skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Says who, do you speak for the whole community?
And, you know, all of Ikea.
Wow! If I'm reading this http://lisperati.com/logo.html right, you're the one who came up with the "made with secret alien technology" logo. I love that logo. :)

BTW, on that logo page, you mention that Scheme is your favorite Lisp dialect. If that's so, then why write your book to be about CL instead of Scheme?
We're using Matlab. I'm teaching electrical engineering students, so they're going to have to know Matlab soon anyway. It's got fairly straightforward syntax, very nice vectorized array operations, and a read-eval-print loop so you don't have to waste time compiling. It's not as pretty and pleasant as Python, but the difference isn't significant at that level.
Curious: has anyone done anything similar using S3 as a backend?
PRESS RELEASE: 37SIGNALS VALUATION TOPS $100 BILLION AFTER BOLD VC INVESTMENT
Quit dancing around the issue. Tell us how you really feel.
The apps that power Django-Mingus
"Today’s LED-based lamps cost up to $100 each ... Over the long term, we can absolutely get the cost down to the $20-25 range"

While they do sound better than the abysm that is the compact flourescent bulb, at that price they're a no-go compared to incandescents that are $0.20 - $0.25 or less at retail.
Android does this.
Discover your Learning Style - Think-Feel-Know Indicator online
Reddit.com: ingresar o registrarse
Be sure to thank boucher for implementing this in the reddit app.
"In several states, such as California, profits are 'decoupled' from consumption."

Hmmm, I wonder why CA has such unreliable, expensive power?
ranting and anger are never appropriate in the workplace. They have a job that needs to get done and money they are willing to pay, either you can get that money or you can't. Don't get so involved in a job, save the emotional energy for your own work.
Pretty cool, but why don't you let us make 32x32 icons with it? Is that too big for this algorithm to be useful?
I think you misunderstood me. I know well that it's been a yahoo company for years. Nearly 5 years, in fact. I'm suggesting that the people who are still complaining about this need to get over it.
I think what he's getting at is that if Microsoft has a similar product and they gained 2 million users, it would not be seen as impressive, because that is still far less than 1% of all Windows users.

So, while Microsoft may have a competing product with many millions of users, at their scale it doesn't get the same recognition as a startup gaining 2 million users.
Likewise. Turns out it's an order, not an offer.
How is it not ad hominem? It's telling facts about the speaker to put down the content.

Regarding credentials, we are judging the content on its merits, not deferring to Uncle Bob's authority.
With MP3s as with high-end speaker cable, I think your first hurdle is selling me on the idea that I'd want to be able to tell the difference.

My friend Danny... oh, wait, I've said this on HN before:

http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=279682
How to Eat Bark
Always Start With A Test
Don't white knight this situation.

You quit. You got fired shortly into a 60 hour contract. Your losses are small, you planned on leaving early, and the contract should have protected you from something like this.

Move on, very little to gain by attempting to show them their wrong ways. You can't make changes from the outside.
My whole point is that short-term productivity doesn't need an advocate. If you're literally going to die then sure, go ahead and throw the hail mary. However in the vast majority of cases the future becomes the present quicker than anyone foresaw and then you find out that 20% time savings has now put you in a position where all future development is 50% more expensive, at which point you either (possibly) scored an amazing victory or you (more likely) handed yourself a crippling setback. You know, sort of like the situation that presumably led to the rewrite of Mozilla.
Maybe! Depends what you're working on.
Perl has kind of become the Common Lisp of the videogame generation.
Better cheap than good: renewable power for developing world
Of course, we could just turn this around entirely and ask the UX guy, "Why can't we add feature X?" And his response could just as well be: "I don't know. I just design UI. I don't code it."

UX doesn't make you dumber. We really need the UX guys, but what we don't need is to compartmentalize them from the developers. This is a two-way street. UX needs to understand code enough to be able to read it and follow it. Coders need to be able to work within an existing UI design and not make it suck if they need to extend it or change it.

