skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It would separate two forms of money: the common form of money used as means of exchange and a store of value; and, the debt/credit money created out of thin air through a contract and collateral. The two currencies would float against one another. People would be paid in common currency, but could borrow in the debt currency.
The default search in Safari is also through Google. And to be fair, Maps+Youtube are more significant apps than Weather+Stocks in terms of usage and complexity (should be easy to swap out the Yahoo sources for some other ones).
US Bankruptcy and Foreclosure Visualized [infographic]
2009 United States bankruptcy and foreclosure data both visualized and broken down into depressing facts.
Microsoft appeals for stay of Word injunction
There may be a big difference between an app under review and being rejected. There's also a difference between an app being sold in store for months and an app being pulled from the store! Reminder, it was Apple pulling 3 existing Google voice applications that prompted questions to Google about the status of their official app in the first place.

Google's response at the time sounded pretty final: "We will continue to work to bring our services to iPhone users, for example, by taking advantage of advances in mobile browsers."
Plain insane, indeed. I have no idea how they even pull that off. I feel sorry for their families. I really hope Apple hires and trains about another 200 of these reviewers.
I think this goes for a lot more than just programming languages. FOSS projects in general tend to pick some generic English words as names that make them really hard to find. I've even seen a few startups that've fallen into this pit.

Ironically, the fact that most "decent" domain names have been taken is forcing startups to put more time into coming up with a name which could ultimately help their searchability, though it does come at the expense of the "speakability" of their name.
Yes it may take a day or two, but there is nothing like communicating an interface and what you actually want to do with an actual pre-prototype. I view it as a step before communicating with code see http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/communicating-with-...

It will also help later on in allocating tasks and workflow to other members of the team. As you develop code just update the prototype.
PGP = Pretty Good Proteins.
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Part of the problem seems to be the programmer's habit of using the shortest possible variable names and commands: ls, cp, mv, and how many programs have variables a, b, x, and so on. There shouldn't be any drawback to using longer descriptive names (or funny, arbitrary names) for languages since you won't have to type them often; and they are much superior in searchability. The more unique the better for searchability, in fact.
Also, can anyone tell me what he's talking about in making C "easy to search on the internet." Finding general information on C has been extremely frustrating.
Microsoft is the worst for this! .NET is a terrible name to search for. SQL Server Reporting Services is also awful. At least they've seemed to have gotten the clue with Silverlight.
The following page explains the usage of the "+" operator on Google search, and mention that some common terms like "C++" receive a special treatment: http://www.googleguide.com/plus_operator.html
In this case it's more that ignorance is blindness. That syntax is a feature. The fact that Lisp code is expressed in Lisp data structures makes it easy to write programs that write programs.
Goto is pretty handy if you're not writing in the language but writing a translator to the language instead. That is, when some corporate politics demand the product must be in PHP but you feel you start losing your mind writing in it... well, write in your favorite language and compile it to PHP!
There was something I read in the past year about the conflict between recovery and forensics - preserving the evidence for an investigation prevents a quick and smooth recovery, and conversely quickly recovering from a problem destroys evidence. So real world systems that have to keep working either need a complete backup system (ridiculously expensive) or they need to stay down until the investigation is completed (which could be even worse, especially if a gov't agency with a stronger sense of CYA than urgency is doing it). Investigating airplane crashes doesn't have this problem, since the plane isn't going anywhere. I've spent the last ten minutes googling trying to find the source and can't.
Wow I've been using pencil but I keep losing the paper. This is good!
No, I don't think that you can say that Gruber is pro-Apple. It's more accurate to say that he is pro Apple products. Apple the company cops a fair bit of criticism from him, including on subjects such as the App Store, DRM, pricing etc, but Gruber explains in detail exactly why he is so enamoured by they products.
What are you responding to? TCO could be the second coming of Christ and I'd still think Yegge was being too harsh.
That Python code shouldn't work. It needs a 'return', assignments aren't expressions, and assigning to a nonlocal variable in the absence of a declaration just creates a local. (Might be nice if Python did look more like that, though!)
I'm not much of a programmer yet, and a lot of the C bashing I read complains about pointers and how necessary they are in C, yet according to this:

"Dynamic typing. In Lisp, all variables are effectively pointers. Values are what have types, not variables, and assigning or binding variables means copying pointers, not what they point to."

They are even more fundamental to LISP. Also if dynamic typing is good and most posts seem to claim it is, and dynamic typing more or less equals pointers which is what this seems to be saying, doesn't that mean using pointers is good? Also, I have seen frequent complaints about C's "static typing", but if using pointers results in dynamic typing, doesn't that suggest that static or dynamic typing is a stylistic choice in C programming?
Will facebook do anything about this?
I don't think that's fair. They certainly have an "ounce" of credibility. This piece struck me as pretty good journalism on something pretty important, and I think it would be good for credibility all round to give them that.

