skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Interesting programming languages for presentation
I need to hold a presentation (~15 min) on a programming language of my own choice, for a programming languages course. The language should not be one which all in audience should be familiar with, such as Java, C or Haskell. The language presented should either be:
1) An interesting main-stream language, used in industry etc.
2) Interesting out of an academical viewpoint.
3) Historically important

I had planned to talk about Self and prototype-based languages, may including Javascript. However, someone have already picked Io, which is also prototype-based, and I want to talk about something original. Anyone have any ideas?

Much obliged :)
That's not really true. There are a lot of insurances that cover an airlift upto a million dollars. Some kitebording insurances I know do so.
" just don't see Intuit as the right company to run Mint"

It isn't. But (due disclosure: I worked at Intuit once and while I have no special knowledge about this deal, I know how Intuit works)

Intuit had no choice really. Mint was high on management's radar and they were always scared of it. Intuit doesn't "get" the web, the whole company is structured around its success on the desktop and there are too many layers of management to make any kind of innovation successful (One on team I saw, there were 22 managers and 3 developers! I kid you not!).

Intuit talks a lot about "innovation", but the fact is that Mint (and FreshBooks) have been chipping away marketshare every quarter and they couldn't build a mint clone/mint killer (they tried a few times).

Intuit has no choice but to acquire mint if they wanted to have a solid web offering. Will they run it into the ground? certainly, over time, as soon as the mint devs vest and leave and the regular Intuit folks take over. Of course this leaves the space open for another competitor!

Congratulations to the mint team! The one thing Intuit has in plenty (for now ;-)) is money! Enjoy!

EDIT: If I were Intuit and I wanted to make this work, I'd keep the Mint.com team around and let them work in their own fashion, outside the regular Intuit corporate structure. Knowing Intuit this will never happen.
That would make one mean hardware/software incubator and hacker house ...
In your interview at a rope pyrochronography factory, they ask you how to time 45 minutes given two ropes that each take an hour to burn.

(The ropes burn uneveningly and unequally. That is, half a rope won't necessarily burn in half an hour, and it won't necessarily be same amount of time as half of the other would take to burn - all you know is that the total time for one rope to burn is one hour.)
Because you aren't your customer.

And what you said isn't true, although most engineers I know believe it. It's not A/B testing or bust, and design isn't series of arbitrary aesthetic decisions.

You can also gather (non-numerical) data by going out and talking to potential customers, figuring out exactly what they need, and then making design decisions with that as an input.
Fortran 2008, 51 years and going or how to simulate your weather!
This could be an excellent opportunity to start a competing outfit. I bet Inuit will have choked on Mint by the time a new competitor is launched.
So, it seems that the market for a mint clone will be open pretty soon.

I'd imagine there will be a lot of disaffected users here eventually.
This is a terrific exit for Mint

Seriously? Maybe I don't get it but if Yahoo had bought Google or Facebook had bought Twitter would those have been terrific exits? Why are they selling out so quickly?

I don't trust Intuit and will probably stop using Mint (I was just getting started in the past few months).
the point of the higher priced option is that it doesn't cost you any current customers while potentially bringing in customers who wouldn't have otherwise used you though. like the article said, even if the premium option just adds a bunch of management-appeal language with no objective value, you still might be able to get it into the hands of the engineers who work under them (at companies where idiots make the purchasing decisions) that might otherwise not had the option.

secondly, the view that undercutting (for the same objective value) will always be interpreted correctly by the customer is a little naive. In reality you often don't want to undercut your competition by too much for exactly the same reason my initial post was about: perceived value.
Rogue ad hits New York Times site
They also acquired PayCycle (among the leading online payroll companies, and one I used for a couple of years) a little while back. I switched all of our books and payroll over to Intuit products recently, mainly so the part-time bookkeeper will be happy, but haven't been able to figure out how PayCycle fits into the lineup, or whether they will be merging Intuit online payroll (which costs a measly $9.95/month) with PayCycle (which is about fifty bucks per month).
The part I don't get is why Mint would take the quick exit rather than fight the fight. It looked to me like they were well positioned for a long term victory.
Are you saying the difference between the performance of the two groups wasn't statistically significant, or that their methodology is flawed, or that their results were not reproduced in other studies?

It's possible that their theory is bullshit, but it seems like you're discounting the data it is based on without cause.
Need somebody to push the button for you?
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"It looked to me like they were well positioned for a long term victory."