I have seen this work REALLY well. But what will break it every time is the "not my problem" attitude expressed in this post. It's not the fault of the UX paradigm when people abuse the necessary separation between design and code.
Other options include ShrinkTheWeb (http://www.shrinktheweb.com) and PageGlimpse (http://www.pageglimpse.com)
Did anyone vote for the 'make science seem cooler' option? It's seems incredibly trivial when compared to the rest of the problems, but it's a bit frightening with the declining rates of students graduating with science and engineering degrees. If there are fewer and fewer people to fix these problems, what will we do then?
From the article: "This is what's happening with most companies' “Social Media Strategy”."

Ouch.

But it is totally true. To my way of thinking a company shouldn't have a Twitter account if it is going to be all business promotion. You have to mix in something interesting to keep subscribers happy.

The same thing goes for business blogging, etc.
10 watts to create the equivalent light of a 60-watt incandescent bulb; the color of the light output must mimic that of today’s incandescents; and the bulbs must last at least 25,000 hours

Assuming 8c / kwh: Energy savings = 50w / 1000 (w/kw) * 25,000h * 0.08 $ / kwh = 100$. They still stuck compared to CF, but if you keep a light on 24/7 then these should just about break even compared to incandescents at 100$.
True. That is why they boast on their TDD advice all the time...that developers should TDD this and that. And what happens if the project failed? Ah, the developers didn't implement TDD correctly. Period.

TDD != Software
I must be even more blunt than I thought, because this didn't really sound all that angry to me. More "frustrated."
On the graph, how can there be more replies per second (the y axis) than requests (the x axis)? Look at the graph at x=80 (actually, it's slightly under, maybe 79). There are up to 85 replies.
Rather than continuing with the passive aggressiveness, the professional thing to do would have been to exchange a firm handshake, make the usual nonspecific promises about looking forward to mutually beneficial opportunities in the future, and parting amicably.

[Edit to add: Even supposing sending the letter was a good idea, it is terribly written, and it is entirely the author's fault that (quoting the last line) "I'll be surprised if anyone except IT reads this far".

Here, let's try this again:

Subject: Why Project X Has Missed Its Deadline

Dear Boss 1 and Boss 2:

Project X is currently 4 weeks past its planned deadline, $87,000 over budget, has 20% of the feature set yet to be implemented, and performance is 30% worse than the legacy system it replaces. These circumstances were preventable.

Functional code was repeatedly discarded during development, resulting in delays and cost overruns. This occurred as late as two days before the predicted shipping date, at which point a rewrite was guaranteed to negative impact the schedule. The technical justification for replacing the functional code did not advance company objectives.

Management of X was apprised at the time that the team was unable to resolve their difference of professional opinion as to whether to keep the functional code or reimplement for aesthetic reasons. Management was apprised that the decision to reimplement would negatively impact timely deliverability of X. Please find attached supporting memos #41 (request from team member to reimplement authentication), #47 (opposition by self to team member's request to reimplement authentication), #49 (decision by manager to reimplement authentication), #51 (warning by self that schedule would be negatively impacted), and #73 (request for authorization of 3 man-months to address slippage).

I am writing you out of professional courtesy. Management is aware of all facts in this memo. I recommend action to avoid further cost overruns to the company in the future; no reply to myself is required.

Respectfully yours,
"do not follow in the footsteps of the sages, seek what they sought."

but do listen to their advice and do your own thinking.

The point is not to write tests because Norvig doesn't, or equally, to write tests because "Uncle" Bob does.

