skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Which lisp are you talking about? For example, Common Lisp and Scheme are both languages of the lisp family, but they are rather different.

The PG books are about Common Lisp. CL is defined in a very good ANSI standard. Where implementations of CL really diverge is in the areas which are not covered by the standard, e.g. networking. Not that it is an enormous problem in practice: there are good portable libraries around ("portable" means that they work on different CL implementations).

edit: thinking about it, if you are using Peter Seibel's lisp in a box, then it's CL that you are playing with
Earth's population isn't growing exponentially or even linearly, though.
it seems like arbitrage is often presented as somewhat negative. floating exchange rates between fungible commodities (and the arbitrage opportunities that accompany them) are a feature not a bug. they allow markets to correct for fluctuations in supply and demand very quickly ensuring more efficient resource distribution.

arbitrage being available exclusively to a small group who also control membership to their own group? corporatism, and obviously bad. this problem of the financial world having insiders and outsiders has nothing to do with high speed arbitrage, that's just an illustration of it.
"How is 2.x dead?"

It's dead in that precious "The technorati are planning on moving away from it in the next couple of years" sense, which has, like, virtually no relevance to anything else.

See also: Windows (and Microsoft in general), iPhone App Store, and Twitter. All dead, baby, dead as a doornail.
Interesting. The legibility isn't even comparable to the subpixel font in the OP, however.

This guy's done some very interesting stuff on typophile.
Color is only visible in sub-pixel antialiasing. Regular AA, or AA designed for something other than LCD output, is just shades of gray.
Ask YC: What are some good example of microrewards on websites?
Why is this page styled with Facebook's CSS and header? Who is this written by?
Karma and SO's badges being the obvious examples...
Me too. i thought it was a non profit for some reason.
Google Acquires reCaptcha To Power Scanning For Google Books And Google News
Or the analytics. It's on 100,000 sites.
I never tried Scheme so you can assume I am talking about CL if that helps, but since I don't know the difference between them, the question is directed at both.

In fact, if they are both 'Lisp', why do they exist at all? Why there ARE differences? If CL is a 'very good' ANSI standard as you say, why people use Scheme? Arc is also CL, but why does it exist at all? What does it has that justifies it being created, increasing even more the noise? If I wanted an implementation of strict CL, which one would be it?
Is it a portal? Does it integrate with existing systems? If not, is it an integration engine? Is it still in development, or is the system ready? Sorry for all the questions, but it's still not clear what need you intend to fill from looking at the site.
Scalable distributed b-tree
new distributed systems primitive?
My laptop has 8 pounds worth of pirated movies in it.
Our Top Five Regrets
Quarterlife Magazine's Writers Admit Their Top 5 Regrets in Life.
Ask HN: Selling a software start-up
As advised on Proggit, I'm posting my question here.

I'm considering a selling a small software company in order to be able to concentrate on other ventures. Currently, it's taking up all my time and I've got some other ideas that I want to work on. The company has been profitable since day one (it's been around for almost 1 year) and yearly revenue is the upper 5 figure range (the only real cost is a VPS).

I'm still not decided whether I want to go ahead with it but if I do, how would I go about finding a buyer?

Thanks.
It's almost as dumb as naming a site "The Pirate Bay".
The statement about Hungarian notation and identifying datatypes in names is wrong.
Me. The HTML page is directly taken from the original Facebook note.

