skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wish I could up this one more. I am in the process of playing with Lisp (in my case, Common Lisp, the SBCL variant to be specific) and I would love to see people with production services in any Lisp, or even Scheme.

I have been very attracted to the idea of Lisp, specifically as I discovered teepeedee and teepeedee2 as being some of the first truly fast web servers [0], and now I found wookie,[1] an evented web server running on top of libevent. I really want to play with that.

The closest thing I know of to people running "prod services on Lisp" are the Untyped guys in the Racket Scheme community [2], and not much else. I know pg and company became famous on Viaweb and Lisp, but since then there are scarce examples. However, the amount of bitching libraries and cool books (pg's book included) make me want to buck the trend and do it anyway, even if no one watches and I end up in my own ditch writing code to dig my way out for the all the unstable or non-existent pieces of code waiting for me.

[0] https://github.com/vii/teepeedee2

[1] https://github.com/orthecreedence/wookie/

[2] https://github.com/untyped
In 1996, this could very well be real. In fact it was quite a common opinion, held by many intelligent people.

And many aspects of the Internet were just that, fads. With hyped up "cyber"-everything, it was hard to see the forest for the trees. Hence the bubble and collapse.

Also, it took a long time for the Internet to actually be better at many things. Yellow Pages mentioned are a good example. It took a decade from hype to reality before the Internet made the local Yellow Pages superfluous.

(Personally, I had been waiting for something like the internet to happen since the 80's, but that makes me a hacker and a nerd, not a visionary...)
The Two Envelopes Problem: the most boring paradox in the world
I've heard this argument a lot. It was given as a reason for why Nokia went with Win Phone, even though the writing was on the wall that Win Phone is a failure and represents Nokia's suicide note.

And that's why people bring up Android into the conversation. Because Samsung, and not Apple, is the most profitable smartphone maker and because the pie is huge and still growing. I would have bought a Lumia if it came with Android. My wife and my friends too.
not sure, but as a wp user that made me sort of happy - probably the first time i've seen that on hn..

my guess would be ease of porting, though that's purely a guess. i am though starting to notice an increase in the number of same-day releases for wp as ios, and in some cases (like disney games recently) ahead of android.

though still small, i really think the platform's gotten to the point where it makes sense for devs to at least consider it, especially as many times the effort to port from ios is sufficiently small to justify the work.
> With Common Lisp/Scheme, so much time is spent reinventing wheels due to smaller communities

I'm not sure, but I think that C and C++ ecosystem has at least the same amount of libraries available as Java. And the reason why I mention this is that many Lisps have FFI which makes integrating those libraries almost seamless. Aside from Gambit-C, which compiles Scheme code to C and so supports inline C code, for example Racket has very nice DSSL for FFI, which reduces the need for glue code to one or two lines of code per imported function.

Integration with native Java libraries is easier from JVM languages, of course, but then there are many Lisps for JVM too. And for CLR, where tail call elimination exists. So if you want to write in Lisp, but are worried about lack of libraries, you really have many options. Clojure is alright, but saying that it's the only choice if you need access to libraries is not quite true.
Involuntary unemployment is at 7%; it's a macro issue.
RxJava: Functional Reactive Programming on the JVM
8.1 also heavily pushes logging on with a Microsoft Account. 8.0 had a small print option to use a local account but that is gone now and you have to submit a bad email/password combo 3 times before it gives in and lets you setup a local account.

I'll stick to a local account per machine thanks very much. Would rather not have MS holding the keys on whether I can logon to my own machine or not, nor give them free big data for onselling to marketers.
"Answer a survey question to continue reading this content..."

Flagged.
I'm British and until American TV I'd never heard anyone call them 'Legos'
> you have to submit a bad email/password combo 3 times before it gives in and lets you setup a local account.

Ike. That's horrible. Who in the world thought that hiding a standard user account would be a good idea?
Unfortunately, that's not true. There are a lot of people out there who genuinely think that the poor in the Western world are simply lazy, and that they could manage perfectly well in similar circumstances.

I've seen quite a few of those comments on HN. I recall one commenter, even, claiming that the obesity problem in the US proved that welfare payments were generous if not over-generous, because "our poor eat like gluttons".

The more evidence against idiotic viewpoints like that which accumulates through experiments like this, the better.
Maybe so. I wonder though, if it's cheaper to produce it synthetically and impossible to tell the difference in the final product, wouldn't those people who produce it now (out of greed) be very tempted to use the synthetic process, but still claim that they use the "authentic" one?
Perhaps they provide extensions for the numbers to avoid this issue?
Is it a syntax error to talk Java without playing buzzword bingo?

"Leverage proven techniques and technologies"? What does that even mean?
Unlocking iPhone 5S with chopped finger
Are you saying there are no jobs?

