skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) Fair enough, up to the designer's taste

2) Do you mean "not real good with case-sensitivity" or just "case insensitive"? If the latter database still preserves the case, then the underscore on an all-caps name is even uglier.

3) driversLicenses.id is not the same thing as vehicles.id. The point is to name the column what it is so the meaning is preserved everywhere. If you don't use aliases then you can't distinguish them in the result set. If you do use aliases then an app that reads and updates has to now remember that the alias isn't its real name.

4) I haven't noticed the mental cache problem myself, sorry. But a table called "vehicle" isn't a vehicle. I don't believe the issues with "person" vs. "persons" or even "sheep" vs. "sheeps" is worth the mental cache problem of remembering if you're dealing with a row or the entire table in the context of the application.

5) Conceded

6) The point of the article is about using naming to improve clarity, including where metadata like domains and check constraints aren't visible, such as printouts. The postfixes don't even encode type, but information about how the value is defined. A books table with a "ddc" column isn't hurt by adding "_class", but you're also communicating that the value comes from an international standard classification system (Dewey Decimal). I don't know of a database system that can encode this meaning in types, domains or check constraints.

On critique of _skidmarks and StudlyCaps, I guess I should have emphasized the concept of coding to what the toolchain and environment's conventions suggests, such as putting "When In Rome, Always Do As Romans Do" in boldcase at the top of the sidebar. Like I had.
Your questions are reasonable ones given your experiences, but their nature makes it unlikely for people to expend much energy answering them -- questions like "why isn't anyone moving to fix them?" may be perfectly reasonable to you, and inspire eye-rolling in others.

Nonetheless, you'd be able to answer most of them if you tried to make a few of your own knock-off programs in lisp. ;) To do that, you'd have to decide on a lisp, installing a few and trying them out, and then decide on a project -- hopefully, something small and manageable. Perhaps a visual "hello, world" program. Or a code-golf exercise. My personal "hello, world" for learning a new language is usually a basic 1D cellular automata.

Once you've written your hello world, you'll have answered many of your questions. Next, rewrite it! Is your code idiomatic? What are some common idioms, and why do they exist? Could you make it shorter?

Next, extend it. Can you use it from the web? What would it take? What about letting people customize your helloworld? etc etc. See what it feels like to develop in the new language, even though the entire "project" cycle could conceivably be done in a single day. (Disclaimer: not by me. It takes me, at least, two months of part-time hacking to feel affection for a language).

After that kind of a learning process -- which isn't terribly onerous; it's the sort of thing you end up doing with almost any interesting language -- you'll look back at these questions and laugh.

And, if you aren't willing to go through that sort of "learning lite", why bother asking the questions?

( If you're looking for enlightenment about the process of actually using Lisp, in book form, I recommend Practical Common Lisp, which is available as a free pdf ).
Even though it may be greedy ebay was asking for it by not making sure they were actually buying all of skype and not just the front end.
A New Way to Turn Plastic Into Fuel?
I really like The Matrix, but it doesn't make sense for a simulation. It's a movie and there are tons of things that Just Don't Make Sense.

People grow up inside the Matrix, which means that the whole system has to be continuous. No resets, reboots, starting from scratch, etc. So how do you seed this thing? How do you 'start over'?

Then of course there's the whole thing about Skynet (yes, I know, different franchise) using humans for energy. WTF. Kill the humans, put cows in the pods and have the whole simulation be an endless grass field.

I could go on, but, well, I won't.
Do You Have the Right to Flip Off a Cop?
Study: 74% of developers in emerging markets use open source software
Resignation Letter: Tired of Meaningless Work
Betfair has realtime sportbet trading
the minimum amount to get this functional.
Tweets from other TwitTornado users are in real time (via Tornado). Tweets from non-TwitTornado users are polled on the interval.
Unladen Swallow Talk at PyCon Argentina
Phone Calls Come to Twitter with @call @username
meh.

the original post to me seemed unnecessary, as does this reply.
WebKit Page Cache I - The Basics
"The general notion is that you start with customer discovery, then move to customer validation, then customer building and then company building."

