skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most of the complaints in this article boil down to "macros are too powerful." I think this is the key part of the argument:

"A smart programmer is not necessarily an empathetic language designer; they are occupations that require different skillsets. Giving any programmer on your team the ability to arbitrarily extend the compiler can lead to a bevy of strange syntax and hard-to-debug idiosyncrasies."

There are at least 2 counter-arguments to this:

1.) in the simplest case, just restrict the use of macros. A team can easily adapt the rule that only the most experienced engineer on the team is allowed to write or approve macros. (And in my experience, the need for macros is fairly rare. I think my ratio is something like 100 or 200 normal functions for every macro that I write.)

2.) macros allow all kinds of interesting type checking, and data structure validation, and therefore they make it surprisingly easy to validate data and types as your data and/or vars get passed around your system. Consider all of these very interesting tools you can use in the world of Clojure:

Prismatic Schema which allows validation that a data structure matches a schema of (possibly nested) types:

https://github.com/prismatic/schema

and this now offers coercion, which makes this fantastic for importing JSON from other sub-systems or outside vendors:

http://blog.getprismatic.com/blog/2014/1/4/schema-020-back-w...

(I assume you could easily validate before giving data to Liberator to export your data while conforming to your schema: http://clojure-liberator.github.io/liberator/ )

There is work being done on an optional type system:

https://github.com/clojure/core.typed

Much effort has been made to make contract programming easy in Clojure:

https://github.com/clojure/core.contracts

But also I find the built-in syntax for writing pre and post assertions is clean and easy to use:

http://blog.fogus.me/2009/12/21/clojures-pre-and-post/

In short, there are an abundance of mechanisms available with Clojure which help facilitate the enforcement of any kind of schema or contract, and some of these tools are enabled (and their syntax is made clean) thanks to macros.

In short: macros can be used for evil, but they can also be used for good. They are very powerful, so everyone should be judicious about their use, but there is no reason to argue that macros render a Lisp unfit for programming in the large.

Having said all that, I'll remind everyone that the ultimate counter-argument is offered by Paul Graham, in his essay "Beating the averages":

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

If that essay does not convince you of the value of macros/lisp, then nothing will.
The biggest problem with LISP is the lack of large organizations who use it.

C has all these problems as do C++, Java, Python, Ruby.
Ask HN : How to encourage sign ups and have users use the service?
I am the founder of a end-end cloud management & monitoring product with cool features like visual designing of deployments and configurable dashboards. We have raised a small angel fund with all other funds are bootstrapped through savings so far.
We have had several beta sign ups and in total we have around 150+ users.

We went live few weeks back. So far - sign ups are trickling very slowly. The feedback to whom we have demoed like what we have done and problem we are trying to solve. However the feedback from beta customers are slow to say the least. We thought we could get some quick signups, users using the system and then feedback. It is not happening much. Can some one suggest me what we can do better to reach out more prospects? Receive quick feedback from customers and get some coverage.

Unfortunately - we running short of cash and it is a deadlock with investors asking for paid customers.

As founder, I have exhausted all my savings on the venture (including 401K, college savings) on this. I am not willing to give up, but ground realities are just hard.
Similar type of deal with [going 64-bit](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=18323) on Mac OS X. Has languished for multiple years. DirectWrite shipped in 2009, one month after Snow Leopard with 64-bit recommended for apps by default.
I remember seeing the same kind of arguments about Ruby when it began to become popular. "Ruby is too dynamic. You shouldn't use it on large-scale projects."

Learning a language involves more than just learning syntax and semantics. You also need to learn how to write for maintainability. It sounds like the author is less certain about how to do that with Lisp, but instead of seeing it as a chance to learn more he writes off the entire Lisp family as impractical.
You can always buy him/her something; a soda, a cookie, probably anything from the store will improve his day and doesn't fit the definition of "tip".
Maybe you should do more fun things with your kid? You could even leave the house together with the kid. A further step might be visiting other people with kids, leaving the kids to play with each other and their parents with time to drink coffee and chat in the kitchen.

Or get an iPad.
Why not just:

font-family: sans-serif;

Most people will get their browser's Helveticoid default anyway, and people who have changed their browser's default will get the font they actually wanted.
Why is that a problem if it's just an apt-get install away?
Good arguments for why Python is a great little language, but no convincing ones regarding Lisp: there are no large software projects undertaken in Lisp recently (or ever?) that have failed because of it's extreme flexibility making collaboration impossible, no lisp programmers complain that there are too many ways of doing things or about "conceptual clutter" (ok, after my encounter with CL I'd complain about it, but I never got any real work done in CL so my opinion doesn't matter - maybe the "conceptual clutter" would've ended up to be "invaluable expresivity/flexibility" in a real world project) etc.
You an me b
Much of the time I can understand speech without trouble. Sometimes, often due to certain types of background noise, I have to explicitly concentrate on understanding. I can do it, but it's mentally tiring to maintain conscious focus on something usually taken care of by an "unconscious" mental process.

