skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> but a quick search didn't reveal a syntax for hash table literals, which I would consider to be a prerequisite for calling them first class citizens

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-class_data_type

Hash-tables are part of the standard, and available in conforming implementations out-of-the-box. (make-hash-table) produces an instance of a table which can be passed as argument to function, be assigned to variables, ... I don't think syntax defines what feature is or isn't first-class, even though it has an impact on it's usage.

Adding support for litteral hash-tables is possible, as it was already said: define a reader macro; that macro could even simply use the utility function "plist-hash-table", from Alexandria, which is used like this:

(alexandria:plist-hash-table '(:a 1 :b 2))

So that you could write #H{:a 1 :b 2} and get what you want.

On the first hand, people say that CL is bloated, but on the other hand, they want to have everything available by default. Do you expect Python or C++ implementations to come with regular expression built-in, or is it okay if you need to add an 'import' statement or link with Boost?

CL allows you to define libraries that can change even the basic surface syntax, for your convenience. Considering that there is more than enough defined in the specification, what benefits would be in having an "official" hash litteral syntax? consistency accross different projects? many people use the "cl-ppcre" regex library without problem.

Yes, regular expressions come in a library even though they could easily be labelled as a fundamental feature of a language, and hence be expected to be "first-class", or "built-in"; but again, that is not the case in CL, which is neither Perl nor Lua.

And about keyword parameters, this is just the surface syntax, which is on purpose based on a simple, basic representation of the syntax tree as lists of expressions.

Then, the compiler will work with the argument list in your function definition and take one or another approach to represent them in the object code. And I doubt that they are stored in a hash-table, which is unlikely an appropriate way to handle a couple of keyword arguments.

Similarly, when you define a class, everything is declared by a simple list of slots, where slots are lists of parameters: but in fact, the class might store the actual instance slots in a hash-table, an array, a list, a database or a memory mapped file.

The fact that you are mainly manipulating lists does not mean that everything is eventually represented as supposedly inefficient linked-list at runtime.
Django noob here. Could you give more details about the mechanism for doing background processing you mention? (Not sure how it helps the user not wait if it's synchronous.)
I think there are better analogies than girl/interview rejection scenarios. More like TV gameshow where there are lots of applicants and only a few get chosen to make it onto the show. The producers have reasons of their own that have no bearing on how good you are. So rejection is not to be taken personally in a soul destroying way.

Just a lesson to learn, no feedback needed.
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Write To Them is open source and is already being used in multiple countries:

https://github.com/mysociety/writetothem
I don't get it. Do they really solve a problem? I have a pretty nice laptop adapter, that is light and about twice the size of Dart.

I is perfectly fine for me.
The problem is that despite the Verilog being relatively easy, it's still incredibly tedious and error prone.

It's amazing how Verilog manages to be too low level and too high level at the same time. It's a simulation language not originally intended for synthesis, so it doesn't have access to hardware primitives, and requires you to write specific patterns to ensure they're inferred correctly. But at the same time, it's too low level to even allow you to abstract those patterns.
I'm looking forward to seeing what improvements happen once there's a laptop charging standard:

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2319855/eu-pushes-f...
Thanks for pointing this out, great to see interest in the library.

I've been developing this library for a couple of years now, and since a couple of months working on it together with another colleague.

Guys feel free to share ideas and code to improve the library and make it even better, check it out on Github.
In contract terms, yes it is ambiguous - especially now legislation offers an alternative phrase.

As a consumer, perhaps I think place order means let me try it for 30 days and decide if I want it or if I want to return it. Or some other variation which means I don't expect to have to pay you anything.

Whether I am being deliberately obtuse or not, few traders will want to get into legal nonsense over online orders which are not necessarily very profitable (hence any profit is lost as soon as there is any dispute costs).

If the law offers an acceptable phrase, it is reckless not to adhere to it as otherwise you end up in a court discussing sematics of english phrases rather than whether you are owed money or not.

[edit:typo]
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Call an early board meeting and aim for disciplinary action against the CTO. Founders don't get kicked out by employees. You also need to establish leadership power within the company as a founder vs being pushed around or treated like a code monkey.

Even CEOs can be removed from their high horse should there be collusion here between the CTO and CEO. If you feel this may be the case, seeking some legal advice so you can throw powerful words at those colluding should rattle the bird cake a bit. Just don't bring emotion in.