I added an author cred to clear up confusion.
In this case, you may be right. Generally speaking, finance can have positive effects -- even commodity speculation can be argued to positively influence long-term price stability. But it's hard to imagine how competing for low-latency server space makes the world a better place, except perhaps to piss people off enough that someone might eventually implement an official timing methodology that can't be gamed by sub-half-second latency advantages.
What the article described sounds like pretty standard sales/business relations. I don't know of any big companies (in or out of the IT industry) that don't throw booze filled events for major customers. On a smaller scale, taking customers out for a couple beers (or sushi and sake) is pretty standard for any sales team.
Source? Numbers? I know that a few first-world countries like Japan have negative population growth, but is that the case everywhere? Are the countries that having negative population growth enough to offset those with positive?
What are "the most interesting/great things with macros" that you would like to do?
When Nature Is Freakier Than Sci-Fi
The large tongue eating parasitic isopod is spooky. great picture.
Finance isn't zero-sum. Better finance makes market capital allocation more efficient, which makes the pie bigger for everyone.
I understand that things of this nature have happened before. In one of the segments from his well-known talk on failure, Adam Savage mentions that it happened with (I believe) Crest over teeth whitening strips.
He also is, sort of directly, responsible for the patenting of plant genomes, input-intensive farming that leads to soil depletion and algae bloom, dangerous crop monocultures, and so on and so forth.

On the flip side, he directly helped countries like ethiopia implement modern farming techniques that increased crop yields magnificently.
Last 30 days have seen incredible M&A activity!
> How does git make programmer A want to disentangle the fix?

From experience, I'd say it makes the process of doing so easier. In git you can:
1. commit a portion of the code, even a portion of a single file using git add --interactive
2. stash your current changes, re-make the change needed, commit, then unstash and keep working

> How does git keep Programmer B from making changes against the wrong base?

Making it easier to move the fix is exactly the point. You can't make it impossible to make mistakes, but you can make them less disastrous. Also, you can easily revert the fix in the wrong branch or remove it entirely if you haven't shared your changes.

> How does git make merging easier?

I was too scared to make branches in other systems, but my guess is that rebase is a significant part of it. If you're rebasing fairly frequently the changes you're making shouldn't diverge too much, and it makes the actual merges trivial.

You gain a lot from being able to manipulate the history of your repository. The unfortunate thing is that the history itself isn't version controlled, so you can't manipulate the history once you've shared it with other people.
And in any case sub-pixel color artifacts were a fact of life for decades when we were all using CRTs. I don't remember anyone complaining about all those visible phosphors then.

Regardless: am I the only one who doesn't see much value here? The icons earlier were arguably more readable, but the colors are nonetheless a little distracting. And I have a strong suspicion from comments (some very positive, some like me much less impressed) that these images are being tuned very heavily to a particular LCD design, or pixel pitch, and aren't as generically useful as people think.
I read this as Google basically giving up on CAPTCHA.
Let me explain.

For a while google had one of the hardest CAPTCHAs but bots just keep getting better, and they were cracking it more and more often. But you can't just make the CAPTCHA even more difficult, it was already fooling a lot of the humans.

Note that a bot does not need to successfully solve it 100% or even 90% of the time. I'm not sure of what the exact figure is but at some point the bot reaches parity with humans even if it only succeeds say 25% of the time. That's because on average now it only takes 4 guesses to guess correctly.

And I don't think reCAPTCHA is stronger then the multicolored CAPTCHA google had (still has?)

I think google is realizing that they just can not stop the best CAPTCHA cracking bots, maybe they can stop a lot of them, or a lot of the not so smart bots.

But they also can't just give on CAPTCHA, and let anyone and any bot in without even trying.

Thus reCAPTCHA because you might as well do a little public good while you're at it. If nothing else, you've at least made some old texts more readable.
Common Lisp was an effort to create an unified, "industrial strength" version of Lisp, because at the time there were many. For this reason the resulting standard is very large and complex. Scheme has been designed with a different agenda (cleanliness, elegance, etc.) and it is more used in the academia ; for example, scheme is the dialect used in the famous SICP book.

If you choose CL, the choice of implementation is not very important while you learn it. Different CL implementations have different strength, e.g. in unicode implementation, compilation speed, treatment of certain kinds of numbers etc., but it is not relevant for a beginner. A popular open source choice is SBCL, but there are others.

Also, there are free/opensource implementations and commercial implementations. The commercial ones are costly (but trial versions exist); they give a more complete environment.
This is interesting, especially in conjunction with this Economist story about the near-collapse of the porn production business: http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm...