I mention this because:

> To me, [exhaustion when reading and understanding people] is a symptom of a poor Theory of Mind, or a conflict between the consciously held theory of mind and the internalized one.

It strikes me as likely that someone who isn't neurotypical may similarly be having to explicitly consciously process the reading of the other people around them. This may not be a poor theory of mind, but simply a side effect of a different neural architecture.

Your empathy habits and practices are admirable. I encourage you to cast your net even wider, though, when it comes to imagining versions of yourself with different neurological makeup.
Looks interesting but there's little said about it and the video doesn't make a lot of sense (or make the product look good).
Yeah basically, I'm incoherent when I don't edit, heh.
I'm very happy with Stripe. I would almost call their API beautiful. It's simple and well-designed, and has been very easy to integrate using stripe.js and stripe-scala.
> Recurring theme of HN success stories: setting a goal, and hustling to meet it by sheer determination and creativity.

don't forget to succeed first and then blog a retroactive confabulation of how strategic you were.
Sun.misc.Unsafe and off heap memory
> Mr. Thompson said that in the workplace, email had become a major barrier of efficiency. “People feel the need to include 10 other people on an email just to let them know they are being productive at work,” he said. “But as a result, it ends up making those other 10 people unproductive because they have to manage that email.”

The solution to that is not to fix email, or to fix the secretarial pool where memos used to be typed up with Cc lists, or to fix instant messaging or whatever's next. The solution to that problem is to fix that problem, that people feel insecure enough in their jobs (for lots of reasons) that they must waste other people's time to help them declare "I am valuable."
I mostly agree but fwiw, the usual counterargument on #2 is that those should be language facilities instead, which allows them to be carefully designed and then taken advantage of by the compiler. For example, in Racket (formerly PLT Scheme) you have: http://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/contracts.html
Ask HN: I want to learn how to prototype hardware. Where do I start?
I'm an iOS developer. I'm decent and have launched a couple of apps. With bluetooth LE and multipeer connectivity, I am very interested in learning about building a hardware device that pairs with my iPhone. Where can I go to learn more about prototyping?
It's not necessarily a very good idea (although death marches, used judiciously, do work)

No they don't.

Or that is: they sometimes work for your boss (or your customer), in the short run. But they don't work for you.

And when push comes to shove, that's who you need to look for, right?

There's no reason, other than a feeling that you're expiclity under the client (or employer's) thumb -- e.g. a short-term financial emergency; or you're feeling very early in your career, and that you can live without a shining reference from them, after you've made your way through the tunnel of pain they've laid out for you; or you just didn't vet the other party properly, and weren't aware of their manipulate (and perhaps sociopathic tendencies) -- to put up with death marches, ever.

All you have to do (absent one of the above-mentioned emergencies) is say, "I'm sorry about the external pressures you're facing, but asking me to put in these hours this doesn't seem to be in line with the parameters we set up at the outset for this project/job. It's also just not going to be good for your working relationship, in the longer haul. So either you're going to need to find additional resources to help you, or I'm going to have to pass."

It's not easy. But it's doable. And trust me, you'll respect yourself a lot more in the morning.

For further guidance and inspiration on this topic, please see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Ways_to_Leave_Your_Lover

"The answer is easy if you take it logical-ly..."
Unfortunately, gmail marks everything (well, 99%) as "priority" despite my training it for many months.
European culture is likely to have been far more shaped by feudalism than American culture is. You don't have to individually remember something for it to have an important effect on your values and actions.
TL;DR: He used to use drugs and booze to deal with his insecurities. Then he used money. Now he (apparently) uses the attention that comes from telling everyone how wise and honorable he has become.
Google (ITA Software) is not large enough.
Unless Congress doesn't keep the mortgage interest deduction and you renting friend doesn't have to pay if the furnace, water heater, or AC breaks. He also doesn't have to think about and set up a sinking fund/account for replacing the roof.
The OP is going to have kittens when he finds out about hylang (https://github.com/hylang/hy)
Algorithms are not enough: lessons bringing computer science to journalism
I actually find your post very interesting. It's written in a manner that confirms exactly what you say. On a scale of "empath" to "sociopath", I feel like I am much closer to an empath. And I find that it causes a lot of problems in my life: constantly worrying over what others are thinking, always trying to please everyone, obsessing over the way I construct emails and social exchanges. It's really a drag.

Occasionally I feel envy for people with sociopathic tendencies. How nice it would be to only worry about what makes yourself happy.

