things: Patriot Act, PROTECT act, economy disaster, NCLB, and other heaps of bullshit as well as killing and torturing thousands if innocent people.

Why are we not prosecuting Bush&co? Oh, very easy. It's not because he&co aren't evil (because they most certainly fucking are). In our world, might makes the right -- the one with power is the one with enough propaganda powers (and just powers) to make himself right.

And you ask me why I hate religion and wasps.. this is why :) It hides evil under the mask of morality and goodness.
Clickable: http://www.wikifieldtrip.org
Code generation isn't as powerful as late binding. Lisps would be more interesting if you could easily manipulate environments, and set the environment that functions are evaluated in. In this regard, Arc isn't as agile as some OO languages (Io for instance).
Nice. Looks like we'll have a browser that has extensions that aren't an utter pain to write, and rocks on all fronts.

Chrome is looking like it's going to be as refreshing as fire(fox|bird|whatever) was back in the day - really, it already is if you ignore the lack of extensions.

This makes me giddy like a schoolgirl.
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I would love to see the same for Arc...
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Haskell-for-fun and Python-in-practice

I am in exactly that camp, tho' I do fully intend to use Haskell for real once it becomes viable to do so. It's like the Python Paradox all over again.
Big plus for no restart!
I've often wondered which websites might track all your keypresses and send them with the submission so they keep a record of your typing, and display only the final edit. Wouldn't be too hard to turn keypresses into ed commands.
As is often quoted.... "Drawing on my fine command of the language, I said nothing."
Tim Draper: Now's the 'best time' to start a business
I got Chromium from the .deb that's available, and it made me install the msfttcore font package in order to function, which screwed up my fonts. My guess is that there's a way to make that not happen, but I don't have time to dig around for it right now. Other than that, it seems like a pretty nice browser.
It depends. Having designed medium sized VLSI ASICs over a decade ago and worked with FPGAs recently, I'd have to say that it may still take several FPGAs to equal one ASIC.
> PostgreSQL has implemented for years transactions, foreign keys, subselects, unions, views, stored procedures, triggers, Unicode support, full joins and constraints on data.

> MySQL does not yet implement full joins and constraints on data.

It's all you need to know,
Nokia 6303 classic Unlocked at keepontalking.com
Nokia unveils a new mobile phone in the Nokia 6303 Classic. If you enjoyed the Nokia 6300, chances are you are bound to love this successor model. The Nokia 6303 is a tri-band handset and is pre-loaded Nokia Maps for turn-by-turn GPS navigation.
Seems like a great idea, but...

Didn't work on Chrome 2.0.168.0 (shows "An error occured...", downloads .exe, silently does something, "Installed!", restarting Chrome, same routine: error, exe...).

Didn't work on Firefox 3.0.10 (shows "An error occured...", downloads plug-in, restarts FF, then same again: error, plugin).

Didn't work on Opera 10.00 alpha (doesn't even show list of browsers).
Wow, who would have guessed that these "universal applications" which run on all platforms big or small would be written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript? Ha!
I call marketing BS in the same vein of the future of the web is 3D.

What they should really say is that in the future the internet, and the browser and the desktop and the OS and all sorts of small apps will merge thus creating a relationship that sometimes take processor power from the machine, sometimes from the cloud etc. creating a seamless experience.

What google are really saying is that they want to go vertical within the software industry.

True but trivial.
I'm not going to argue with the notion that Knuth is "the source" when it comes to learning Computer Science, but his views on SICP are a bit idiosyncratic, don't you think?

So, how do you learn about Computer Science? Some would no doubt recommend "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" by Abelson and Sussman here. (Someone sent me review copy of that book too.) But really, SICP (as it is often referred to) has its own agenda: convincing the reader that the most important thing computers can do is interpreting computer programs. This agenda has arguably caused the proliferation of Scheme implementations and indoctrinated many young minds with certain ideas about how to design and implement programming languages. But personally, I recommend you go straight to the source. After all these years, there is still no substitute for Knuth.
In my country, DRM is unlawful de-jure (but is in use, de-facto), because it violates bunch of laws.
I am seriously tempted to write a bayesian classifier for "Take it to Reddit" to see whether you just overflowed it or not.
Woah... the fact that there's a star next to that headline which adds the story to some kind of global "Google favorites" just blew my mind...
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Agree.

isDebugEnabled() method is used to scare people since 2001, probably around the time when it came out of common use.

Macro that is being used for exactly that is not a distinguishing feature of the language. Java proponents may come out with, say, accessing array in constant time (how many car/cdr pairs you need for that?)

Important is that neither of the described facts add something to the value of one language against another and usually serve only as a basis for speculation.

Edit: when I'm saying "went out of common use", I mean that elegant alternatives like

logger.log("Expensive calculation is going to be: {0}", objectWithExpensiveToStringMethod);

have emerged.