Just think about what they say before copying them blindly especially when you encounter methodology vendors, "naked men who sell you their shirt" as it were, and not succumb to the latest snake oil nostrum just because its vendors have loud voices.
Its a bit late now. The last date was Sep 12 :(
One thing I'd prefer is dropbox using _my_ S3 buckets so irony rely on them only for syncing. What are the economics of such an approach?
We'll know it's bad when Canadians start threatening to move to America.
I don't want to post this again some I'm just going to link my post from forever ago. Educate yourself.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=786552
It shouldn't be app-specific. It should be core functionality. Perhaps a gesture, like, if you put 2 fingers on the screen (one at the top, one at the bottom) and rotate them to correctly orient the content, then the Phone should take that as an order to change the orientation from portrait to landscape, or vice-versa... Possibly also add a "lock orientation" icon just to the right of the clock at the top centre of the display so you can lay down, gesture to change orientation, and then lock it.
Shouldn't it be, 'Why do I want to hang out with a company?'

I mean, I understand being tricked by the pretty girl at the bank because (speaking of myself, at least), men are stupid and willing to believe in any sexual opportunity, no matter how unlikely it is.

But you cant have sex or really be friends with or go to the movies with a company (Unless its like an escort or prostitution service). Its kind of like putting the all the letters in gullible in gullible.

So why would I want to follow that company on twitter (or whatever)?

The answer to me is that, well, I don't, unless I have some interest in the company already (like they give updates on things that I want to know about through twitter, or use a cool technology I want to know more about).

Honestly, a company shouldn't be trying to pretend to want to hang out with me, because it is a company and I don't want to hang out with it. I want it for the goods or services it provides (in the unlikely chance that I want those at all).
Good to see gov agencies mimicing NetFlix type contests to speed up innovation and adoption.
I always wondered why Lisp is dead in the water. I got replies from people that never professorially coded anything in Lisp or Scheme (yeah..) - argument was along the lines that in the past hardware was always dictating lower level languages and leagues of people were taught the ways of the everyday code that was only a few (if any) levels above the hardware. Thus, all of the primitives of the age (ASM, C, Pascal, whatnot).

However, I don't think that is the main story here. It sure is a big part, but not main for sure. I mean, there were LISP systems in usage at the big boys houses where money/hardware was no object. Later on, Moore law brought us supercomputers of the past to our desktops and we got C++, Java and Python; Even Ada was formed and deployed.

So, what's the deal? My primary focus in life has been computer graphics, and my first language was C. I was born in 1980 and my early serious computer endeavor is inherently tied to the Amiga platform (SAS C and alike), so I didn't have exposure to other language paradigms at all until later.

Later on, through a marvelous turns of event I was exposed to Scheme and at first I didn't "get it" - but there was this epiphany moment or two where I could see almost everything I needed in computer language for my needs, yet it was so simple.

Not to bore you more with details - I always wanted to get into game development. Career of TV and Commercials direction happened in the mean time, and now I am back into making my game development ideal a reality. My weapon of choice is D/Tango, since it really best suites my mindset. However, after seeing a PPT/PDF from naughty dog earlier this year about how they have utilized an embedded PLT Scheme, I came to wonder once again about maybe using Scheme as a scripting language after all.

tl;dr; Can anyone, preferably a pro Lisp or Scheme developer give a rationale why it isn't used more often? Everything I've read makes absolutely no sense why it isn't. Oh, and about the python argument that gets thrown around - I like the python as the next guy, but let's not fool ourselves.

</rant>
Never, ever, burn your bridges.
* It turned out you could do it: I programmed it for the IBM 704.*

Anyone else find this comment motivating? It kind of sums up a moment of reflection I guess I somehow aspire to. Find an insanely difficult challenge, that you deem important enough to devote a significant amount of time and energy to, and then one day: "It turns out you could do it: I programmed it for the ${preferred architecture}." Thanks Doug^H^H^H^H hold on - didn't Steve Russell implement McCarthy's original Lisp on the IBM 704 - not Doug McIlroy. What am I missing that pulled me away from my moment of zen here?
Companies are not real people. They are literally fake.
> I wasn't talking about any mass killers, I was explicitly referring to people with psychical problems.

Actually, you said "mad". It's unclear whether you meant angry or insane, but either way....

> Firearms still seems to be their weapon of choice, won't you agree?