True. But I would imagine 170 million is a lot of money to the founders. A bird in the hand and all that...
Flames like those do not hold much warmth or danger.
If you don't share the client sockets at a level that can distribute work to all of the processes you will get an unbalanced number of connection:keep-alives amongst the workers.
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Grab your love life by the collar and get out of the bedroom; there's a whole world of cheap thrills and naughty sex out there.
Intresting read.. It seems it never did make it to the PC/AT line though.

"The 80186 would have been a natural successor to the 8086 in personal computers. However, because its integrated hardware was incompatible with the hardware used in the original IBM PC, the 80286 was used as the successor instead in the IBM PC/AT."
I've been using Vim for over ten years now, across several jobs and platforms and tasks, so my .vimrc and .gvimrc have gathered quite a bit of cruft. I keep them in a git repository along with my various other generically useful config files, and just check them out on each new machine I get an account on.

There's too much stuff in these files to describe what everything does, but there's a lot of comments, so along with the Vim online help you should be able to figure everything out:

.vimrc: http://paste.ubuntu.com/270714/

.gvimrc: http://paste.ubuntu.com/270716/

Highlights include a single key-binding for stepping through every buffer in every tab, consistent mouse-handling between console-vim and gvim, and code to automatically make gvim inherit the GNOME default monospace font.
I'm going to have to disagree with that. Wish I could tell you why.
Sorry to kungfudoi for posting this half an hour after he/she posted it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=820962
Those are the standard sounds made by some brand of walkie-talkie (Motorola I think) to mark begin/end transmission. Now that you mention it, they do sound an awful lot like the sounds Commander Keen made with the PC speaker.
$170 million is why. There was a good amount invested over a few rounds, but what's left is probably enough FU money for Aaron and team.
Hopefully this means that Mint will be finally be available outside the US.
Caring about your books and paper
Which is a shame.

I just found shelisp [1] which, despite the questionable name, looks simple and promising.

[1] http://dan.corlan.net/shelisp/
The question isn't so much why Intuit would buy Mint, but why would Mint allow themselves to be acquired so soon?

If Mint was doing so well, they'd continue on their path to completely outplace Quicken. Something about this just doesn't add up.
Littmann stethoscope
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This made me realize why I prefer watching a movie before going to bed, instead of having a late night coding session. After keeping my mind occupied for a while with lots of left-brain thinking, I can't just flip a switch and see life in a holistic, right-brain way. I'm usually laying on the bed, sleepless, thinking about every little problem in my life in excruciating detail. It's only after I make some conscious effort to switch to right-brain thinking that I finally relax and fall asleep.

I face the same issue when I drive home from work, too. It's usually when I see my daughter's face that I can power-down the left brain and start seeing the big picture.
Company Helps Real Estate Agents To Get REO Listing
I like the above thought and love to be the part of it.
Carrol spncr
<a href="http://www.virtuallyachieved.com/pressreleases/reopressrelease.html">
Company Helps Real Estate Agents To Get REO Listing</a>
I've been thinking about this also and was planning this week to change one of my login shells to just pythn to trial it. I've now got two small line-based editors running in python (one is an ed clone, the other is simpler and uses list comprehension), and it's simple enough to write wrapper functions around the bits you need to change directory and spawn process. There's no standardisation of effort, but it's completely doable just on your own system. I realise it's probably not at the top of your mind, but can you think what you found missing when you last tried it?
It uses thrust vectoring. The engine is on a gimbal and is constantly moving to keep the vehicle upright and on course. The fact that you can hardly see the movement means the sensors and software are doing a really good job keeping it stable.
Goodbye, Mint.
Is the oscillation at the end of the first video due to back-blast? It looked like it was increasing, as if in positive feedback.
Yeah, but they do most of that already unless it's illegal and they can't get away with it.
Naked Voices: Stories & Sketches by Saadat Hasan
In this collection of sixteen stories and three sketches, translated by Rakhshanda Jalil, Manto brazenly celebrates the warts of a seemingly decent society as well as its dark underbelly - tired and overworked prostitutes in 'The Candle's Tears' or 'Loser all the Way'; ruthless as also humane pimps in 'The Hundred Candle Watt Bulb' and 'Sahay'; the utter helplessness of men in the face of a sexual encounter in 'Naked Voices'.
Should we create pain-free animals for eating?
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Reminds me of Civilization and its Discontents by Freud (1928), where he treats technology and tools the expand man's ability to perceive the world (telephones, long distance prothetic ear, telescopes are prosthetic eye enhancement) or interact with the world (ships, travel aid, prosthetic feet, etc.)... aka man evolves through technology.
The days of billion-dollar exits for zero-revenue companies are gone, and will probably continue to be gone for a long while to come.
When you live in a city, you live close to many other people and there is going to be noise. It's like living out in the county and wining about the long drive to the store. If sound pollution is such a huge priority for you, why do you live in the city?
I updated my post and introduced substantial changes.
Love to be the contrarian... this guy was probably good hearted, but he did not "saved millions from starvation". Worst case he may have enabled other people to curse billions to starvation.