Like it or not, I've often thought that porn is a leading indicator of internet trends, and the overall trend in porn seems to be towards low-budget, low-quality disposable stuff designed for a quick buck with no long tail (yeah, that sounds so wrong in this context...). It's also interesting that the industry has gone from being sleazy and underground to professionalized, corporate and semi-respectable - they hold conferences, award shows and so on. But the market is fragmenting so fast that I wonder whether it can properly sustain itself as a distinct industry much longer.

The porn biz never embraced DRM, but that decision has also meant giving up long-term revenue as porn is avidly pirated. Also, the trend towards reality TV, widespread availability of webcams, and IDIY (Internet amateurs) are moving inexorably towards the death of the porn star and porn studio, to be replaced by camsluts; there are a lot of exhibitionists out there and distribution is no longer an issue, especially since porn does not particularly depend on long-form productions like movies do. a 'hot' video lasting 5 minutes is way more desirable to consumers than a 'lukewarm' one lasting an hour.

I don't keep up with the adult web very much but my impression is that while established pay sites are holding their own for the time being, there's a rough 3 way split: 1. mini-studios that do their own video for members, 2. mini distributors that buy in most of their content from model/photographers and resell it, and 3. those who give it away but use the porn as a draw to affiliate programs for sex toys, underwear etc., or sex-dating services. Conversely, I think there are sex-dating services that are free and use the traffic to market porn and/or sex toys.

There's a lesson her for HN readers. What if, instead of consumers finding web apps they like and paying for them (or generating enough traffic to monetize ads), app development tools become so flexible and streamlined that they become consumer-facing, and the majority of people are happy to create their own mashups? That vision is years away now, but ten years ago it wasn't obvious how much havoc cheap digital cameras and streaming video were going to wreak on the porn business as they are doing now.
Some users from 4chan managed to hack recaptcha and embarrass Time magazine seriously at the same time not long ago.

Basically they stuffed the ballots on the Time online voting page where users could vote for most influential person of the year. Most influential person ended up being Moot, founder of 4chan. Just to rub it in they managed to spell "marblecake also the game" out of the first letters of the top 21 entries.

Note: This hack shows more about Time's incompetence than recaptcha's.

In-depths story here: http://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/27/moot-wins-time-inc-lose...
Is Google building an anti-spam empire?
Facebook tops 300 million users
Google to be 'very disappointed' if Chrome doesn't achieve 10% share in 2 years
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+population

Population growth world-wide is 1.14% per year.
He saved an estimated ONE BILLION people. That really puts things in perspective.
http://esa.un.org/unpp/
I stand corrected on the last point. Someone needs to tell Ars and update Wikipedia:

In July 2007, the Ars Technica website published an article announcing that the KDE team would move from KHTML to WebKit.[13]

( From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#cite_ref-arsunfork_12-0 )
It is funny on HN that whenever there is a porn related post, a lot of people will upvote but wont comment. :)

Anyways, I am just curious as to why it is taboo for a normal VC to be investing in adult entertainment? Porn is a big/booming industry and I think a lot innovation can be made in it too.
btw, arc is /not/ CL. It is another kind of lisp. As I understand it, arc is lisp as PG thought it should be. Other currents of thought exist.
A hedge fund in an industry with few publicly traded companies? Perhaps it is a private equity fund?
Speaking of one who has four "distros" in the shop (ubuntu, freebsd, openbsd, osx) each of these has its strength and making our stuff work on them is not a big deal. I don't get confused at all, and there isn't all that much "noise".

Similarly, for the very high performance stuff, i use SBCL which generates native code on all the above platforms. I recently have started to do CCL because a client wants a true mac app and CCL has this wonderful cocoa bridge. If i had to do any java stuff or interface with java, I would probably be using clojure.

If you are interested, I recommend continuing PCL and the lispbox.