Founders are key to any company. Roles change. Part of a growing company. Founders keep the fire burning. Any smart investor will tell you the same.
People can cancel an order, which might be a problem. Maybe "Pay Now" / "Complete Order" etc would be as unambiguous.
In an earlier startup I went to 88 meetings over 8 months before getting to a VC term sheet. That is a lot of 'no'. If you are going to be an entrepreneur you need to learn to live with rejection and keep moving forward. I got my "sorry" email from YC tonight, but that's fine. I knew the odds were very long. I'm getting up early tomorrow to continue working on my idea. I may apply again in the future with this (or another) concept, but for now I'm just going to keep on hacking!
Ah snap! That's good stuff right there. What else can we think of renting? P2P game rentals?
There's no such thing as an "objective" fairness, and if it would exist, it wouldn't matter anyway. It only matters if your partner sincerely thinks if it's fair or not, and whether he will think so in the future.
Another rejection here. It was our first time applying for YC (or any other incubator). The application process sure helped us view things in a perspective other than co-founders as coders. Even if we decide not to apply again it will be a great exercise to answer the application questions every 6 months.
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Lavaboom: Secure email for everyone
My shell scripts almost always contain "set -e -x", and I always forget which is exit on error, and which is echo commands. The long form would help me avoid that problem.
This is not that surprising; one would expect the brain to adapt after exposure to a substance that affects its chemistry.

It is also completely meaningless, as there is no comparison done to measure brain change in response to alcohol, nicotine, sugar, caffeine or even different diets.

Finally, the article implies the brain change is harmful with no explanation, which puts it square into junk science land. Shame on the authors.
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"You need to narrow your focus" seems like something that would not be the main reason for rejection, and instead something that the mentors advise to fix after getting in. If there really was a serious reason for rejection (instead of being close but barely not good enough), then I think it's most likely related to the team:

* "Your fourth co-founder is dragging you down. You need to fire him."

* "You seem to have different life priorities and dedication. I predict an angry team breakup in 6 months."

* "You gave away 50% of the company for an investment from your uncle. No VC will be interested to follow up."

* "None of you have good enough technical skills to get to the point where you can fundraise and hire engineers instead."

... and so on. This kind of honest feedback would not go down well with most the founders, even if they say that they want honest and harsh feedback. It's one thing to suggest improvements to the business plan, but nobody wants to hear that they personally might not be good enough.

And the feedback would open YC to all sorts of criticism. Remember the brouhaha about the comment on founders' accents? The message was "There should be at least one founder who speaks English well to interact with the media, investors and public." But it was immediately taken out of context to accuse YC of discriminating against foreigners.
I've had great experiences with Nexmo (www.nexmo.com). I believe they do two-way SMS these days, too.
I *heartbleed* OpenSSL T-Shirt
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We got rejected, it's now a bummer because we really dreamed of going to California. Now we have to do it ourselves and I believe that if you can't bring up the motivation to do it without YC, you will even have had a hard time at YC.
--> JK Rowling got rejected lots of times, not a lot of publishers wanted to publish her book. Sylvester Stallone had a hard time bringing Rocky to a succes and so on... So, I believe rejection is not fatal for our app!
I wish you all the best of luck with your startups, with or without YC! :)
This is not a valid point against medical studies, because medical studies never attempt to prove causation. They are merely showing that event A preceeds event B with correlation of 0.51 or so. The human body is so complex that controlling for every variable is simply not possible. It's not just funding either. To control for every variable you'd need more test subjects than there are humans alive. Furthermore all medical double-blind studies do indeed only show correlation (nearly always very low correlation, a successful drug will have correlation coefficients of maybe .53 If you find a drug for almost any disease that correlates with curing any disease of .7 or .8, you can start a pharma company and it'll be worth billions).

Also while correlation does not imply causation, it does mean 1 of 3 things. Suppose A and B correlate. Let's take a flu medication and getting cured as an example.

1) A causes B (people who take the drug tend to get cured from the flue as a result)

2) B causes A (people who get sick, and heal by themselves tend to take the drug because they feel sick)

3) A and B are both caused by the same thing (can be many things, e.g. the medicine salesman has the flue)

There have been attempts to mathematically define causation as correlation with a time offset (the one that preceeds is the cause, the one coming after is the result). This has had only limited success. That of course does not stop nearly every study outside of the pure sciences from taking such time-delayed-correlations as proof of causation. Are you really suggesting throwing out 99%+ of science over that ?