Overall, grain yields may have grown up. However, one must remember that "demand" in economics terms is not what you want but what you are willing and able to pay for. The green revolution technologies have impoverished and taken out of business small farmers but in the developed and subdeveloped world, reducing food security overall. Sure, they produce more than never... but they have gone into debt in order to afford the seeds fertilizers, machinery, etc. Then prices crash due to over production and those who stay in business do only so because of the subsides of their governments.

On the other hand, the people who controls the comodities market do not sale affordable food to the poor. They funnel the extra grain yields into the production of meat and other highly industrialized food products that can be afforded by the affluent, and the poor continue to scrap a living with agrarian methods already known in the dark ages.

So, for my part, I'll let the guy rest in peace. I believe he wanted to do good, and even did some of that... but such a hero? I don't buy it.
hey! new technology! will communism work now? how about now? maybe now!
http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Dummies-Sean-Masaki-Flynn/dp...
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There is a good competitor, Wesabe. Disclosure: I helped get that product launched and still have some stock.

They have many of the same features, are catching up in the polish area, and have a strong data privacy angle.
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what's up with the acquisition price ..Intuit's recent acquisitions - paycycle, homestead, and now mint.com all acquired for 170 millions!
I'm going to go ahead and be the counter point on this. I worked at a shitty service job for years and nothing pissed me off like people using my name and trying to get friendly.
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He's basing his knowledge on Jill Bolte's TED talk. NOOOOOooooo. That TED Talk was full of misinformation when it came out, and obviously still is.

The left brain is NOT a "serial processor", and the right brain is not a "parallel processor". Those are bullshit analogies.

What the main difference is, is the left-brain is usually specialized for fast, categorical processing using a smaller field of information, wheras the right-brain is usually specialized for broader, global processing.

The whole brain uses parallel processing. Also, kids who have huge sections of their left brain removed (due to epilepsy) are still able to develop language abilities in their right brain. Language processing can be done on both sides of the brain.

You can test for hemispherical differences in people by either the left or right part of their visual field. The left hemisphere processes the right visual field, the right hemisphere processes the left visual field. The right side of the brain actually processes language faster\better in some instances, like getting jokes. This is because you need to activate a wider field of connections to pick up that such a grouping of letters (the word) can have multiple semantic meanings.

The difference isn't serial vs. parallel. That's bullshit. The whole brain is parallel everywhere. The difference is in the field of focus. How much data do you look at to draw a conclusion. Left-brain: smaller field of information, "local" processing, can categorize faster. Right-brain: broader dataset, "global" processing, categorize slower.

As a cognitive science student I wanted to clear that up.
Also, intelligence is extremely varied people are not either "left brain" or "right brain", there are lots of different processing heuristics that might be occurring that different emphasize over others.
IPhone gets .Net app development
170 Million is long term victory.
Sociology has defined "need" long ago. Check out the Maslov pyramid:
http://bit.ly/17Tfik
Fish is good but development has all but ceased on it.
dr_dank explained BeOS's awesomeness in a Slashdot post some years ago http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66224&cid=60954...

Here it is, pasted for posterity:

So, Be fans, what makes BeOS so special?

BeOS was demonstrated to me during my senior year of college. The guy giving the talk played upwards of two dozen mp3s, a dozen or so movie trailers, the GL teapot thing, etc. simultanously. None of the apps skipped a beat. Then, he pulled out the showstopper.

He yanked the plug on the box.

Within 20 seconds or so of restarting, the machine was chugging away with all of its media files in the place they were when they were halted, as if nothing had happened.

Damn.
Yeah - people tend to overestimate some risks - like car theft, flying airplains etc. - this is why insurance companies can make some money. This is in conflict with that hypothesis - the left-brain dominant would not do that because left brain is calculating, right-brain dominant would not do that because it is optimistic.
Here's the same algorithm and other variants implemented in Matlab/C++ (can be run on Netflix-sized data):
http://www.cis.hut.fi/alexilin/software/
I have just one word: Damn.
Most rope has three strands twisted together. Pull these apart and tie them together. Voila - a rope that is 3 times as long (minus knots).

http://www.paddling.net/sameboat/Images/knotrope.gif
The image shows what I've now learned is called "laid rope"
Okay - I'm stumped. Care to share the answer? (maybe in a day or so -- to allow others to attempt to puzzle it out?)
There's also http://www.buxfer.com, a YC company.
Wish I could tell you why.