I just looked up on craigslist, and there are tons of postings for unskilled jobs, such as delivery, servers, greeters, waiters, busboys, hosts, runners, coat checkers, etc.

If you have any skills, there are even more options.
You'll be happy to know that btrfs support will come come through devmapper by 0.7.
I take it you're in favour of "just give them cash" programs? That people should be able to decide for themselves what to spend their money on? That's a position I can respect (if not entirely agree with), but I wonder how consistently you apply it.

What do you think about childcare subsidies? If a government gives poorer parents a rebate or a discount (functionally identical to a voucher) on care services or education, is this patronising because the government isn't trusting them to spend the money wisely? Does this infringe upon their agency, or cost them essential self-respect?
Step 1: Unplug internet problem solved.

Alternatively, I thought this was to have been remedied by RTM. Booting in a VM with a new HD to test)
Just downvote this, no point responding to trolls.
Because the people behind MariaDB are the original mysql devs.
Impressive.

Only one thing bugs me: "but I replace 'xor' with a mathematically equivalent 'modulus' operation."

Unless you scan 256,512,768,etc. number of ports there will be bias, and sequence only looks random. I suggest the author to take a look at this:

http://eternallyconfuzzled.com/arts/jsw_art_rand.aspx
They really do seem to have jumped the shark and it makes me wonder whether I'll still be using Windows at home and coding in the Windows stack in a few years.
"If you are incapable of getting a minimum wage job, you are either lazy or disabled or mentally ill."

I hate to say [[citation needed]], but I really think that if you're going to make an absolute statement which completely dismisses a massive source of suffering, you need to prove it in some convincing way.

"I know disabled people working for much more than minimum wage."

...and therefore all people, disabled or not, can find minimum-wage work?

Logical fallacy.
The article is written in English and includes a mention of teletext, which means the author was probably in the UK. The UK wasn't quite on the bleeding edge of internet tech in the late 90's. Computers were much more expensive in the UK than in North America or Asia and local telephone calls were metered by the minute. If you paid for a month's subscription to an internet provider, you'd still have pay your telco by the minute just to use your dial-up modem! Needless to say, not only did this make everything more expensive, it also added time-pressure to browsing. Get on, get your data, get off! Quick! It's a minor thing, but really must have changed the experience for early users in the UK.
If you weren't alive and sentient during the time this was written, it's pretty easy to dismiss it as absurd. I mean, obviously this guy was a total fool, right? He didn't see the overwhelming tidal wave of change coming at him! What a moron! He should've looked past the fact that nobody knew what the internet was, and that only a few people even had modems. Or that it was so difficult for the average person to connect to "the net" that the idea of a coffeehouse full of dedicated "internet computers" that you rented by the hour seemed like a great business plan.

What are you dismissing as absurd right now? Maybe it's a lame portable music player that seems small and primitive. Maybe it's a me-too social network for Harvard undergrads. Maybe it's a website where you rent out your air mattress to strangers.

In other words: we're all living in a big glass house. Easy with the stones.
What do you mean what does it mean ?

Leverage = take advantage of

Proven = demonstrated to have worked

Techniques = using one approach versus another

Technologies = existing code
I was 12 when this was written. We had a computer that could connect to the internet via dial-up, pay by the minute.

My experience with the internet was that it was useless, but exciting. I'm not sure why exactly it felt exciting, but I think it had something to do with the chaos of it. There was porn (and rumours about the porn). Information about drugs and weird religions. About a year after this article, I could use huge internet directories to do what I now do procrastinating on wikipedia and ICQ for what we now call social networking. ICQ had a button started a chat with a random person somewhere in the world. 90% would chat back.

I think the wildness of it somehow signalled to me that it was a big deal. Wild means open ended. Thats ultimately what made the internet different from telephones, fax, teletext and all the other stuff the author compares it to.
OP here, I think I said it several times that SkyDrive is not a backup system, despite MS trying to claim it is.
On the general issue of securely sending signed documents, I'd like to see a federal agency with credibility provide such a service. In particular, this seems like a great opportunity for the post-physical US Postal Service
"There are jobs available" != "There are enough jobs for everyone".
Are you saying there are no jobs?

I just looked up op craigslist, and there are tons of postings for unskilled jobs, such as delivery, servers, greeters, waiters, busboys, hosts, runners, coat checkers, etc.

If you have any skills, there are even more options.
If Panera's corporate website is to be believed, they've been donating unsold goods since they were founded in 1988, most recently with their 'Day-End Dough-Nation' program.
Someone who will retire in 12 months.
"Realistically, most people just drag stuff to a USB stick periodically and that's good enough for backup. That's how it really works."

