skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A friend of my sons comes from a house definitely not focussed on teaching reading and writing at a young age. Yet their 5 year old son is streets ahead of his age for reading and writing. He is naturally gifted at it. None of his siblings share this trait or even an interest.

Another friend of mine found out their son was a reader when he started kindergarten. He was always 'reading' the books in the house, but his parents thought he had just memorised them from being ready. In fact his kindergarten teachers gave him new stuff to read and he lapped it up. He was reading the first Harry Potter book by the second grade. My friend actually got frustrated because his son didn't want to do father/son things, but preferred to read.

Some kids are gifted readers, just like some are gifted at hitting a ball with a bat. The important thing is (a) spend extra time and attention if it is clear they do have a gift and (b) don't feel like your child is somehow behind if there is a kid like this in their class.
Steve Yegge regarding Clojure (2012):

" For a few years I had been really excited to start learning Clojure, and my initial experiences with it were quite positive. However, I eventually learned that the Clojure community is extremely conservative. That is is pretty unusual for a Lisp dialect. Lisp is widely regarded as one of the most liberal language families in existence. And Clojure has the superficial appearance of being a laissez-faire kind of language. It is quite expressive, including a -- ahem -- liberal dose of new syntax. And it eschews static type annotations and strong type modeling in favor of a small set of highly regular, composable data types and operations -- not unlike, say, Scheme or Python. But the resemblance to a liberal language ends there. Clojure's community came pre-populated with highly conservative programmers from the pure-functional world: basically Haskell/ML types (lots of puns today!) who happen to recognize the benefits of Lisp's tree syntax. So under its expressive covers, everything about Clojure is strongly conservative, with a core overriding bias towards protecting programmers from mistakes."

https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/KaSKeg4v...

He defines conservative:

"I hope you'll agree that this definition is minimally controversial. After all, the adjective "conservative" is more or less synonymous with caution and risk aversion. Financial conservatism is frequently (and intuitively) associated with age and with wealth. "

My own feeling is that he misunderstands functional programming. I could say "functional programming offers safety from side-effects" and then he might say "Yes, that is what I mean by conservative" but who wants to have their code undermined by uncontrolled side effects? By his definition, "conservative" applies to every programmer; which makes me think his definition is useless.
Show HN: My startup gives you a live stream of fan photos & videos
I suspect this is because of the addthis social services. Will dig into this later!

Edit: my Ghostery reveals just that: Addthis and Google Analytics. I could perhaps replace Addthis with just a Twitter/Facebook social button, but I liked the layout of the Addthis buttons.
WTO agrees global trade deal worth $1tn
Easy to organize with craigslist.
FBI can secretly turn on laptop cameras without the indicator light
Though her company initially hired her for her problem-solving skills, she is regularly unable to fix actual problems because nobody will listen to her ideas.

So true. Half (or maybe more) of being successful as a creative person is learning to play politics and sell your ideas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Messaging_and_Presen...
Sigh. This blog post again.

At least it's been posted with the "2006" date in the title, but some of the problems:

1. The title is catchy and provocative, but it should really read "Common Lisp is Not An Acceptable Lisp". "Lisp" by itself is a family of languages, not a single language. Most of the blog post is dedicated to attributes of Common Lisp specifically. The title always struck me as a bit disingenuous and link-baitey, especially since his very first point is about how there are multiple different Lisps.

2. Which implementation of Common Lisp are you talking about? There are several, and when you talk Haskell "kicking its ass all over the performance map" because of the type system, it's helpful to know whether you're talking about CLISP (an interpreter by default), or SBCL (a Lisp compiler, and one that is highly focused on speed.)

3. CLOS looks weird to people who are used to "object oriented" languages like Java, sure, but it's much more true to the nature of object-oriented programming as a whole. I'll refrain from pulling out the old Alan Kay quotation in which he (the father of the term "object oriented") identifies Lisp and Smalltalk as the only two OO languages that he's aware of, but CLOS is much more true to the spirit of OO programming than any other system I've worked with (except perhaps Smalltalk)[0].