If everyone is not moving to fix the problems that you mention, it might mean that they disagree about what the important problems are.

Arc exists as a research effort in thinking about what the next version of lisp should look like, and there are those that feel it is a possible answer to some of your questions.

Scheme is a very essential (e.g. minimalist) implementation of Lisp that is often found in teaching environments.

Don't let the variety scare you--just dive in if you are interested.
NAVTEQ's map of San Francisco has a street called "Submarine Bells Way" that doesn't exist in real life.
Tele Atlas's map of Oakland, CA, includes a made-up street name "Del Norte Drive"
Yeah I thought the article was a little misleading on that point. They made it seem like the human input was improving the OCR algorithms.
Uh.... this is apple. Try again ... with boys.
The Parable of the Box
Howard Wolowitz unavailable for comment.
Not to downplay what Microsoft is doing, but if it only works for preselected inputs, it's not search. It's just web pages you access through a search box instead of through links.
That makes lisp a popular IDEA but it completely ignores the GP's point of economics of a language. Specifically with a dozen implementations each you end up with a bunch of libraries that are subtly (some times not so) incompatible with other implementations so while the community as a whole might be large you don't get the advantages in terms of available code that the size should bring.

At least that was my experience with Scheme, I don't know (but suspect from all the whinging) about the CL side of it.

Which is one of the big advantages of Clojure of course, it comes with a lot of batteries.
'Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine', McCarthy, 1960

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive/recursive.html

Does that sound like 'Ruby'?

I don't think so.
How much of the Green Revolution was due to improved technique and how much was due to hydrocarbon inputs?
Is Louis von Ahn going to work for Google as part of the deal?
Hi I'm from CodeCogs. This last week has been somewhat interesting, it hasn't been a slashdot effect, more a Dos attack effect. But you're right, CC has been slower than it should be - and this is being rectified fast.

As for it being pulled. Not anytime soon. It will always be a free survice, so long as its in use. Made increasingly likely now two large companies are considering handing over control of their servers for us to support directly in exchange for public access. First steps to a truely worldwise distributed equation rendering network.
And even though Scheme was designed to be clean and elegant, CL has to be backward compatible and thus cannot be 'cleaned', right?.

Is there any 'cleaner' CL standard, or at least a 'best practices' guide to code in a cleaner way, avoiding the worse pits that had to be kept in the standard due to backward compatibility?

I can give you a simple C++ example of what I mean. In C, you had those *parameters that had to be matched by &args when the function was called. C++ brought some self-referencing &parameters that were passed normally and worked the same way than the former but were (saidly) less error-prone.

Is there any similar effort being made in Lisp?
(This is from my personal experience, your mileage may vary)
Scheme and CL have different goals: Scheme aims for a quite minimal language with additional abilities primarily through libraries (part of the reason that it is often seen as a teaching language, the core can be learned quite quickly), CL seeks to be a more general purpose language, so it standardizes more features and abilities. Also, Scheme seems to emphasize functional programming more.

The choice of a Lisp seems to be one of situation, context, or religion (for example, see the disagreements as to whether a Lisp-1 or Lisp-2 is better).

Arc may just appear to be an attempt to build a better mousetrap (and is not CL), but it seems to be inspired by the same reason that created most other programming languages: someone (pg) decided that there existed a better way to do task x. I, for one, think that the syntax is cleaner.

I'm usually a Schemer, so I can't really recommend CL implementations...
Thanks for bringing that up, I'd almost forgotten about that.

The way I understand it, reCAPTCHA gives you 2 words to analyze, one which reCAPTCHA "knows" and one it is trying to learn about. As long as you get the word it knows about correct, it'll say you're a human. You're answer to it's unknown word is simply stored and (I'd assume) analyzed until it has enough responses to consider it a known word. Knowing this allowed 4chan users to nearly cut their response time to the captchas in half.