They also say that you have to know your ideal customer: http://biznik.com/articles/your-ideal-customer
Avoid: Elance, getacoder, rentacoder, guru

Craigslist is honestly better than those places.

Ask for references, samples of past work, etc. Good programmers will have to ask you "of what kind of work" to narrow it down.
See: Kayak, Sidestep
A $50MM round at a $1 billion valuation means that the VC's are collectively getting 5% of the company for their investment. Does anyone else think that's an unusually tiny share?
This is about Sarbanes-Oxley, the mindlessly prescriptive financial markets "reform" that did nothing to stop the massive fraud and collapse of the past three years but has added literally a trillion dollars in costs on US businesses.

"I think the joke is old already, enough with the sarbanes oxley. It was fun while it lasted but there is no way anbody can honestly think that this bullshit is necessary. "
One thing you can try is to submit the credit card information as an Authorization Only transaction first. Most gateways will respond with a transaction id that you could then resubmit after confirmation from the user as a Prior Authorization and Capture transaction that would complete the transaction. Authorization Only transactions and their transaction ids expire after a set period of time if they're not submitted for capture (e.g., 30 days for authorize.net).

You won't ever have to store actual credit card information in this scenario (just transaction information) and you can freely show the the last 4 digits of credit used.

That's one solution I can think of, but if you can dig up a PCI compliant method to actually store the data, please share.
Yeah, same here
Implementation is where theory and practice collide in a conflict! In GNU tradition, guile (a Scheme) is widely available. Personally, I've found newLisp (http://www.newlisp.org/) to be small, fast, portable across all main platforms, good if you want to deploy web-apps, not so good if you want to write full-featured GUI apps.

As for the Linux comparison, once you really know (i.e. can use command line, the shells, awk, grep, sed, etc) one Linux distro, you can work your way through the others and even AIX, the various BSDs, HPUX, Mac OS/X and Solaris.
Black box equities trading + monte carlo voodoo would be nice.
I hate how the tabs don't open at the end. IE7/8 does that too, and there doesn't appear to be a way to fix it.
Regarding (1): Pull out the card and look at it. It says "driver license".
AOP was the next big thing five years ago. I've never heard of a serious, non-dog-food project written in any (pointcut-rich) implementation of aspects.

The fundamental problem with aspect-oriented programming is that it makes it impossible to reason compositionally: any part of your program could be affected by an aspect, so it can be quite hard to know what your code is doing.

I think instrumentation, as a technique, is vital. But having instrumentation as a language-level feature seems like a bad idea to me. As a programmer, I instrument code to understand its behavior, not to define it.
Interesting data, but lots of fallacies in the analysis. Correlation/causation is just a start.
The direct quote was, "I know services like elance exist."
As an avid Clojurian, I can recommend taking the plunge. The seq abstraction goes a long way to reducing library sizes. This is going to be as big a deal as the STM.

My $.02
When did Project Gutenberg become "Google's"?
"Central Asians, people from the Caucasus, Afghans, Pakistanis, and even Indians darker then many an African are considered Caucasian."

Depends who you ask, as race is purely a social construct.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craniofacial_anthropometry

Some mongoloids do have blue eyes, but yes this is a result of interbreeding with descendants of the common ancestor.
This is great! For me, the best thing about it is that it actually allows me to tweet, a feature that has not worked for me on the Twitter website for several weeks. It is nice to be able to tweet from a browser again.
TVTropes. (Or Everything2, or Wikipedia, or...) Basically, using the tab bar as a "to read next" queue as you spider a heavily linked graph. The real solution to this, though, isn't reducing memory usage, but rather avoiding preloading tabs opened in the background once you hit a certain threshold.
Forgive me, but I'm hoping there are a lot of nerdy Mail.app users in this thread...

Does anyone here that uses Mail.app and has it sync up only the last month, or couple months of mail? Or even the last..50 or 100 messages like the iPhone client? I'd really like to use it as my mail client, but I have no interest or need in having my entire gmail account synced on my laptop. I suppose it doesn't really matter if I have a couple gigs of wasted space, but I don't know why I should have to carry it around if I don't need it.