4. "There is no acceptable Lisp". In 2013, this is utter nonsense. I'll give Yegge the benefit of the doubt when it comes to 2006, but even still, it's rather frustrating to read 3000 words (yes, I counted) about the shortcomings of Common Lisp, and then suddenly the author jumps to the conclusion that all Lisp dialects are equally bad, with no supporting evidence.

I have my fair share of frustrations with Common Lisp. The spec shows its age in many ways, and I really wish it had a number of features that I like about modern Lisp-like languages like Racket[1] - dialect scoping, hygenic macros, optional typing, etc.

But I cringe when I see links to this post in 2013. For a blog post that's so long, it's surprisingly spare on evidence that supports the argument presented in title or the conclusion, even if it gets a number of things right along the way.

[0] As pointed out below (thanks, cwzwarich), Kay's quotation mentions Lisp (not CLOS by name), so it's a jump for me to assume that it implies his support of CLOS specifically. That said, if you implemented OO-programming (as Kay defined it, not as Gosling defined it) in Lisp in the most straightforward way possible, you'd end up writing something that resembled CLOS.

[1] I say "Lisp-like" to pre-emptively deflect any debate over whether or not Racket is a "true" LISP (it certainly isn't a true Scheme, because it is not fully compliant with any single Scheme standard; it uses a hybrid of R5RS and R6RS)

EDIT: Okay, here's the Kay quotation: "OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I’m not aware of them.
" (http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht81Ht/doc_kay...)
WOW just wow. Would have been cheaper to fly first class to any other country in the world and get the baby there. It's really time for significant overhaul of the health care system here in the US
Because you can criticize things only if you have a better alternative.
"Those sneaky fucking Russians."
Thanks for submitting this. This was a good introduction to Higgs. It was reading the comments here after reading the article that reminded me of a paper by Leif D. Nelson, Joseph P. Simmons, and Uri Simonsohn, "Let's Publish Fewer Papers,"

http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/papers/fewer.pdf

suggesting that psychology, and maybe other disciplines, could be improved if scholars published less often than they now do. "We agree that it is impractical, but it is just a thought experiment. Still, we stand behind the notion that the ideal is much closer to 'a paper a year' than to 'publish as many papers as you can.'"
Fair enough, but some people do and more people should. If you are being granted access to your records, electronically, by your physician, then you should know (it's a part of the second phase meaningful use requirement for emr).

If I get bloodwork done I go to Quest, so I can access my results using their Gazelle app on the iphone - it's not the greatest but it works.
>for no real reason

I won't give anyone investment advice, but the recent drop does have a real reason behind it. The Chinese government released a notice[1] tightening regulation on bitcoin activity within the country. There is of course debate about the implications of this, but the market has spoken and the price has fallen, so here we are. It's no different than a company's press release affecting that company's stock price.

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1s5hzl/my_human_tra...
I live where $10/day is considered a decent wage, so $670/month sounds pretty good. If one spends their working years paying for a house and saving for discretionary expenses, with the knowledge that food and utilities will be covered by the basic income, it'd be much more than adequate. The real problem is that many of the more adventurous types would just go live in India!

Health care is a politically charged issue, so I'd say replace social security but leave medicare out of it. Obviously something fair would have to be worked out for people who have already paid into the system with an expectation of benefits much higher than $500/month..
Racket has become a pleasant and acceptable, modern, batteries included Lisp as well.

Now our cup runneth over. Common Lisp is the same as it was while Clojure and Racket offer ways to a lispy future.
Introducing 6 Second Music Video Previews
This ought to be a giant warning sign.

Illiquidity of that magnitude should suggest that you stay the fuck away, that there's no real market in bitcoins and therefore that the risk is probably much greater than you perceive.

But, hey, this just means that I'm envious of all your internet riches, or something like that, so feel free to disregard.
> So painful to read.

