skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I upvoted it because I agree with "The problem with your line of thinking is that open source [usually] doesn't pay. The best people in certain fields, meanwhile, only work for money, and occasionally only for large gobs of money", among other reasons.

I realize Dropbox might be able to open source their client without significant risk, but why take any unnecessary risks at this point? There's no reason to. Or maybe Dropbox feels that their source code's quality is nasty, and don't want to put in the effort to clean it up before open sourcing it.

It's solely the decision of Dropbox whether the Dropbox client is open sourced, and they should not be blamed for deciding against it.
Touche and haw haw, but you very well know what I've meant.
FYI, this topic has been extensively discussed a month ago http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=789110
Wait, how are we going to access this information when we really need it, after the lights go out on our civilization? ;-)
Good point. Bad assumption on my part.
It has very little to do with Perl and a lot to do with self-appointed "experts" on StackOverflow that aren't actually as smart as they think.

Whether or not the author of this blog post suffers from the same problem is debatable, however.
if someone can tell me how I can search for people who happen to appear on the same photo, I will be very grateful. Yes, all of faces are tagged...
A Vision of a Post-Wave Internet
Navigation system uses crowdsourcing for route guidance
Last person on the internet, please print Wikipedia.
You needed to say these things before separating from your employer. In fact, you needed to say these things as they came up, rather than letting them pile on and form into a huge rant like this. I'm actually having a hard time following each and every point you have, even though some of the ones I can pick out seem pretty valid. It is overwhelming, and overwhelming usually means nothing is going to get done, because no one knows where to start.

I agree with the other comments so far that this shows a certain degree of passive-aggression which isn't particularly appetizing.

However, I will strongly disagree with the point in a couple of the other comments that the acceptable alternatives are: shut up, do as your told, and detach from your job as much as you possibly can while still performing it; part ways politely without indicating anything was ever other than you expected it. These take an adversarial stance that you and your employer have nothing more to offer one another than what was strictly agreed to as the job duties and wage, and that any such attempt at offering will only result in bad outcomes for the weaker party.

When did we get so fucking bitter and jaded? And when did we decide that this outlook was optimal? I honestly wonder if this sort of attitude contributes to polemics like this, because we insist that people have an seemingly infinite ability to remain stoic and bottle their frustration. The alternative of trying to separate emotionally from a job never, ever works. Doing bullshit for eight hours a day to fund eight hours of "recovery time" is not zero-sum; the effects are real, as much as people want to blame those effects on the mere state of being alive. You are not preprogrammed to be depressed; this is not a least-energy state!

The other option is to quit, but employees usually don't until the get to the polemic-spewing boiling-point of their frustration. It sneaks up on them, because they've been bottling it so long. Writing it and then deleting it is therapeutic, but doesn't accomplish anything. The next job will likely be the same, like a self-perpetuating prophecy, because a lot of employers suck, because a lot of employees within are trying every day to convince themselves they don't care. This is least-energy for the employer, not the employee.

If you really want to step off this cycle, perhaps it is time to admit what you've known all along: you do care what you are doing 8 hours a day, and who you are doing it for.
It's true. My friend John Ratcliff is a very "old-school" hacker, very set in his ways, but when he discovered Dropbox by accident even he jumped all over it. http://jratcliffscarab.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html
37Signals hits $100 billion valuation after selling 0.000000001% of company
> commercial implementations like Lispworks and Allegro

I understand that Clozure CL and SBCL are also good. Maybe not THAT good, but good. Thing that bothers me with that argument is if CL or Lisp in general had the appeal to the critical mass of programmers, it would be built - no matter if standards were the obstacle or commercial implementations. They would come and build a new one, no?

As for the libraries - there surely is a way to make bindings to other libraries. For example, we have that kind of problem in D, but we can easily bind to C libraries, so that is not that much of a hassle.

My deep thought on all of that is what bothers me the most. Here is my theory. Is it possible that the real reason is that there are basically two types of programmers:

1. Recipe / Cargo Cult programmers that are programmers by career inertia

2. Programmers that think more about the nature of the problem and hack their mindset to the code. You know, the type that thinks more than they code - code is just a splurt at the end of the process.

If that is true, and if Lisp appeals only to the second bunch (not all of them, of course). It might be a hypothetical disastrous indicator of the ratio in programmer population.