Seems like it should be easy? It's available on the iPhone client.

Any ideas?
On Twitter: What's Valuation Got to Do With Revenue?
The Holy Grail of the Unconscious
Really? Chrome tabs behave exactly how I've always wanted tabs to behave. Related tabs stay together.
Apple brainwashing: How we do it
It's called DrScheme (I don't think there's an equivalent for CL)
When VCs put up this much money at this high a valuation are they still looking for 5-10X returns?
Anyone who claims that money is an adjunct and doesn't work in academia or charity is bullshitting not only who they're talking to, but themselves as well.
I knew jajah was disrupting the chat/voice call business, but this is just brilliant.
Start-Up Tries to Revive Online Group Buying
I say A/B test the redesign against the current design for one week.

If the redesign gets more sales/conversions than normal, Andrew gets to keep the extra money ... if not, he has to pay the difference :)
It is entirely plausible Mail.app is not the greatest e-mail client ever, but the Outlook/Exchange combination is the absolute worst e-mail solution ever conceived.

It's unreliable, expensive, limited, slow, heavy and each and every attribute I don't want in an e-mail solution.

I can't count the number of companies that make people take messages off their mail server and put them in local stores just because the Exchange server cannot reliably manage terabytes of messages and their attachments. Just imagine the nightmare it would be (because nobody does it) to do any kind of analysis on this mess. It's nearly impossible.
There isn't a comparable feature in Mail.app.

If you turn on the "Advanced IMAP Controls" labs feature in gmail, you can switch off the labels that will give you the most trouble. You can do this with "All Mail" and "deleting" messages from your inbox will still archive them in there: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=78755
A 2-minute phone call? I'm supposed to interrupt my workflow for the sake of a 2 minute phone call?

No. The only time I want to get on the phone with someone is if I can communicate faster or better that way.
Just out of curiosity, have you looked into SimPy (http://simpy.sourceforge.net/)?

I've used it before and it is a nice framework for process-based discrete-event simulation.
Restful, data-object changes
This's exactly what I want. I also built a web based one with PHP but the performance is not good enough for real time.
Java, .Net developers want a piece of the iPhone
Luis Von Ahn's Blog (Wait for his comments on reCaptcha)
So let's see if someone can actually get Luis himself to answer all these itching question's we have about Google's acquisition of reCaptcha...
It would be interesting to find a latent visual ability in humans which could be turned on and allow us to see things in new ways. Like infrared or synesthesia, but maybe something for which we don't have a name.
A thoughtful and intelligent response. Like the recent critique of the American Airlines website (one of the worst sites on the Internet), the response was basically "we know, but it takes longer to implement than it does to draw". The difference is that Zappos has made some visible progress in the last year, while AA.com has barely changed in five years.
Videos of Surgery from the 1930's
France Télécom, the first mobile operator to transmit HD voice calls
This is great. Codeswarm is another project with similar aims. I remember a visualization of LLVM's svn history about a year ago:

http://vimeo.com/1246374

Grouce has a nice improvement where the contributor's commits are shown, rather than vaguely flying towards the center from all directions. I also like how an inactive contributor drifts out of view. Nice touch!
Ask HN: How to successfully launch an iPhone app?
I have developed an awesome iPhone application. The UI is cool, the idea is right, what are some ways to improve my odds of getting a good launch?

The idea is fairly simple so I am leery of just submitting to the appstore and letting competitors with PR teams copycat me.

Cheers!
I looked at it, didn't use it. What I'm doing is more state-based: There's an object `state` which describes the state of the world, and these states are ordered in a list to form a timeline.
How they don't have a rock solid path to profitability on their own? Or how they would be a powerhouse coupled with a search giant?

The answer to the first question is that they don't have an easy way (that I see) of generating significant revenue from their end users, such as premium plans because most additional functionality is already offered by add on apps via the API. I don't see advertising working either, without offending users (we have enough spam tweets).