Admittedly, the sources are anonymous, but could one expect otherwise given the material? I also appreciate the piece's directness, which is a refreshing contrast to the mealy-mouthed, there-is-no-truth-only-opposing-opinions cowardice of the MSM. (Of course, if you're going to say outright that someone is lying you had better be sure you are right.)

By the way, was the Techcrunch story on Last.fm definitively discredited? (That's not a troll - I don't follow these things very closely and am sincerely curious.) I was under the impression that it was left in an ambiguous state with both sides insisting they were right.
That's smells a bit of architecture astronaut to me if you don't mind me saying. Sharing information between systems is a tradeoff (vs arch complexity), not something to be avoided at all costs.
Pointers in Lisp are implicit. Lisp uses pointers only in the sense that loops use gotos.
Diseases are still spreading, albeit of different kinds. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Epidemiology_... https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Diabetes_mell...
Even not as a real lisp guy that's one of the things that I appreciate about lisp and the only time that I've done anything particularly powerful with it: the fact that it's basically a parse tree makes it really interesting for genetic programming.
HN Greasemonkey script: Show user reputation(karma and age) in comments
Why AT&T Killed GoogleVoice
You're assuming your conclusion: that the languages are equivalent in power and differ only in syntax. If that were true, then sure, one would simply make an arbitrary choice based on taste. But it isn't true. It's profoundly untrue.

The syntax in that first example you quote isn't arbitrary. It's essentially the only notation that exists for representing the structure of a program explicitly in language. Is that valuable? Uh, yeah. It's incredibly valuable. It's worth a lot more than syntax in many cases.

By contrast, the syntax in the second example is arbitrary: the delimiters and operators could just as easily be organized differently. Perhaps this particular organization makes certain programs clearer, but it loses the ability to represent programs in general.

If that doesn't make sense, think of the fairy tale of the goose that lays golden eggs. Everybody's obsessed with their particular golden egg. Lisp - precisely because of the difference visible in those two examples - is the goose.

There's nothing in this that PG didn't already express in his comment. But what you wrote deserves more than one protest :)
Yes. However static typing is quite interesting in Haskell. And signalling intent with typing is a form of machine-checkable documentation.
Yes. But some languages get compiler before they get interpreted. For example Python (in the cPython version).

And there's a continuum between interpretation and compilation. Threaded interpreters like they are common for Forth are quite close to compilers.
Singapore: A Model of Judgment for the United States?
Shining example of another person who has failed to understand IRC (asynchronous messaging with spanning-tree delivery.)

I like all of the wordings he has made up for things that have been around for 15+ years.

Making a good messaging system seems to be an unusually difficult problem. People have tried, over many years, and the results - as we just saw - seem to be all round mediocre. In my view the main reason we have not "solved" this domain (as we've solved operating systems, databases, file systems, word processors, spreadsheets, email, data representation, etc.) are that the problem has been too arcane to interest enough engineers.

I believe every statement in that paragraph to be incorrect.
A Django website that took (a lot) more than 20 minutes.
If there was any doubt left that PHP is the VisualBasic of the web it should be cleared now.

BTW, I think nobody linked the classic goto critique from Dijkstra yet: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD02xx/EWD215.... (or paywalled in ACM context at http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=362929.362947 )

Dijkstra was pretty specific about the cases where goto would be confusing and made a case that one should would be better off just not using it at all. His argument applies much more to gotos that can jump across procedure boudaries. Most surviving gotos (including the PHP goto) are not that unconstrained so they do represent a compromise between Dijkstra's position and the pragmatic use of goto where it actually improves the readability of code - especially when exceptions are not available for some reason.
I agree. Though fib(n) is among the worst examples to cite for your cause.
Integrative Cancer Care - The Case of the Smith Farm Center in DC
I will opt for off-the-record encryption (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging) in intercourse with people.
It seems people did not understand what I was trying to say - whatever.
I'd say that's EXACTLY what it is.

I'm curious as to how someone starts a site like Newmogul. What's day one like? Do they just have a load of links to news aggregated articles with comments from anyone they can grab around their office, and a lot of empty space on the site? Genuine question - how does it work? How do they drive their traffic in there?
I'll give you a point if you become more polite.
I think "Factor" is a good name for a programming language, it's memorable and it conjures up appropriate mental images. That the word has both of these qualities ensures that it will be used for many other things, and this will be true of most good names. Instead of worrying about the googlability of "Factor", can't we count on people to at least search for "Factor programming language"? And if Google isn't already returning good enough results for that now, I think I'd rather wait a little while for search technology to catch up than compromise on the names of my programming languages.
Scheme does not have _any_ loop constructs. Neither does Haskell. (Apart from the standard library. There you find some `simulators' of loops.)
And colons to semicolons. (Does Basic still use them to separate statements on the same line?)
It seems that the fact that Lisp is a parse tree is what makes it a limiting case. That is, if there's only one canonical structure for representing programs, and Lisp makes it explicit, then any other language that makes it explicit is going to be isomorphic to Lisp.