Or maybe I'm just thinking too much about it all.
How Long Do You Need To Boil Water?
I'm intrigued by this link being submitted.
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An excerpt from The Dream Machine:

"As a Lisp programmer continued to link simpler functions into more complex ones, he or she would eventually reach a point where the whole program was a function-which, of course, would also be just another list.. So to execute that program, the programmer would simply give a command for the list to evaluate itself in the context of all the definitions that had gone before, And in a truly spectacular exercise in self-reference, it would do precisely that. In effect, such a list provided the purest possible embodiment of John von Neumann's original conception of a stored program: it was both data and executable code, at one and the same time

In Mathematics, the technical name for this sort of thing is recursive function theory, which was why McCarthy called his first public description of Lisp 'Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation By Machine' Today ranked as one of the most influential documents in the history of computer languages, that paper established that a language could have a rigorous mathematical foundation. And it signified that John McCarthy had finally come up with a framework that was precise enough, rigorous enough, and compelling enough to satisfy even him"

His paper can be found here: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.pdf

I am just amazed how often his name appears on this book (the first time he is mentioned, Waldrop talks about how strange people said he is). But in my book he will always be a legend and a visionary.
There are lots of pro-open source people, and lots of people who still need convincing. I don't think we can easily be sorted as a community into any category beyond "ambitious". All other traits are up for grabs.
Though I must admit, every time I share something with a friend in a public folder I worry that I'll trip up some "amount of shit you can give people" limit and end up banned.
Just because the halting problem can not be solved in the general case, does not mean it can't be solved for a specific program.

So the conclusion with the heart are wrong. The "program" that is a heart might be analyzable as a halting problem. It's not a general purpose program after all - it's a specific one.
He left out the most interesting part: how exactly a heart cell can simulate a nor gate.
Erm... You can get around this in Safari by orienting your phone so that the Home button is towards your ceiling. The reason this works is because Safari only has three rotations (normal, landscape 90deg left, and landscape 90deg right). Since it never flips upside-down, just keep your phone oriented so that the home button is towards the ceiling.

Edit: Oh snaps, apparently apps besides Safari will actually flip entirely upside-down! Wow, that's annoying. Seems like a bug in their app, though. Safari got it perfect.
Most people, I think, would have to be quite angry before they would bother writing all this about a place they were never going to set foot in again, so we assume he's seething, even though the tone isn't even as angry-sounding as Zed used to be.
Amazon Kindle does it nicely… kind of popup-button.
Synoid (1983) pure analog video feedback demo
Hmmm... well, there are probably more than two types, but I think there are at least the two types you mentioned. The only person I really feel comfortable speaking for is myself. I choose Lisp (Common Lisp in particular, and SBCL at that) for a number of reasons, but mostly:

1. because I seem avoid so much code that I could see myself having to write in other languages, and

2. because it gives me all this great dynamic functionality while still being extremely fast, especially compared to other languages.

Once I realized all the crazy things you can do with it and still run fast its been difficult to imagine using anything else where I have a choice.
Java's type system can't protect you from me
I'm not familiar with the americancity website, but the article was, for all the above-mentioned reasons, intellectually empty.

Consensual acts by consenting adults are, legal or otherwise, totally unrelated to acts of aggression against individuals or their property.
How many of the money-losing ventures here pay taxes, seriously?
It's a license which confers certain rights to the recipient of the software. In this case it appears the the recipient successfully sued to enforce those rights.
Ask HN: Why the instant dead-ing of the '36-38 NotNoise' 'valuation'?
I may have missed something, of course, but it seems to keep being resubmitted by different people and then killed. Curious _why?
That's some pretty speculative wondering..

According to this study, California has fairly average reliability (page 26). (using interruption cost as proxy)

http://www.netl.doe.gov/moderngrid/docs/Cost_of_Power_Interr...
because he started with inane shit; "seeds of facism"
"Indian version of Y Combinator"

Yeah Right!

From the FAQ

"When the company is formed we set up a bank account. When the bank account is set up we deposit a check for the full amount of our commitment ie. 5 Lakh directly into it. A company secretary is brought in to distribute funds from the company checking account as per the budget instructions. Adjustments to the budget can be made at board meetings. Founders do not have direct check writing control of the bank account."

You need to buy an extra laptop, wait for the next board meeting and/or get approval from the "Company Secretary".

"Founders do not have direct check writing control of the bank account!"

Sounds like a great way to run a startup!

And they have the audacity to call it "The Indian version of YC".

I doubt PG and co sit around approving line items and writing checks every other day! AFAIK they hand over the money at the beginning and that's that.
For Goodness' Sake
I read that paper around six months ago. I found it a little dry at first, and then absolutely enlightening. It's amazing what beautiful and complex things can be built with such a small handful of functions.
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Let's say we are arguing about the color of Mount Everest. Joe says it's blue and Mike says it's white. Would it be relevant to the debate if Joe had never in fact seen Mount Everest?