I've come to the conclusion though that for the most part, someone's level of empathy is mostly physiological/genetic and there's little I can do to change that. If I tried on purpose to care less towards others, I'd probably start feeling sick/guilty -- a biological reaction that I wouldn't be able to suppress.
> There's less mobility in social class

quick point of fact, this used to be true but is no longer the case.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/us/harder-for-americans-to...
I don't really disagree, but: You write as if the only options are "rich" and "poor". It's possible for the following two things both to be true: (1) Being poor sucks big, steaming donkey balls. (2) Being rich (as opposed to not-poor) is, for one reason or another, not a wise thing to aim for.

As it happens, I think #2 isn't correct, because given the way the world is (a) being rich is the only way to be reasonably well assured of never being poor, and (b) there are a whole lot of people in the world who are desperately poor, and if you care at all about them then you have a use for an unlimited quantity of money, namely sending it their way.

But in a less messed-up world, I think it would be eminently reasonable not to have a strong preference for being rich over merely comfortably off, and if the former takes a lot more work or risk than the latter then it would be reasonable not to bother.
It is GWT, so it is transpiled to JS. I remember when I first saw this project years ago, I was impressed. Back then GWT was the best choice for statically-typed, large JS project development IMO.
Finding the instructions when you know what to look for is easy; the hard part is knowing that it's possible and to look for it at all
That's such an interesting data! But why did you skipped years 5, 6, 7, and 8?

I'm in a year 7 and by interpolation it looks like I'm following your path.
Mortgage payments are not tax deductible. Currently the interest is. Congress could change that. But as it stands now it is something one needs to consider in the cost comparison. (You might be paying $1000 to save $250)
A large reason there is fewer large lisp projects, is that its pretty hard to get a team of lisp developers. Also, many programmers who do know languages like a lisp or Haskell are often going to be better programmers and will require a higher salary. Not everyone who codes in these languages is a great programmer, but I suspect there is some correlation.
Maybe just in some corner cases.

However Eiffel, OCaml and Python MI implementations seem to be implemented in a more sane way.
And weirdly, I often miss-spell JavaScript as "Javascript." No idea why.
If I had the choice to develop a functionality as a Lisp macro or alternatively as an XML-based DSL for Java, I would know what I'd prefer...
Stop Trusting Yourself
> Putting 1000 people on this would get you a 1000x speedup over making it a one-man project

What? Do you seriously believe in that?
Anybody else close that to conserve battery power and save the planet from global warming? Cause i did. Fuck thats a lot of vommit on the screen.
I think they have lot of dolars from oil, so perhaps money are not that important. Perhaps they are just show strenght. Perhaps they do it just to piss off US.

Still, enriching uranium for civil use is they right.
Just be aware that your instructions may have to change soon; Google is slated to start blocking all local extensions unless users install the Dev or Canary channel builds on Windows [1].

[1] http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/11/07/google-block-local-c...
Weather Prediction using Social Media Analytics
As has been stated... The derivatives trading business was a prime culprit for the crash of 2008 so I think it is fair to say that some lying, cheating, stealing went on and the subsection of finance the author was involved in was complacent in it.

Also being rich vs poor, and Wall St vs Main Street, are not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination. You can become rich without working in finance. And you can hate Wall St's culture and also be rich.

I don't think that all the people who are pissed about the financial crisis are poor or that they think being poor is noble. That seems like a pretty false dichotomy. Being poor does truly suck!

I think the main issue the author is pointing out is how ignoble it is to be unhappy with a 2mil bonus for a job that really isn't that important in the big scheme of things. 2mil is a lot of money for the vast majority of people and bitching about it just makes you out to be an asshole. If that is a cultural issue with that section of finance then that seems like a legitimate concern.
HFT people will argue that they provide more liquidity in
the market - it's easier to sell your stocks because HF
traders increase the overall volume, etc.

A problem with their argument, (one of many) is that HFTs are not regulated market makers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_maker

HFTs provide liquidity when the market's good, but you always have plenty of liquidity when the market's good. You only really need liquidity during a price crash, which is precisely the moment all the HFTs head for the exits, and the exchange seizes up.

HFTs are essentially a tax on stock transactions, and if you actually wanted that, why not have a legislative tax, rather than giving 5% to whatever stock trader has the shortest fiber optic cable to the exchange?
Another reason: they don't tell you or it is in a domain which the average developer does not know anything about.

How large is the scheduler for the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been adopted for many other telescopes?

Who are the users of AllegroGraph?

How complex is PTC's CAD system which uses Common Lisp? A few years ago they mentioned 7 million lines of Lisp.
I've had very good luck with the google chrome store. I get a steady stream every day from there for my reporting app.
How the Internet Ruined San Francisco (1999)
This is an unfortunate outcome, since Yale’s copyright assertion muddles the argument that Yale’s actions violate Peter and Harry’s freedom of speech.