I'd like to know, though: is that true? Is an abstract syntax tree the only good way to represent programs as data? Has any other expressive way to do this been invented, or do programs always boil down to an AST after the syntax has been stripped away?

I say "expressive" because I can think of at least one other code-as-data representation: binary. But that isn't suitable for programming. If there is another representation that is suitable, but isn't isomorphic to a parse tree, then presumably one could derive from it an analog to Lisp that doesn't simply reduce to Lisp. Until then, though, I think the point that PG made semi-jokingly in the essay, that any language as powerful as Lisp will be a variant of Lisp, has to hold true.

Some day I'd like to research this question (or better, someone on HN could just tell me the answer). If other meaningful representations are possible, surely some must have been invented by now. And if they aren't, then the AST is a considerably more remarkable discovery than people realize.
Look to the pharmaceutical industry: Aspirin, Pinex, Panodil, .............
Shoutcast 5.1 Surround Sound Streams?
Hey Michael,

that does a request to the server for every comment listed, so you are basically loading up HN with a high multiple of the current number of requests per second if this becomes popular and / or gets loaded in threads with a large number of comments.

Not sure if this is a good idea.
I don't think that a parse tree is intrinsic -- it's just something that maps well to the languages that we actually use: of course you could translate everything to a turing machine's tape, but that wouldn't be particularly useful.

What would really interest me would be exploring that if human logic fundamentally reduces to a parse tree because of something to do with the language faculty of the mind, and the programming languages that we create tend towards that just because programming languages are built out of the same logical faculty.
Interesting difference in the attention spans of the 1930's to now. 1:50 in and still not a word of commentary on what this is about. How many people on HN sat through this whole video?

"Recent studies show that Internet users spend as little as 50 milliseconds scanning a website before deciding whether it is of value to them or not."
Source: http://www.messagingtimes.com/blog/2006/03/15/microcontent-m...
I agree with jhancock. I do not want to force Apple into distributing my software. I just want Apple to stop actively preventing me from distributing my software (through my own resources), which is what it is doing with the App store.
Similarly, I can only imagine the frustration of Jazz fans when they try looking for their favorite guitarist. :)

Although in this case the last name can help.
This is an interesting breakdown of technical debt as you'd actually see it in a real, production site. Crufty systems to rip out and replace with frameworks, databases which were being shared across applications, data migration (I feel your pain), etc.

On the plus side, after you get good at using a framework, you tend to accumulate a lot less debt. The downside is that your first project with a framework probably incurs more debt than you would otherwise, although if "otherwise" is a using a home-brewed flat-file DB you might come out net positive anyhow. ;)

I've ripped out almost 70% of the code that was in the first commit for the Rails version of the Bingo Card Creator over the years. (I did not know you could serialize an array in the database, so instead, I wrote it to a ... home-brewed flat-file DB...)
What Everybody Should Know About Installing And Using Java On Ubuntu
Well I'm sure HN gets quite a lot traffic as is at the moment on the homepage and with rss feeds and whatnot.

The user profile page itself is only around 19KB....

I'm definitely not trying to DDoS Hacker News though. If this really causes problems I will delete the repo.
Excellent point, but you can easily expand the list way beyond programming languages. Django is a nice one, sure it is a great tribute to a great musician, but I keeping having to tell google to leave out 'music' when searching for info.

Search engines ought to be smart enough to determine the general context of your searches across several searches in a row but it seems that that is not yet available.
Do the math, a thread with 50 comments (not rare) suddenly pulls an extra megabyte in order to retrieve several hundred bytes of info per pageview.

Anyway, it really isn't my call to make, I just figured I should warn you, in case you had not thought through the consequences of this becoming popular.

edit: unless I'm misreading your code it even does requests for users that are listed multiple times on a single page, you could easily save there by caching the results of your queries.
If ATT called Apple and simply asked them to deny GV approval then that is certainly a "non-contractual understanding". There do not need to be reverse conditions AFAICT - if there are it's a contract.
I thought paper might also be handy but on deeper consideration, I realized you are right.

"I have this twitter-based idea. I've brought a pencil so you can stab your eyes out while I explain"
Sounds mad, but even though we have CS3 and most other graphics/design packages, we use the drawing tools in Powerpoint a lot to do quick web page layouts or site designs, regardless of what PP's actually meant for.