The answer to the second question: three words - real time search. Google indexes the web but it can't crawl pages as fast as people can tweet about them, and there is a vast amount of data about what people are talking about that doesn't hit the web, blogs, or news sites as fast as it hits Twitter. This as what I believe is part of the value of YouTube as well (especially if Google develops a way to transcribe videos). Adding Twitter to the portfolio would flesh out Google's ability to index more than just web pages (they've got our email with Gmail, voicemail with Google Voice, and videos with YouTube already).
Parallel processing could save thousands by using Xbox
IDrive Lite, A Contacts Backup App For iPhone And BlackBerry
i dont think it will be used to call friends/family.. on twitter you can essentially follow anyone.. it will be used by people who dont want to give away their numbers...
5 Apps Tap the Internet's Infinite Playlist
Now, Even the Government Has an App Store
Jupiter’s Magnetic Moon Generates Spectacular Light Show
DragonFlyBSD 2.4 released
So if somebody looks at my twitter feed then they can see who I'm calling? I'm not sure I'm ready to broadcast that.
Incredible, indeed! :-)

Edit: it's hypnotizing. I've turned off the music I was listening to and I'm replaying this over and over.
To the Andrew: I didn't know at first I could click on the img and see a full-size page. I was wondering what I was supposed to infer from looking at a "head shot".

I like the original. He removed the shortcuts to "what's new", top sellers etc. That does not seem like an improvement. I've not shopped at Zappos but I use similar links on Newegg all the time.

Just adding gradients and whitespace is not enough to improve a site. :)
If a man's design critiques generate a lot of links and discussion but reveal that the author has no concept of the design process of large sites, does his reputation ultimately benefit or suffer. Tune in next time, but my guess is any publicity is good publicity.
Dive Into Python 3 now finished and downloadable as HTML and PDF
Tetrachromacy?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06256/721190-114.stm
It's also somewhat tongue in cheek.
The Zappos guys seem to be thoughtful all-round. A lot of companies sponsor a mile or two of highway, they have something like the last 20 miles heading in to Las Vegas (not sure exactly but I drove in from LA over the summer and I was passing their signs for 20-30 minutes).
(1) is a ticky-tack foul, just pointed it out because "Choosing the right name is everything" is pretty hyperbolic and I was being hyperbolic, too, with the "insane" bit.

(2) I'm biased toward _-naming in general, I think it's less ugly than camelCase. But my point (2) is just from experience: developing on MySQL on a Mac (case-insensitive filesystem, case-insensitive naming by default) and Linux (case-sensitive) and porting from MySQL to Oracle. Under-barring is least-common-denominator approach that's likely to save some time and frustration.

(3) You'll have name-collided columns in the result set regardless of what they represent. PERSON and PET may both have a nickname column, when you join pets and their owners, you're going to need to qualify or alias nickname.

(4) You're right, a table called "vehicle" isn't a vehicle. But I don't think of it as a list of vehicles either, I think of the table definition as being SQL approximation of the definition of "vehicle-ness", each tuple is a vehicle and a select from the table will get you a list of vehicles, but the definition is "what it means to be a vehicle" approximated in SQL as CREATE TABLE VEHICLE (...)". This helps to maintain the "relational mindset" and avoid slipping into the VisiCalc mindset when dealing with relationships between relations.

(6) You're right on about the importance of clarity, but I think clarity improves with concision. Qualified names are clearer in this respect than names overloaded with metadata. I realize that a lot of databases don't have good support for defining types and domains (postgresql seems to, though), when there are ways to encode the metadata you want without polluting the name space use them.

You're right on about the prominence of "When In Rome…", sorry, it didn't even reach my consciousness.
The Silver Bullet: Why Software Is Bad and What We Can Do to Fix It
Zune HD apps are here... complete with pre-roll ads
I'm having a really hard time seeing the brilliance in this.

First off, the barrier to entry is -huge-. Both people need to have accounts on both services. That's four accounts for one call.

Secondly, it's allowing you to activate a service via Twitter that should already be easy to do. If it's hard to make a call on Jajah to another Jajah user, they're doing something wrong.