Not at all. How about some meaningful evidence? ("The ones that I've heard about" isn't meaningful evidence.)

> (btw, what mass killers have used fire?)

McVeigh and Nichols used a fertilizer bomb. Julio Gonzalez used fire (Happy Land Social club - 104 dead). Humberto de la Torre killed 25 with fire. Rogelio Andrade & Allan Lobos killed at least 10, again, with fire.

Sadamichi Hirasawa managed to poison 10 people fatally during a bank robbery.
I'm at the same university, and I feel the movement away from Java for introductory programming is a step in the right direction, primarily because of this initial learning curve. The example you've given perfectly demonstrates why Java should not be used as a teaching language - just getting a simple program running, you have thrown at you classes, methods, arrays, packages, access modifiers etc; this serves as a large barrier to learning the important programming concepts.

This isn't a call to "dumb down" Computer Science - the curriculum should still be challenging, but Java is the wrong kind of challenging. Students are spending more time learning how Java works than learning how to program.

We're losing a lot of students who might otherwise love programming if they could see the beauty of it earlier on. Having students learn using a Lisp would be better (hooray for minimal syntax!), but Python is a nice compromise.
Also, this is a 100k convertible line of credit. I don't know they're conditions, but Bootup Labs could easily use a convertible note to their strategic advantage... For example, bankrupt the business, take more ownership, or strong-arm a board position by offering not to covert the note.
How often do people actually do a full-lifetime total cost estimate like that, instead of just going for what's cheapest right at the moment?
"didn't netscape get its butt kicked by a bunch of programmers writing multithreaded COM?"

In those days, almost everyone writing desktop softare got their butt kicked my programmers writing multi threaded COM who worked at Microsoft, a company that indulged in blatantly illegal or semi legal tactics to do said "butt kicking". Eric Sink recalls how he had an epihpany when he came to know that Micrsoft had 1000 developers working on IE, a product that they gave away. I wouldn't judge programming ability by getting steamrollered by the MS juggernaut.
This, to me, speaks to the issue more than all the other responses here. Yes, it's stupid to burn bridges and Yes, it accomplishes nothing. But more important than all of that is you never know when someone from your past is going to pop back up or in what capacity they'll be when they do. You risk making yourself a liability to a new employer if you've made enemies out of people they might want to partner with, hire, etc...
Create a second account just for the laptop and set up a shared folder between the two accounts. Put all the files you want on the laptop in the shared folder.
Fluther raises 600k for crowd-sourced answers.
This doesn't make sense at all -- the GPL is just a conditional disclaimer of copyright -- it doesn't even pretend to be a contract.

Only the copyright holder has standing to make a civil infringement suit under standard international copyright law. The copyright granter (national government) has the sole ability to initiate a criminal case, and most signatories only have criminal statutes for commercial piracy. France has draconian 'moral rights', but they are not transferable even in 'work for hire'.
"Moving forward is the best (and oddly easiest) solution."

The best revenge is to live well. (Making it big rubs it in ;-) )
My opinion - a lot of it comes down to implementation. There are a couple of really good open source implementations, but for the most part a lot of Lisp folks prefer the commercial ones. Anecdotally, Lisp came along so long ago that it has survived several different phases of computer software sales evolution. The phase that saw dynamic programming development tools be sold for significant sums of money altered the Lisp implementation landscape significantly, and today we have commercial implementations like Lispworks and Allegro, which while excellent, are expensive. This pulls enough talent away from open source implementations, of which there are several, that they all remain somewhat warty. So while I use the heck out of SBCL, I must admit that I find myself occasionally envious of the libraries and attention, and especially smoothness of integration with new technology (as opposed to new paradigms) that other dynamic languages such as python and ruby seem to enjoy.
Yup, my point wasn't at all that there's something wrong with UX design in general or the people doing UX design. It was an observation about myself that I noticed happening a few times. I found myself turning off the "UX part" of my brain and copping out by throwing questions back to our UX guy that I should have been able to do myself. Somehow the distinction of a UX-specific job title and role made me get lazy when it came to designing good software. This was really just a wake-up call to remind myself that good design is (and always should have been) a key part of my job.
Been using Dropbox since beta. Never had this problem (XP and Vista 32-bit).
It's not that dead. You used it to make this comment.
Yes. Dropbox uses S3 as its backend. (And Jungle Disk is a somewhat similar product that lets you use your own S3 account.)
I just finished reading the LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual (still readily available from Amazon), published in 1962. The book is mind-blowing, because it mixes discussions of high-order functions with instructions on how to properly lay out programs on punch cards.