The reasons are this: anyone can use the tools without have to learn anything, it's really quick, the way it works tends to make you keep things simple (very important), you can create a template page and then cmd+V it across all the other pages (slides), you can scroll through the pages (try doing that in Photoshop), easy output to pdf/jpgs etc if you want to share and of course if you want to present the design...well 'nuff said.

If you're designing for Twitter I'm assuming that graphically you're doing something very clean and simple. This method helps you keep it that way.
"if you purposefully engage in the spreading of false [...] information then [...]" you must be marketing something
Apple answers fcc questions
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/apple-answers-fcc-questions/
Australians 'need more seasons'
Worth of Programming Challenges and event ?
What do HN guys think about Topcoder ( http://www.topcoder.com/tc )? Is it a dependable platform to learn and master C++, C#, java and algorithmic techniques.
Is it better or worse than other Online judges ( ACM UVA, SPOJ etc ) ?
What is the worth of Google Codejam ?
Should a computer science undergrad afford to spend their major chunk of time on these online judges practising programming or it's more worth to develop a software or contribute to open-source ?
What are their respective values on job-scenario ?
I can't be sure of this, but I don't think that such large percentage of the HN readership:

a) Uses Firefox and Greasemonkey
b) Will want to install it and keep it installed for a long time.

For the few that will, I don't think this will make such a huge impact.
Here is an interesting view on the non significance of programming contests http://web.archive.org/web/20071121053436/http://www.cs.calt...

And after leaving college and coming to the Industry, the first thing I learnt is that the kind of programming you are expected to do in an organisation is so different than the style we follow in the colleges or promoted by the coding competitions.
His advice would seem to distill to "invent a new word as a name for your language". Would this be a sensible thing to do?

What would some examples of "good" programming language names be? Most languages I can think of have names from {English words} or existing proper nouns and so any non new name has a potential to clash on doing a web search at least till the language name becomes popular enough to rise to the top.

Do we really want new computer language authors to create nonsense phrases as names for their languages?
Topcoder is modern electronic Sweat Shop
Interesting idea, but why use arbitary names like 'sprummer' or 'sprinter'? Why not give it a name denoting what it is (like 'rainy season' or 'hotting-up season'?
FOSS projects in general tend to pick some generic English words as names that make them really hard to find

This is related to most F/OSS projects having a crushing deficit in the marketing skills department. Notice how most don't have a visual identity, either? And how they typically launch mostly undocumented, on somebody else's website?

I had a checklist for launching A/Bingo, and held off on it for a week past when the code was ready, because the marketing wasn't. Logo, slogan, landing page, usage documentation, install documentation, live demo, domain name. It practically killed me because I was/am proud of that project and wanted to start collecting feedback but I know it won't spread if I don't do a proper job of it.

There is no point in spending dozens or hundreds of engineer hours on a project if it languishes in obscurity because you were too disinterested to, e.g., put a logo on it. (Mine cost $210. Cheap at the price!)

Incidentally, even if you can't get the exact match domain .com domain name for your project, for OSS everyone is just going to Google you anyhow. Name the project well and you will rank for your own name very, very fast as a consequence of your normal marketing activities, since good OSS tends to collect authoritative links with laser focused anchor text. </freeSEOAdvice>
Scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/18994187/DownloadDoi1011
Then it would be as useful as a mailing list that nobody wanted to read .. still that might be better than it is now.
There is a neat trick called "faux columns" which has been around for ages to help in most cases for equal height columns.
What do you gain knowing the karma and age of a user when you're replying its comment or thread?

Are you going to base your disertation at "argumentum ad hominem"?

No to the subjetivism
Not sure what the news value of this is, GVR is a very good programmer, but not a frontend engineer. This is kinda like a famous CSS expert/designer like Mark Boulton or Veerle Pieters giving up on SQL because it's so much more pain than what the MS visual studio wizards can generate for you.
Sports only measure the sporting ability of a person or team against another person or team, that's it. They have some relevance to useful characteristics for combat too.

Utility is not really an issue.

For me, the point of sport is fun - that's why I don't watch Professional Football (soccer), it's all about money, not about fun IMO. The only way I really find fun in sport is doing it.
The Mother of Cobol
When I evaluate the merit someone's statement in the real world a big factor will always be my and others' respect for that person based on my his\her reputation.

The comments on HN already display the user name. Tell me, would you honestly discern a comment from pg the same as you would for some other unknown user?
Wet and dry seasons are already part of the Aussie vernacular in most of the country. There's region specific lingo as well, except in Melbourne where there's just no point in trying to discern what season it is.