Most of my friends and colleagues say 'what is a backup?' when I ask.

So a sync to a skydrive account may be better than what they have already, but I think the OA was saying that Win 8.1 could have made a genuine backup easier to do and less 'technical', thus improving data safety.

Instead the Microsoft people chose a different approach. The OA thinks that once people lose files because of an infection or corruption of storage, and if those files are synced large scale data loss will occur, and users will blame it on Skydrive.
Just encrypt your laptop hdd?
So the SkyDrive setup screen declares that it will 'back up files to the cloud' while it doesn't, and there is no reliable default back-up solution that ships with Windows 8.1. I'd say it isn't so much the article that's 'idiotic', but how little Microsoft seems to care about providing ways to keep your files safe if you're using Windows...
Many of the comments here are just to complain that this does not correctly account for how poor people live and then basically give him shit for it.

Have you tried to live on SNAP when you don't have to? Though so, given the guy a break.
The poor can't eat empathy.

Go start a company and then make some good jobs - pay your customer service people well and you will reap it in.
I've been running Firefox with CertPatrol add-on and if there's one take away is that simple client-side pinning generates so much noise that it conditions you into completely ignoring any certificate changes. Way, way too many websites either change their certs regularly or they use a CDN (and sometimes more than one) so that the page ends up getting a different cert on virtually every load. The most obvious example is Twitter's web interface - I am not a heavy user, but I still need to click through a dozen certificate changes per day.

TACK is certainly a must-have and I'm really looking forward it being a native part of browsers, but there will still be likely a lot of (high-profile) websites that won't play along :-/

[0] http://patrol.psyced.org
NSA Spies on International Payments
Meet and Tweet - The man who met his Twitter followers
Nexus 5 Camera to have Optical Image Stabilisation
How do any of those companies always get away?
I know it's not really to do with the service, but 1% of profits go to preserving pandas?

Surely if you care about pandas enough to name your service after the creature, you can do better than 1% of profits?
Far be it from me to say that the choice of programming language doesn't matter, or that picking one slightly off the trodden path is not a sign of a certain openness of mind. I also think that Clojure is particularly enjoyable, elegant and beautiful, while at the same time extremely practical, easy to learn, and well suited to modern application development; it is the best designed programming language I have encountered in my almost-two-decades-long programming career (with Julia giving it a run for its money if only it had been implemented on top of the JVM as well).

However, I've seen a clear inverse correlation between the magnitude of technical challenge and the emphasis on the choice of programming language. It is usually web application developers that spend the time and effort picking what they deem to be a modern, or "more productive" programming language. It is as it should be, because most productive languages, Clojure included, are usually more productive for applications – not complex basic algorithms, or the development of novel data structures. Application developers spend 90% or more of their time writing and debugging production code, so they'd better spend some time picking and learning a language that makes their work easier.

But people in the fields of computer vision, artificial intelligence, machine learning, concurrent data-structures and others – very smart, very forward thinking people – would pick Java or C/C++ nine times out of ten, and not only because these languages are better suited to their task performance-wise, but because they have other, more important things to think about. If your challenge is not translating a business model into code, but solving a real algorithmic or technical problem, then the programming language really doesn't matter, and you're better off sticking with the one(s) you know best.

If 95% of your time is spent thinking anyway, it doesn't matter if your language can reduce the remaining 5% of actual development by a factor of two or more. IBM's Watson would not have come about sooner if its engineers had chosen Haskell over Java.

ADD.:
"Productive" programming language are better when you need to solve the same problem over and over (say retrieve data from a database and generate HTML). But when your problem is more or less one-of-a-kind, these productivity boosts either disappear or don't matter. When you're handcrafting a magnificent chair, picking the best assembly line is irrelevant. Chances are it's been designed to solve other problems and retrofitting it to your requirements is extra work, and even if it wasn't, this chair need only be made once. Mass production tools are unnecessary.
I've been a happy windows users for a long time, but 7 will probably be my last windows OS - and not because I want to go elsewhere, they are actively pushing me away.

It really hurts to see that after so many years of searching itself microsoft finally got things right again with 7 and made a great OS, only for them to throw it all away in the hopes of trying to do a OSX-like thing which ended up being subpar, unsurprisingly, and on top of it most of their regular desktop lovers such as me hate them for it.
Cota - Wireless Power Revolution
I think you are being to kind if this was written in 86 it would be fair comment in 86 when online was Telecom Gold (dialcom) PRESTEL and CIX.

But in 96 the internet was just starting to ramp up and beak out of the nerd ghetto.
>This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." -- Western Union internal memo, 1876.

>"The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys." -- Sir William Preece, chief engineer of the British Post Office, 1876.

>"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" -- David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.