Is this because you have some secret knowledge about the deal, or just because you have a gut feeling about it? Your last sentence seemed a little suspicious, which is why I ask.
I thought of a different solution to the one everyone else is pitching. If you could loop the rope you might be able to get it around the tower (if the diameter of the tower is low enough, and if it's not it's a bit of an unusual tower), and then you can 'shimmie' down the tower, working around the rope as you do. I'd expect you'd have better odds doing this then splitting the rope.

If a part solution hadn't been given (tie the rope in a loop) then you might even be able to gnaw through the rope so you have it in two pieces - one to wrap around yourself as a harness so you can slide about as you work the rope down the tower. These solutions do assume that the diameter of the tower is consistent in both directions.

Although if it got thicker on the way down you might be able to loop slack into it higher up and then consume this as you descend.
It depends on what your audience already knows about. If it's a programming languages course then they might know about any or all of these, but given that you should be aiming to learn something, perhaps your best idea is to pick something obscure that will improve your knowledge, then make the argument that it's interesting from an academic viewpoint.

However, more pragmatically: Lisp, Erlang, Occam, J, APL, Lua.
Was mint a zero-revenue company? They have at least three angles to cash in on what they have (aside from selling to Intuit): A) Pitching offers from banks for credit cards and accounts. Banks are willing to pay for these, and they have the information to match the right accounts with the right people. B) Offering tax-filing services like TurboTax. C) Sellign aggregate data from their customers (Not my favorite, but it's not necessarily off of the table).
So far as I know appendix removal is move invasive of a surgery with more risk than removal of wisdom teeth is.

Other than that, I would want to see the numbers on '% of people that need appendix removal' vs '% of people that need wisdom teeth removal.' My suspicion is that the latter is much higher than the former, but I could be wrong.
Well, it all depends on the 'type' of government healthcare that happens.

If hospitals are still privately owned, but the government basically starts it's own 'insurance company' that covers everyone that isn't part of the private insurance company plan (similar to Germany) then it's possible that a rural area could still have spinal surgery experts. Even if the hospitals are all government-owned and run (similar to the UK method of healthcare), it's still possible to have spinal surgery experts in a rural area. It just would depend on what was cheaper. Is it cheaper to have a spinal surgery-trained staff at the rural hospital or to fly everyone 300 miles to another hospital? (Or the 3rd option of having staff at a different hospital, but making sure that it is less than 300 miles away -- i.e. spread out facilities that can handle such injuries so that there aren't hugely expensive transit costs for treatment)
genetic engineering will be old hat soon. Our kids will be writing 'Hello World' in DNA++. As for creating pain-free livestock to eat? Why not go one step further and create livestock without any awareness at all? Better yet, just add engineered nanobots to a nutrient solution to create the perfect steak? Livestock would be obsolete. Future generations will think us barbaric for killing other sentient life.
Crushing your enemy, seeing them driven before you and hearing the lamentations of their women is victory (e.g. Larry Ellison). $170 million is retirement.
Most systems will have at least bash, csh or tcsh. I've yet to run across a system that only had ksh or zsh (or something exotic).
Mint was making a rather significant amount of money as a credit card affiliate. (They also hawked other financial products, but that is almost certainly the most lucrative one. They have a lucrative CPA, a wider reach than home loans, and more repeat business in the demographics inclined to hand all their financial info to a Web 2.0 site.)

Many, many affiliates who look at a million dollars as "Meh, not a lot of money to me anymore" physically drooled when they heard of Mint's model, principally because almost nobody realizes they're an affiliate marketer. As an affiliate, you (potentially) make a lot of money but defensibility of your revenue is a constant driving concern since Google, the merchant, or other affiliates can always disintermediate you. But who can disintermediate the guy you've already given full read access to your financial life to?
Should we grow meat in-vitro?
Probably, but we might as well just skip to the meat grown in vats.
if someone can buy a laptop to use wireless then why can't they pay for wireless service?

The price of the cheapest second hand laptop with wifi support is around $0-100. The price for wireless service is quite a bit higher than that.
They tried to deploy a few in Moscow, gave up and now trying Wi-Max.