( and 4. you made a mistake and while it looks like correlation, it's not. E.g. longterm correlations in chaotic variables, like taking the .999999999999999999 correlation between mathematical descriptions of planetary orbits and concluding those planets are actually in those orbits until something large happens [1]. Yes it goes for earth too. The orbit of the earth could alter to throw the earth into the sun, or out of the solar system and there would be little or no warning. There is also no need for "large" events to cause this. Planets' movements do not follow the central limit theorem and therefore cannot be predicted with 100% certainty. The huge problem is of course, that in the real world nearly every problem exhibits chaos, for obvious reasons, not just the stock market)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem
Dear Brett,

Thank you so much for your help. I will see you an email tonight.
He's making fun of himself as an 'enlightened Python programmer'. It's not his honest opinion of the language.
Bill from Lavaboom here.
There are a lot questions about what we've built, we've answered some of them here: http://www.lavaboom.com/nerd-info

If you have any questions or suggestions I would love to hear them, hit me up here or on Twitter at @lavaboomhq
We’ve seen the end of physical slavery just to go into an era of intelectual slavery.
> I see the implementation of cryptosystems as an engineering endeavor little different than designing, for example,
> a commercial airplane, a bridge, or a radiation therapy machine.

Couldn't agree more. The problem is that for any bridge that gets used, every structural engineer signing off is going to have been educated and experienced to the extent that they are Chartered (or equivalent), the plans for the bridge have to be approved by planning authorities and a thorough documentation and review process has been gone through, before the first drop of concrete has been poured. And once its up, it's tested, and inspected regularly.
As every engineer on the project has necessarily been educated they know how hard it is and what the pitfalls are.

Bad crypto results from the fact that there is no need for any of the above requirements to be met. Any old engineer might think they can produce a good implementation, design it, put it into production and have systems secured by it, without being aware of the potential problems they're causing.

The free world of the internet is a wonderful thing, but regulation isn't entirely a bad thing either.
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That matches my recollections perfectly.

More technical jacquesm classics take a while to produce :) But I'm sure something will pop up sooner or later, as soon as my current batch of commitments has been dealt with.

Thank you very much for the explanation, much appreciated. Interesting facts there about the flags. I've long since lost my flagging, posting and upvoting ability so none of that was mine, I merely wondered as an observer because the rankings of that page made absolutely no sense at times and I did spot it when it got deleted and then re-appeared.
I'm saying skip the reasons--that's too labor intensive. Just give a general idea of how the application was. Why? mostly calibration, I guess.

I would find it useful to know how I'm doing within the pool. Even if the answer is "bottom 20%", that lets me know how much more effort I have to put into it to improve.
If some Christian designer would use 3:16 as the time on all their documents and designs, would that also be offensive?

Or, some mystical Qabalist (or Jewish) designer could use Gematria to work all kinds of message in numbers into the designs and nobody would even be able to tell! :)

Another one, quick question, say you see someone being extremely fond of the number "88" in their designs, on a scale of one to six million, how offended would you be?
IMHO a good choice would be a language where this can be/is implemented as a library and doesn't not have to be baked in.
OS X ships with an increasingly ancient version of bash owing to GPLv3. You probably want to use a later version installed with brew / port etc.
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This is how I work. Whenever possible, when I have to write a utility in whatever language, I write it such that it can easily be integrated into shell pipelines. That makes it far easier to glue multiple tools written in different languages together.
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Well, maybe in that case it is.
But I like to separate the commands so that the data flow looks sequential. That way it makes more sense to me.
says a poster on 'hacker news'
Much as I hate the cargocult invocation of "UUOC", this is actually nicer because it reads more sanely - the HEREDOC is properly linked to the curl whereas the previous has the curl seemingly adrift on its own line unattached to the HEREDOC.
If you look after random mixtures of Linux and similar you'll be OK, but I've juggled OpenBSD , FreeBSD, Solaris, and Linux all at once.

Usually Solaris would get GNU tools installed beneath /opt, or similar, rather than in /bin.
Did he learn his lesson?

It's things like this, I never put immature things in my code comments or sample texts if it's going to be even remotely connected to a professional setting. In fact, I even do so when it's not. I just have to read back my own code comments from when I was 17, to see that shit isn't actually funny :) :)

(obvious exceptions will be made if I have a really good joke, though. sacrifices for art, etc)
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This is a typical example of rent seeking behaviour. Companies spending money on lobbying without creating wealth. Unfortunately tax is one of the core functions of government and will always be vulnerable to this sort of manipulation of the political process.
> repeatedly stating "A language is a tool, not an identity." every thread about X programming language adds nothing to the conversation.

You're being unnecessarily harsh, this type of comment might have educational value for newer developers. The fact that a programming language is a tool is not understood by all of us, and I personally admit that a very similar message I read on IRC opened my eyes when I was younger.