Have you considered some sort of reading program? It's not as hard as one might think.
Great idea, but why is this thing on front page if its not working ? I see nothing to select in "Select Procedure" menu.
Being educated is the default state of being. An education is literally available everywhere, and kids especially seem to get excited about the process. Parents would have to explicitly set up an environment to prevent their kids from receiving an education of some kind, which, I agree, would be troubling. How realistic is that kind of environment though? Aside from that, it really is just a question of how.
Snapchat's very odd encryption and authentication
Can't wait to try but right now, it looks like there's something wrong with the dropdown menu: Cannot select a procedure.
This shows off one of lisp's (INHO) unfortunate anachronisms, namely that your "other car is first".

CDR and CAR refer to machine instructions on the IBM-704 that had a (by today's standards) a somewhat quaint handling of "words" in memory, roughly allowing CAR to refer to a data element at the head of a linked list, and CDR to refer to the pointer to the rest of the list (or the empty list) (As well as a CONS instruction to build a word in memory from for parts, including the two 15 bit values that CAR/CDR refer to)[1].

Lisp then extended this by allowing programmers to combine c(a|d)+r, to get the equivalent of second, third, first-of-second-sublist etc. I'm not convinced the succinctness is worth it -- apparently experienced lisp-coders disagree. The TL;DR is that if you don't know lisp, this code is the same as the above, and is a bit more intuitive:

;;takes two list l1 and l2 of same length, and return (l1[0] l2[0]
;;l1[1] l2[1] ...)
(defun mix (list1 list2)
(if (null list1)
nil
(append (mix (rest list1)
(rest list2))
(list (first list1)
(first list2)))))

Other languages might use head and tail, rather than first and rest. I'll agree that list1 and list2 might not offer much more readability than l1 and l2 -- at least not with the comments given.

[1] Most of this is paraphrased from wikipedia, and what I remember from various times I've tried to get started with lisp, without ever really getting entirely comfortable with the language. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAR_and_CDR

[edit: I didn't notice the comment about reversing the list, but I think it is rather obvious that (append rest list(first)) does indeed reverse the order...? I actually wondered if append had a strange order of parameters while I "rewrote" the code :-) ]
I am experiencing the same trouble here, no menu to select...
You can get predicted columns via https://github.com/no0p/alps ... Turns out that adding words like infer to the lex is kind of a big project in pgsql. Excellent work with the language aspect of it in BayesDB -- well thought out.
The first thing that comes to mind is "Message to the Fed - NAS"
> I'll refrain from pulling out the old Alan Kay quotation in which he (the father of the term "object oriented") identifies Lisp and Smalltalk as the only two OO languages that he's aware of.

I think he was referring to Lisp in general in that quotation, not CLOS, although I remember glowing praise from him regarding The Art of the Metaobject Protocol.
Ah, quite right, I see that's on their site:

http://abbottstore.com/adult-nutrition/ensure-complete-milk-...

But, this crap is not why people are stoked about soylent, since the vast majority of people who are excited about soylent don't seem to be aware that there are a bunch of products that are pretty close (or possibly better in some cases) already.
One important thing I and you gained from our education was the learned ability to apply ourselves to tasks set by another

this is entirely appropriate, and has nothing to do with industrialization. to have a mate, raise children, and prosper, you need to be able to respond to the needs of at least one other adult, one or more demanding children who are incapable of satisfying their own needs, and tohe ability to do these things in an environment over which you have relatively little control.

It's all very well to complain about abstraction and what Marx dubbed 'the dull compulsion of economic relations,' but you might as well complain about the fact that your personal creativity is still constrained by the reality of your body's needs for food and sleep, no matter how much you resent stopping what you're doing to make a sandwich.