Third, Twitter isn't a command line. I don't type things into Twitter that I want to do. It's a simple, many-to-many communication channel. This doesn't fit in to the way people use ( or don't use ) Twitter currently.
Hire a reputable company, not a random guy. Hire someone that has a portfolio, references, contracts, an office, a business phone number, an address, etc.

Oh, and be prepared to actually pay an appropriate amount of money. You do get what you pay for.
Damn right you do. I'm not recommending it, and I wouldn't do it, but there is no reason it should be illegal.
Petition: Mudge for Cyberczar (Peiter Zatko for U.S. CyberSecurity Chief)
There actually was a recent paper describing a model of zombie infections, it was mentioned on HN previously.

http://www.mathstat.uottawa.ca/~rsmith/Zombies.pdf
just to give you an example.. all the big dating sites (match.com/eharmony.com) have a secure calling service and they charge money for a user to be able to use it...

now on twitter which is again a social site, you can do that without giving much away.. and see how it goes.. before actually going on a date and exchanging real numbers..
I think the biggest disconnect I see with this is that few people use Twitter as a synchronous one-to-one communication tool. It's used as an asynchronous one-to-one communication tool, and as a synchronous one-to-many / many-to-one communication tool. But the Jajah offering seems to be forcing a technology into a paradigm that isn't built for it.
I saw something on this recently.

I have to assume that Y chromosomes have one colour-sensing cone otherwise by this logic all men would be dichromatic?

I'm also struggling to understand how if one X chromosome has these two genes, having two X chromosomes (so more of the same 2 genes) would result in different colour-sensing cones.

Finally, it's interesting that the identified tetrochomats cannot see things in the ultraviolet (or otherwise infrared) spectrum, only increased colour differentiation. Perhaps, they really are but the brain interprets them as related to our existing colour map, in the same way that regular trichromats identify a connection between red and violet.
Mine says "Driver's License"
We have been discussing this article on our work ListServ since it came out on Wired this afternoon (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/colortherapy/). The conversation turned rather quickly to whether or not those of us who were color blind would take the treatment if it was available.

The three of us (out of ~20 people) who were color blind had rather different answers. One guy fell in the middle, he wasn't quite sure one way or the other. The other guy is leaning towards the treatment, primarily because art plays a large roll in his life.

I feel that I would not take the treatment. From what I can tell, being color blind seems to be more of an advantage than a disadvantage for me. While color is nice, it doesn't seem particularly useful in my life. On the other hand, the tendency to notice textures and patterns over the color they are in has frequently been useful to me. I notice movement faster (due to the texture changing, but not the colors), and I notice small differences easier.

I would really like to see how other people weigh in on the issue.
Taming the Digital Distractions That Make Your PC a Time Waster
Hi HN: Live screencasting solution
What cost-effective tools would you use to broadcast your screen in real-time to paying viewers and a (configurable) delayed transmission to non-paying viewers?
Creatures. Man that was a great program - I wish I had a spare machine around just to run it full time.

http://www.gamewaredevelopment.co.uk/creatures_index.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exokernel
the (object-oriented, semi-functional) Lisp programming model of the last decades.

I disagree with your claim, both here and in the OP, that the Lisp programming model is object-oriented. CLOS is just a library, one can write arbitrarily complex Lisp programs without going near it, and many Lisp hackers don't. Thinking in Lisp is not at all the same thing as thinking in objects. (After building OO systems for years, one reason I like Common Lisp is that I want nothing more to do with OO.)

The reason CL is semi-functional is not CLOS but the fact that it fully supports imperative programming, leaving it up to the programmer to decide what side effects to allow where.
The Self-Employed Are the Happiest
In all honesty, I did not consider the two versions of the site to be different enough to create such a big stink over. The second version looks "brighter, glossier", not really better designed. The overall site is still a mess and a jumble. Does anyone honestly scroll all the way to the bottom for either of these? Half the stuff on both versions looks like its doubleclick ads or something.
Pykeyview