The "high level language" which shipped on every microcomputer platform of the 1970s and 1980s was Basic. I have often wondered why. Compared to Lisp, it is inelegant and inexpressive. Perhaps people who hacked larger computers of the era did not interact with microcomputer hobbyists. Perhaps it was too difficult to get Lisp fast enough to be usable on the old hardware, although if it was possible on big iron in the late 1950s, it should have also been possible on microprocessors in the 1970s.

An entire generation of programmers grew up using GOTO <line number> to call subroutines and execute loops. That same generation could have grown up using lambdas. How sad.
Gosh, I had heard jokes about naming conventions resulting in religious wars, but I had thought they were only jokes.
"The phase that saw dynamic programming development tools be sold for significant sums of money altered the Lisp implementation landscape significantly, and today we have commercial implementations like Lispworks and Allegro, which while excellent, are expensive. This pulls enough talent away from open source implementations, of which there are several, that they all remain somewhat warty."

This assumes lisp = Common Lisp.

Clojure for example is entirely Open Source and a delight to code in.
I'll agree with you that there are some really, really annoying bugs (Filevault + Spotlight? Flakey lan sync? Resource forks?) that I'd love to get in and fix, but can't, because the source is closed.

I've run into this with other startups too; getting bugs fixed, or even acknowledged, is like pulling teeth. It's way longer and way harder than it has to be.

Along with APIs, we've been promised selective sync, better permissions, and a whole host of other features with due dates in the 9+ months ago range.

Don't get me wrong, I love Dropbox. Couldn't live without it. I even sent them a resume once along with an expanded bug list I wanted to fix, but never heard back.
> Also, I don't understand why the HN community should view this as hostile

We view it as hostile because they're taking our money to do it.

You want my money for your biz? Ask me. Don't take it from thugs who took it from me at the point of a gun.

Yes, I've heard all of the "but taxes go for good things". Maybe some do, but ...

Here's my test. If I'm not willing to fund something by pointing a gun at my mother and saying "give me money", it shouldn't be paid for with tax money. Why? Because taxes come from pointing a gun at folks, including my mother.

Is your biz so worthy that I should point a gun at my mother?
This is somewhat of a side note, but I don't get why people who certain could do better, choose to work in "IT" (vs. in an engineering department of an Internet or software firm). There's much less challenge (writing internal applications in PHP), the people you work with are neither passionate nor particularly bright and I am guessing the pay or career options aren't great either.

I don't mean it in an offensive way, could somebody explain some of the reasoning behind why people might want to make that choice?
I am not an Lisp user at the moment, but I worked on a project before with NAG IRIS Explorer, which is a scientific data visualization tool. The scripting language in the system is scheme based around 1993. (I think it is a dialect of scheme that is closed to GNU Guile).

I think scheme/lisp is used inside a lot of big systems, such as AutoCAD, Emacs, IRIS Explorer and probably more. One of computer graphic pioneers Ken Perlin wrote a shading language for his own renderer in scheme. But unless you use his renderer, you will never know he put a scheme interpreter inside to process his shading language.
MIT has posted the course and video lectures online, in case anyone was interested: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...
This rant is not worthy of HN.

(I'm the author.)
The boiling frog story is true.
http://books.google.com/books?id=Hr0aAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA299&#...

The modern researchers who "debunked" it simply heated up the water too quickly.