Likewise, I really don't like the fact that my dog tends to wake me up around 6am, but it's not because of any ideology; if I ignore his entreaties by refusing to get out of bed then sooner or later he'll end up peeing on the floor. I mention this very prosaic example because of the lessons of Zen Buddhism (a philosophy dedicated to the identification and avoidance of unnecessary abstractions) is that while meditation can free you from illusions, it's not going to free you from the basic necessities of living in the world.
See what goes on inside the brain of an entrepreneur
There is absolutely nothing wrong with floppy disks, as long as a) you have readers and writers on both sides, b) your data fits on them, and c) you can get replacements for the foreseeable future. The point is having a process that works. Just because they don't work for most use cases doesn't mean everyone should switch away from use cases which they do address, at a potentially high cost.
Side effects are useful. We use them all the time: IO, graphics, sockets, signals, etc. We even use mutable data because in certain cases it's more efficient. So I think I agree with Yegge there wrt, "conservative."
Why I left Facebook
When I first read Guy Steele's 2nd edition of Common LISP, the Language in the early 90s I remember thinking "This is a huge language, how could anyone implement this reliably?"

A recent pass through that book, and the language actually seems small. Not trivial, but definitely doable by a smallish group of people in a reasonable amount of time. Implementing a browser DOM plus JavaScript, or a C++ compiler, seems a lot more daunting.
Well, the natural thing to do is compile the lisp to javascript and use webgl!

Would be interesting to see how much is needed to get it running with some other gl context. Also -- maybe this'll run under OS X and windows without requiring a X server for the GL context?
Why Canada and the U.S. Should Merge, Eh?
Apple Honors Mandela on Home Page
Fantastically informative post. I learned.

As a slight addition, by eliminating only cost-based social programs like welfare, SNAP, etc., it would free up enough in spending to pay each adult citizen in the US approximately $12k per year, and probably more, because the administration costs should be less for one program vs. the many.

That amount could be added to the kitty as well.

I'm still on the fence as to whether or not we should have a basic income. I vastly prefer it to the deeply flawed social programs in place, and I suspect that any implementation we'd get from our government would be deeply flawed as well, or either progressive/regressive/broken in some way, but I don't know if I'm on board with the actual idea of it -- that said, it's very, very compelling, and your approach seems rational, Constitutionally valid, and practically, very workable.
So if you go and say you are seizing, they will just stabilize you till you are done seizing then kick you out? Or at that point they will attempt to collect for the emergency care and prohibit further care until you can prove you can pay for it?
Can someone explain lines 49-52?
The crosscat paper (http://web.mit.edu/vkm/www/crosscat.pdf) is super-terse. Is there a more gentle description somewhere?

I'm quite familiar with generative models and MCMC sampling and reasonably familiar with the Dirichlet process though I've never implemented it.
>A few days? People get upset if you haven't replied in an hour.

I've solved this problem by always taking forever to answer e-mails. If it's important, people just call me.

Whether this is good or not is questionable, however.
http://www.sci-news.com/geology/science-fresh-groundwater-re...
> Private schooling is bad; public schooling is even worse. That's where ideology substitutes for academics as well.

Not picking on you, but this comes up a lot about public education as a tool for brainwashing. Often the implication is it's by those "liberal teachers". I must say, based on the voting record in the US, those teachers are incredibly ineffective brainwashers.
NYT article on this a few days ago...I thought exactly about an app like this...kudos.
Hello Frank, your memories of reality as you observed it are a lie. Pass the rolls please.
You haven't addressed the issue of relevancy. Let me put it another way: How much do we need to know about the journalist's views beyond the views that are expressed in the article?

As far as I can tell, the article already reflects the author's ideology. So by reading the article you are not going to be mislead. The page you linked cited some instances of people promoting policies that would help the Koch brother's commercial interests. In that case the link is relevant.

But if someone writes something right wing and you post "LOOK OUT EVERYONE THIS GUY IS A RIGHT WINGER", that does not add useful information.
Nobody said that side effects aren't useful, as Rich Hickey would be the first to remind you. Clojure has full support for side effects and mutable data structures if you need it for efficiency. The point is that in Clojure, there are easy and idiomatic ways to control complexity by minimizing side effects and use of mutability.
I would argue that work does favour creativity. If you go to work just like everyone else does, you'll make an income just like everyone else does.