Point being that for every good invention somebody will think it has no value. The opposite is also likely to be the case so the really interesting question is how do you distinques between the two?
That small print to use a local account from 8.0 was moved one extra click away to the page you get on when you click on the button to register a new Microsoft Account in 8.1.

So it's still there but you have to really look for it.
This is actually a solved problem in some industries using a technique called "3 point analysis". I've no idea why it hasn't really caught on among developers; it's very useful. Essentially it goes like this:

1. Estimate the very best possible outcome. How long would something take if everything went to plan?

2. Estimate the very worst possible outcome. If everything that can go wrong does, how long will the task take?

3. Estimate the most likely outcome. Knowing what you do about the client, the task, the tech, etc, how long is it likely to take.

(Point 3 is the normal way of estimating.)

The advantage of 3 point analysis is that you can use the difference between the times to estimate risk. If the best and worst outcomes are similar, then there's little risk of things going horribly wrong. If the best and the likely times are similar but the worst is much longer then there's something that can completely screw up - identify what that is and defend against it. If the likely and worst times are similar but the best time is much shorter, identify why that's the case and try to make sure it happens. And so on.

Better yet, by taking the aggregate best times for a set of requirements and comparing it against the worst, you can get a good view of the overall risk of a project.

Very useful indeed.
For an open source project, with an open API, take a look at musicbrainz, they're used extensively in the music industry.

If you're looking for open as just openly available, you've been given a bunch of other examples already.
How do you deal with the abuse reports? I tried this on a Digital Ocean's droplet against port 80 and sure enough I got reported for abuse in less than 5 minutes after running the script at only 100k rate. It's only port 80!
Lately there have been a few discussions about PGP keys and smartcards are always mentioned. Would smartcards be a solution for the client-side crypto objections? Could you make a secure version of cryptocat by just making it a wrapper around a smartcard reader? Could you use a smartcard to make secure use of PGP in webmail feasible?
I think the point is that most of the time when you think "I need something that does x", there is a library for that; whether it is a core library or not. In Lisp I guess you often find something very specific that doesn't quite solve the problem you have.

Having said that, I really liked the Google Guava library, although a good bit of that stuff is working around or solving problems with Java itself.

https://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/
Decades ago this was one of the features of the OSI X.400 email standard the idea was you could do physical delivery as well as electronic - leveraging the fact that many PTT's had relationships with their country's post office.

I think the 88 version of x.400 also had non repudiation and electronic signatures - its a long time since I read the blue books.
look nice but I don't think the whole panda branding and "save the panda" going to work for your target market which is SME and up.
[tongue in cheek] This is the first strong argument I've ever seen in favour of FPP.

My point with the posters-on-lampposts is that that it shows that candidates have to fight for thier seats. 'safe seats in Ireland' aren't as safe as 'safe seats in UK'. Which is good thing for democracy!

I don't think it's a good thing to have political debate defined by political extremes flinging mud at each other, and PR tends towards that. And I don't like the constant trend towards politics being run by a distinct, professional political class. PR plays right into that.

Counter-example: The UK. It has FPTP, and it has all those things! It has professional political class! It has politicans who sling mud.

(Ireland, with PR, also has a professional political class, and mudslinging politicans BTW. Neither PR nor FPTP solve that).
It's just a bunch of text and diagrams. Can't they stick it on a $5 DO VM or even Dropbox?

Why do people bother with these crappy hosting services that require people to pay to see your content?

I am honestly asking what these people actually offer other than hosting. I'm totally up for setting up a little web app for hosting scientific papers, but what would be preventing me from competing with these people?
Best Corn Doughnut Fritter Recipe Ever
There were people who shared your opinion about XP->Vista. Then 7 came out many of those people were happy to go from XP->7. So, I doubt 7 will be your final Windows OS... If they haven't pissed you off enough to move yet, you'll likely end up using Windows 9.
I am still traumatized by it.

I can image you are. Telling the story might enable you to own the trauma in a way you haven't until now. I can't, however, say that would be best for you to do. Only you know that. I hope you find the healing you deserve for this.
Motivational CORNER: DO THE BEST YOU CAN
I think I have read two pieces of fiction in my adult life. I'd love to read for recreation much more, but if I have time to read a fantasy or horror or science fiction novel, I have time to read something related to my field, instead.
Finally one simple solution to all your development problems
Athletics cost colleges, students millions
Right..... So you're saying that your code works? Like, it doesn't crash? That's... awesome...

Buzzword bingo does not add value. It only obscures meaning. Of course your code works. Of course you use existing technologies. That work. In existing code. That you leveraged. Using techniques. And technologies.

Jesus, I hate this kind of language.
In California, I saw the virtues – and vices – of the new economy