I'd be fascinated to hear more details (or be corrected) on how reCAPTCHA works if anyone has them.
This looks like it'd be promising for having SQL databases over a cluster of machines; how far along is this research?
Extravagant Wordpress Themes & Under Construction Templates Out in September
How so? His inability to operate his cellphone is irrelevant. He asked the guy to send him a fax. The guy sent him a text message or email instead. Buffet looked for a fax, and found none so assumed that the guy had given up. How exactly does this make him 'out of touch?'

He was playing to his strengths by asking for a fax instead of trying to use features of his phone that he didn't understand. It's not his fault that the guy on the other end of the line said, "Fax!? That's too old-fashioned! I'll send him an email/text instead!"

As others have stated, if he was really that interested in the deal he would have called the guy back and asked why he hadn't received a fax.
And shrinking in richer economies. You can't extrapolate out decades with those kinds of trends. Lots of developing economies will be as rich as the west is today before then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Human_populat...

From a peak growth rate of 2.2% on a base of 3.2 billion in 1962-1963, the world population growth rate declined to 1.2% on a base of 6.6 billion in 2007. That's about 79 million net new people in 2007.

Wikipedia elsewhere reports that 1989 was the year with the largest absolute increase in population, 87.8 million net new people. So shrughes' report of not-even-linear growth seems true, at least for the last 20 years.
You say "porn is avidly pirated", as if that's a distinction that is unique to porn. Every single media type on the internet is avidly pirated, except the ones which are annoying to digitize like books - and even those more and more are pirated.

Your point about the collapse of the cost of production for porn is a good one though. That's really hurting the industry's profits.
The man achieved great things, specifically the way in which he solved the problem is phenomenal. It reveals not a just a great mind, but a great character. Not to be glib, but you'd look for something like that in a founder. Except the he didn't create yet another web 2.0 site, he saved billions of lives.

Having said that, lets keep in mind that the green revolution is not as often described a low risk/high yield deal.

Low risk/high yield things often tend to be Utopian and are most often revealed to not be at least one of those things.

The green revolutions is HIGH risk/high yield. It is high risk because it relies on very few, very genetically similar varieties. And those are at high risk for decimation due to disease.

They themselves might not be more susceptible to any one disease, but their near universal use carries a high risk of unforeseen food shortages when some fungus wipes out a sufficiently large percentage of the global wheat crop.

We should carry on Norman Borlaug's work and develop more genetically diverse strains which maintain similarly high yields.

It would also be nice if we could find a way to fertilize without creating hardpan soils or fertilizer runoff into rivers/lakes/oceans.
I've been thoroughly enjoying the show personally. There are certain parts that are obviously overdone/dramaticized for TV but I'm sure it's necessary for non-entrepreneurs to be interested.

A good sign that it's doing OK is its recent shift into a better time slot (Tuesday nights instead of Sunday nights).
These high frequency traders typify the harmful Wall St. attitude with which America's twenty-somethings are enamored. It really needs to stop.

Let's compare business to football.

Some people become experts in training, coaching and playing football. Others manage teams and learn how to spot talent and work with dynamics between players to create winning combinations. They're trying to raise the bar and increase the level of competition within the game.

Then there is a class of people who don't really add anything to the game, but they want to profit off of it. These are the gamblers.

High frequency traders are like meta-meta-football players. They try to profit off transactions between the gamblers.

Frankly, I don't know how they can look at themselves in the mirror. I wish they would put their minds to good use and actually solve real problems instead of meta ones.
puts puts_method.class #=> Method
puts my_block.class #=> Proc

Method and Proc are types; blocks are a syntactic construct.
We can't be sure that they don't invest in porn. General Catalyst Partners and Highland Capital Partners quietly invested in Cash4Gold [1] (whose business practices are a lot more questionable than porn) [2].

[1] http://venturebeat.com/2009/02/03/sleazy-measures-for-sad-ti...
[2] http://consumerist.com/5147418/florida-ag-examining-cash4gol...