In the same way, software advice that doesn't take the form of deductive argument from mutually agreed-upon principles is largely valuable insofar as the person peddling it is experienced and honest.
Thanks, that was what I was looking for.

"Woods...believes it to be a watershed case proving that free markets adjust prices and supplies much more efficiently than any government coordinated action, and that Keynesian philosophy ignores the '21 episode because it suggests government intervention is not required in such crises."
Good idea. Not sure I can stay under the free limit or want to pay for a second account, but if I can that will do it.
I'm not surprised at the cost.

The biggest problem with LEDs has been that efficiency drops as the LED is scaled up in brightness.

Most likely they solved that by placing a very large number of smaller LEDs together in one bulb.

But it's not going to be easy to reduce the cost when you go that route.

The basic research of making a bright LED efficient has not been solved yet.
This is a great story for everyone who are on a Visa in the US to pursue their entrepreneurial ambitions. And for people who are already US citizens, it's still a good story to see how he managed his projects, legal issues, hiring, juggling expenses etc ...
Barack Obama: Economic vandalism
Passive AdBlock use is a very implicit, inconsiderate way of telling people to get a new business model. How about, "Hey, the ads on your site are annoying, and I think I almost got a virus from one. I suggest you fix it. In the meantime, I'm using AdBlock on your site."

There are perfectly good reasons to block ads, but far too many people take a brute force approach to it that will result in good sites going away, or charging users instead of advertisers. I think both of those outcomes suck. If you want to block ads, I'm sure you can spare 30 seconds to let people know why and how to get you to stop.
I agree with the first part of your response although its not really a goal of this form of stimulus to hand out "fairly". The goal is to provide for macro-economic stimulus.

The second part of your reply depends on many factors. Not every form of stimulus ends up being a "handout" or "pork". Most stimulus can be debated ad nauseam as to if it had the intended effects and most likely if you can measure the effects, you have to do so in longer stretches than 2/4/6 year election cycles.

I completely disagree that people should not "waste" their time in politics. Government is an investment. Its foolish to not oversea and provide/demand input to what you have invested in. This is a core problem with the U.S.: people think they can just pay taxes (preferably low) maybe even be so bothered as to vote once every few years, and government and the economy will run smoothly.

To put it as bluntly as possible: "Democracy belongs to those that show up". If you do not get involved you will most likely find yourself eternally dissatisfied with the results.
Here's a more interesting scenario: assume that I own a significant amount of stock options from that company. Don't I have an incentive to make sure that the company succeeds (even though they fired me) and therefore try to explain to management what the current problems are?
It's probably more that they failed to expand their power generation capacity to meet demand, then tried to fix the problem by implementing a half-baked "deregulation" scheme that created a distorted market full of loopholes that allowed unscrupulous raiders (cf. Enron) to go on a looting spree and wreck the whole system, and it takes a while to pick up the pieces after a disastrous mistake.

The moral of the story is that sometimes, "a competitive free market" and "a stable, regulated public utility" are both local maxima and may have very, very deep minima between them.
On the positive note, I believe this is the way to enforce http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/affirmative-action/ for the denied and deprived sections of society in America.
It took 7 years!?!? for this case to finish?

New business model:

Violate GPL
Earn money for 6 years
Pay massive salaries
Go bankrupt on the 7th
My point was just in questioning a $4/million figure using a 0.10/hr instance. Why don't you run benchmarks against a reserved high CPU instance for 100M pages crawled? I was never contending that you cannot offer cost savings over custom crawling in ec2, just the way the #s on the page were calculated. If you have enough traffic to keep your instances saturated of course it is more economical to buy dedicated servers, but nobody starts out that way. Why in the world do you think you can't get enough nodes or bandwidth to do web crawling off of EC2? I remember seeing Bezos talk about animoto scaling up to 3500 instances instantly for video transcoding, I find it extremely hard to believe such a parallelizable task as web crawling could not be done on EC2. It's one thing to say that you can do it cheaper, it's another thing entirely to say that it can't be done on EC2 at all. How did you come to this conclusion?
Ask HN: Twitter is to text as [insert-future-app] is to actions?
Imagine seeing how an investigator does research on his computer live? Or seeing what Paul Graham does on his pc? Being able to learn from it and discuss it. Creepy but interesting, no?

I have an idea for an app and very little means to create so I ask for opinions and how you would proceed. I am disclosing everything with trust in this extraordinary community. If nothing else, I hope to turn this one crazy idea into a learning opportunity. Perhaps it can be a communal effort.