Agreed. Very muddled thinking, indeed.
While it doesn't tackle the benefits of decentralization, I really like the arguments in this article: http://theumlaut.com/2014/01/08/bitcoin-internet-of-money/

Basically, the benefit of the internet was that it was the first "open" telecommunications protocol (as opposed to telephone for example), which allows for permissionless innovation. Applications (i.e. Facebook) can be built on the internet without approval of any central party.

Bitcoin is an open protocol for "ownership." We're not even beginning to scratch the surface of what applications can be built upon it.

(chopped up for brevity:)
"Internet applications, such as email and the World Wide Web, are defined in protocols implemented on devices at the edges of the network, like servers and home computers, not in the guts of the network: routers, switches, hubs, and exchange points. The lower layers of the Internet can be completely oblivious to the specific applications that are in use; they just focus on getting packets of data to the right place.
...
If Sir Tim [Berners-Lee] had to explain to a telecom executive what hypertext was in 1990 before he could create the web, it may never have happened. If we had to rely on telecom companies to provide video calling, it would probably be more expensive and inferior to the video calling services we have today.
...
The permissionless innovation and devolution of power fostered by the Internet may be obvious, or nearly so, in retrospect, but not in advance. From Krugman’s perspective, perhaps, the Internet was just another medium for communication, of which we already had plenty. Why should it have been such a big deal?"
> I am a monkey

As a side note, it would be really useful if there was some way of quoting context that didn't trivially lend itself to forging context... (though admittedly that's a much smaller problem).
I'm sure there are a lot of people in the finance industry who constantly think that "enough" is 30% more than they currently have (or maybe rather more than that -- someone well placed in finance can accumulate wealth pretty fast).

I wonder, though, how much of what's gone wrong with finance is because of that. The spectacular cockups and conspiracies that have become public seem to be more about seriously pathological greed than about ordinary garden-variety wanting-a-bit-more.

(Also, I offer myself as a counterexample to the strongest versions of the enough-is-30%-more theory: my current estimate of how much is "enough" is lower than it was 10 years ago, even though I have a lot more money now than I had then. However, I am not in the finance industry and I'm only one person :-).)
What country? I'd like that sort of interest rate! :)
and more importantly macros are expanded at compile time, not runtime, so static analysis is still possible, and this makes that statement a bit wrong.
>"If you don't graduate you don't have the brand. He might be able to establish an independent brand with his plugin, but that is certainly more risky."

>"A BS is a filter that you'll find for lots of jobs (or graduate school); and although there are places that will hire you, it makes things harder than they would have been otherwise."

I would disagree with both statements.

Part of the value (really, most of the value) of attending these schools is the network that you build while there. And yes, he can always write on his resume that he attended Yale from "Sept 2009-January 2013" (if he were to drop out). I attended a top university and dropped out my last semester to pursue tech related endeavors. I have reaped enormous benefits from this decision.

Once you are accepted to a top university, 90% of the "brand"-ing is complete. If you are resourceful (as this young man clearly is), the rest will take care of itself.

With regards to your second comment, the idea of a "BS as a filter" is losing credibility at an exponential rate. It might seem counter intuitive, but a top tech employer would take a second look at a Yale dropout who wrote a popular plug-in. A majority of applicants at these firms already come from the best schools in the country. On it's own, even an ivy-league degree isn't as great of a filter as you might think. (Note: This applies to jobs with the highest concentration of ivy-league applicants)
Hackathons are Dumb
I recently found out about hy and I am seriously evaluating it for use with Django in production. Does anyone have experience using hy in production they could share?
Uhhh, does that actually say what you want it to say?

The summary of the chart in the second link is roughly:

hours productivity product
40 100% 40.0
50 90% 45.0
60 83% 49.8
70 69% 48.3

So productivity per worker rises until around 60 hours per week, but productivity per worker hour is decreasing the entire way through.

What this means is that 60 hour weeks only make sense if your labor cost per worker is fixed, not your labor cost per worker hour. It doesn't make sense even without overtime pay, but if you're paying someone time and a half to work 60 hours a week, you're paying for 80 hours and getting 50 in return. You'd be much better off paying two workers for 40 hours a week each and actually getting 80 hours of work for those 80 hours you're paying for.

As an individual, working 60 hours per week regularly makes sense if you're a self-employed author and can't hire someone else to get the extra 10 hours of productivity, but if you're the average salaried slob working for the average company, it's a terrible bargain. You make the same pay, and the company gets 10 hours of extra work while you lose 20 hours of extra time. Why the hell would you agree to that?
You can turn this around quickly. Which is better, the actual tangible privacy your bank gives you despite its theoretical "illusion" of security, or the theoretical privacy of bitcoin which in practice is hard to maintain yourself?
I use my own install of TinyTinyRSS. The phone app is nicer than google reader ever was. That combined with having the data under my control means that it won't shut down on me again the same way that reader did.