It is only the people who reject the status quo and find their own way to work that actually are able to make incomes that rise well above the typical worker.
Two problems with this for me:

1) I can't just nap like that. I can lay there for thirty minutes, an hour, or more, without falling asleep. Reading or watching something usually helps, but in all cases, the degree of exhaustion, or other fatigue or unconsciousness-inducing factor, has to be fairly high.

2) I can't wake up after 20-30 minutes. I just can't. If I'm going to take a nap, it's going to turn into a 2-3 hour nap (and more often, a 3-4 hour nap). And then I'll be up all night.
Unprivileged GPU access vulnerability - CVE-2013-5987
I'm getting tired of seeing frequent, uninteresting docker-did-x, docker-says-y announcements here. Can we save it for major features that matter please?
Exactly. Some more argumentation at http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/bitcoin-medium-of-exchange/
After more than a decade of seeing exceptions in use it has become very apparent that no matter what they might have been told when they learned about exceptions most people use them for flow control. Mostly because they are a way of doing flow control.
Please. The only proper answer is to gather as many friends as you can and all implement the peasant's algorithm together.
If all this talk of Comcast is about them doing ad pages for NXDOMAIN results, these jokes/digs on them are rather stale - and incorrect.

When Comcast switched to DNSSEC, they dropped their (non-existent) domain hijacking as it was an incompatible practice ... Almost 2 years ago, infact.

http://dns.comcast.net/index.php/help#faq2

I don't have love for Comcast but please do make accurate commentary.
I'm tired of Google's arrogance
No, but I would think that it is often useful to indicate when one does not know of a better option than the one one is criticizing.

Because "this is a bad choice" has a connotation that that is not the one that should be made, but that a different known one should be made instead, I think.

Of course, the indication can be implicit, or from context, etc.

And there might be exceptions,
But I think this generally holds?
oh sorry, I must've introduce that error when fixing other things. Thanks for the notice.
I think the combination of expressiveness, flexibility, and safety that Yegge describes is exactly what clojure is aiming for, so he's actually giving it a huge unintentional complement. He simply doesn't like the goals of the language.
Or, "There is a long history of exaggerated concern, rightly derided by economists, with the replacement and hence displacement of workers by machines."

http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2013/03/automation-and-emp...

Abrupt technological advances can disrupt certain industries very quickly, and it can take a while for the wages and the workforce size to find a new equilibrium. But I agree, that's much different than the sudden and dystopian end of all labor.
It may not be true by the letter of the law, but in practice, it does restrict employee movement.
As I read about the offshore drilling strategies, the first thought that came to my mind was, "At least a drilling accident resulting in a leak is unlikely to do much environmental damage to the ocean and the beaches near the rig."
"70 Distinct Ways to Encode <" would be the traditionally correct way to say it. I should have made that more clear in my original rant. My objection to using "unique" in this context is that doing so further erodes the original, narrow meaning of "unique" as "one of a kind". I suppose that makes me a prescriptivist and I'm okay with that.
Cheer up, we are building some too; there are 4 nuclear plants under construction at present, which are the first new additions to the US nuclear fleet in 30 years: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/business/energy-environmen...
FFI in Emacs
To me 5000 lines of C code is a LOT of code. Linus's first release of Linux was only 10,000 lines of code. Given much higher expressiveness of Lisp, I think 5000 lines of List code is not all that to boast about. I can't pull a reference here but according to one of the studies, the productivity of some of the well known programmers was measured at 10K LOC/year (yes, it's very loose measure of "productivity"). So writing 5000 lines of good code may require ~6 months, i.e., not a trivial amount of work. Although I agree it is cool to have X server in Lisp.
HillBilly Takes Over the World
Comparing HTML5 Mobile UI Frameworks