What if there was an app which you could turn off and on with one click that tracked everything you did on your computer. Very creepy is the obvious answer but isn't that what people thought of facebook and twitter?

v.1 would be a browser plugin that would track the URLs you visit and the amount of time you visit them for. Your profile on the app would include a live list, a version of your web history. For starters, only those who you send access to would see it. Celebrities in the future might leave it completely open. v.5 could publish the fact that you wrote a page on word in 25 min, 5 of which were spent watching a video on youtube.

I envision a social grander to this. Analyzing workflows and time management techniques. Watching what you do more carefully and learning from that. Seeing what others do and learning from that. I for one would like the motivation it would provide. Knowing my real name would be attached to what I do would be a great incentive to stay on task and make sure I spend my time wisely.

The core question here is can people get over the privacy and creepiness issue?
thanks. I think that sums it up very nicely.
I'm curious if anyone is using this on KDE3?

The site refers to "Linux" as if it had some single monolithic desktop manager, but what they really mean is "running Nautilus", a GNOME file manager. I'm reluctant to just install nautilus for fear of desktop side effects.
Congrats Ben! It's been a long time coming. Great work on keeping one of the most top-notch communities on the web.
Wow, a dollar for every monthly unique:) Congrats for the top-notch VC line up.
Venting anger helps. Often when I was pissed off at my client I wrote angry letter pinpointing all the inadequacies in his behavior. After I wrote it I was calm enough to write another letter where I proposed constructive ways to alleviate the problems we had.

Of course I was just sending the second letter because only useful purpose of the first one was to help me calm down.
This is something that Apple could totally provide at a global level. Subclasses of the UIViewController can override the willRotateToInterfaceOrientation:duration: method to define how they want to handle rotation events. Apple could modify the UIViewController's default behavior to not send rotation messages if a global "don't rotate" setting is set to true.
I agree but it's a fun idea to anonymize such unsent angry letters and publish them for own and other peoples amusement.

Plus you can learn a lot from other peoples mistakes, may that be mistakes of the criticized ones or the critic himself.
No, actually, I'm not sure which of two usual misconceptions you have: (a) that Lisp = Common Lisp, or (b) that Lisp is rarely used.

Usually when people think Lisp is dead, they mean (b), but you've been here long enough to have noticed the volume of stories about Clojure on HN, so the probability of (a) and (b) seem about equal.
You should look up Sridhar Vembu's posts on anti-credentialism. In fact he prefers hiring kids out of highschool and teaching them programming rather than hiring engineers (let alone engineers from the IIT).

I love the IITs. Of the 5 enlightened professors I met in India, 3 were at an IIT. I had some of my best times at events at IITs. But using those as a filter is stupid and as you point out, in the case of those who brag about having gone to an IIT, its invariably counterproductive in my experience.
I can only surmise, but I have thought about this same question every time I end up in an engineering department that turns "IT" underneath me -- it has happened a couple of times now. I have left both times, after making attempts to push the organization back the other way hard enough to be threatened with termination.

People make this choice because they have convinced themselves they never had a choice. They remain there because they are convinced they still don't have a choice.

The explanation is usually a story of falling or being forced into a position followed by stating the tautology of it being a job. They are willing to take a painful known quantity over an unknown quantity elsewhere -- which is assumed to be at least as painful --, all the while saying to themselves repeatedly "I need to be stronger than the pain for the people who rely on me." Sometimes this will become even more self-fulfilling, and they will assume they have no other options, painful or not.

Along with this, they will provide rationalizations about how, even if they had a choice, it really would not matter. The purpose of a job is money. Full stop. If you make it anything else, you are martyring yourself to your employer. Thus, it doesn't matter where you work, so long as you are. Any desire you have to make those hours of your day more meaningful need to be bottled away, because they never will be. Those who don't accept this are ignorant of the facts of life, which are assumed to be true by means of circular logic and a desire to rationalize one's own rut in life.

Humans are amazingly good at rationalization, even when it starts from the usually faulty premise that where they are now is the best things can possibly get.

Hope this provides some insight about your question.
The link seems to be broken; it's missing the apostrophes.

Try: http://blog.jrock.us/articles/Java%27s%20type%20system%20can...
What you mean is that "dead" is a perception that exists only in your mind.

If you look at concerns other than langauge, you could easily say that "writing quality software is dead", since most programmers write low-quality programs that barely work at all. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to do a good job, even though quality in the industry is "dead".

Don't base what you do on the actions of an ignorant majority. If you like Lisp, use Lisp. You won't be the only one.
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Foldershare is now known as windows live sync.