> Would you have any problem if Dennis Ritchie identified himself as a C programmer or Matz as a Ruby programmer?

Your own example ruins your whole argument. Matz is a programmer, he invented Ruby and wrote its interpreter in C. Calling him a C programmer or a Ruby programmer makes therefore very little sense. Same goes for Dennis Ritchie and the assembly he used to create C.
My issue with this is that unless you're maintaining a lot of context and understanding the precise weirdness of HEREDOC piping, that looks at first glance like you're catting the HEREDOC to STDOUT and then running a random curl command. It's clever, sure, but it's harder to read and maintain.
I think you're wrong about that. There were some stories in the 70's about that theme, specifically the parallels between 'magic' in one branch of fiction and programming a computer by interacting with them in some arcane language casting spells in another.

The Well World series would probably qualify as an example of the latter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_World_series
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Hi, I'm the colleague josdejong mentioned and I've been maintaining and developing the Graph module. The module is currently in canvas so you cannot put HTML formatting in the nodes. There are a variety of shaped and formatting you can use to customize it though.
> Strong words

This is the same guy who says "No, not everyone who's rich deserves to die": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5625397
This seems like a horrible idea to me. Sure, for people it might be great, but we just shut the shades, and drown out the rest of the world. What effect is this going to have on all the animals who will be affected by 24 hours of brightness year round?

From what I understand, the effect on on plants would be minimal, but what other processes on earth need the darkness? What would be the effect on dew rates, as I assume the sunlight would increase the heat of the earth and disrupt the heating and cooling effect of night.

So many questions I don't even know to ask, but I am really uncomfortable with this idea.
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Would've expected that you say "all you need to do is just dragdis" at the end.
I don't think he liked the book
Traditionally all manufacturers have been using a little bit different connectors on the laptop. Also tho voltages seem to differ a little bit. Hard to see any other real reason for this than to make switching to another brand a little bit harder and to make a few extra $$$ by selling accessories.

So even if adding a new USB port for charging is cheap and easy, the manufacturers might still have reasons not to do it.
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Well, the lack of good documentation for libraries is also hugely problematic.

For example, I'd call OpenSSL documentation "criminally bad" to the point where it actively tries to coax the user into making a mistake - there is no central point of good practices for common use cases (e.g. sending a AES256-CBC encrypted block of data securely with shared key, using pub/private key, etc.) and the docs regulary don't mention the proper way of initializing different datastructures and modules (like RNGs) when they're mentioned. Even finding out how to properly initialize everyting to do a standard PBKDF#2 password derivation is a huge chore that requires reading through tons of badly formatted documents (or copying a random piece of code from StackOverflow which may or may not be secure). That makes even highly secured libraries a minefield where you can easily introduce huge security flaws without even knowing that you did so.

And as long as the excuse for that is "well, you just need few years of studying all crypto background" we'll be seeing security breaches everywhere - developers mostly just aren't prepared to spend so much time learning the crypto field or spend alot of money on security experts. In the big picture that's a huge issue - too many devs just opt to copy random pieces of code from StackOverflow, which can have very glaring security flaws or are simply not secure for the devs usecase.
I know this is all in good spirit and you just want to show some appreciation for the help. But rewarding programmers by number of commits is a bit perverse. Nowadays everyone generally agrees that paying programmers per line of code is a bad idea. I think rewarding based on number of commits creates very similar unwanted incentives and should probably be avoided completely.
It's great to see the interest in the libary! I'm currently working with josdejong to improve the vis.js library. I'll try to answer most questions here. If there's anything else, feel free to ask us on github!
We currently use Canvas for the graph and HTML DOM for the timeline. As for browser support, see my post in reply to the post you replied to :).
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Setting up SSH multiplexing with ControlPersist[1] can help quite a bit here, since after the first connection you don't have to go through the init/connection phase for subsequent completions.

You can even preemptively fire up a master connection to commonly accessed hosts to avoid the initial delay.

[1] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSSH/Cookbook/Multiplexing
It's a tough thing for anyone to read: it's browserWidth wide and monospaced.

Here's a readable version: https://gist.github.com/mikemaccana/10847077
Can't you turn it around and use blogging software (hint: WordPress), which have the ability (hint: plugins/extensions) that publish your stuff to the different media?
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I think the tone is what makes it tougher than it needs to be, not the factual content. Props to the author for just looking at the content and not at the way in which it was delivered. Props to Thomas for taking the time to review the book.
"tputs reset" has much the same effect (I think; there are some cases I've noticed it not fully restoring things) without the delay.