skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Spacetime alarms
Fixed Width Sans font designed for coders
wait... I thought you said "Cool Features" ? Since when is 1990s-style photoshop effects a cool feature? These effects are akin to the marquee element, I do NOT want my browser to have them. The only one that's nice is the text shadow, which is very nicely implemented in CSS3 and a part of Firefox. Not nearly as ugly as the one on this page...
I don't like Facebook's puzzles some of them are impossible to solve without using C.
I couldn't agree with this more. The point isn't so much that what it brings to the table is new - but that it packages all these features in such an accessible way:

* lockless concurrency

* syntactical support for data structures a la Python/Ruby

* macros

* polymorphism and inheritance

* functional programming

All this and the core language is defined in only 4500 or so lines of Clojure.

The Clojure-in-Clojure project is really something to look forward to.
I know of a few people who's passions are triggered by the pursuit of earning piles of money. Programming challenges aren't so interesting to them anymore and serve more as a means to an end.

Banking large sums of money is one of the most challenging things you can do, since you are effectively competing with everyone.
C++ sucks, why do all those idiots at Google use it? /sarcasm
Wireless would be a great addition. Just automatic WiFi detection and upload/deletion would make using it seamless for most people. Disable the audio, if there is any, and I'd just wear it all the time.

I would love something like that. I'm tired of people doing shitty things to me and ones I love, then getting away with it with barefaced lies. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. My girlfriend was just rear-ended by another driver. She even got their license plate, but the police decided it wasn't worth following up, possibly because she was confused by the make of the car. She just doesn't understand that stuff.

I've been physically threatened, had local bureaucrats fictionalize tests, been in accidents where the other driver was doing some preposterous passing on the right-side by speeding over parking spaces, had police who kept interrupting me before I could finish sentences but then claimed I was being rude -- all these are situation where people just lie after the fact and get away with stuff. I'm the one who tells the truth, and yet I am the one that gets shafted. I am tired of that!
Jagger was also one of America's top artists at the time.
But C with vector, string, hash_map, const&, destructors and scoped_ptr is a pretty good language! It's certainly better than plain C. It's just not as aesthetically pleasing that it sits inside the larger monstrosity that is C++.
Better than ImageMagick: GraphicsMagick
Hence the old joke that C++ should really have been called ++C because "C++" violates good C++ practice.
Actually, the first major assumption in this particular model is that the demand will walk to the nearest outlet. Everything else - adding a second dimension, relocation costs, possibility of entry, first-mover advantages, prices, product quality, etc. - can be easily added to the model - just add a bunch of ratios and coefficients* to your equations.

*The second major problem which this model does not suffer though is that when your model gets closer to reality, its predictions become highly dependent on many coefficients the true values of which you do not know most of the time.
if it's not searchable, then we'd have to spend a second life browsing through our first.

Just having the "faces" technology from iPhoto '09 would go a long way towards organizing this record. Have a WiFi enabled device that uses Bonjour to auto-upload when you are at home, and iPhoto can go and index the visual record based on who.

There can also be an "auto-event" splitting based on dramatic changes in lighting. GPS could also be used. An interval where a person is moving across the city would constitute one event, and the interval where they are at one location would constitute another. GPS could also auto-assign names to events, like "Minneapolis Convention Center, October 16, 2009 2:30pm."
It's good, but I still don't think it beats Bitstream Vera Sans Mono / DejaVu Sans Mono.
Marc Andreessen - Guide to personal productivity
This is a great example of how we're losing track of information. Using older eggs is a trick well-known to my wife, who learned it from her mother. It seems more and more lately that we're re-discovering the wheel. Just a few weeks ago I was reading somewhere how a weaver had un-earthed a forgotten weaving technique through Google's book project.
I'm using it in production since last week, about 50,000 connections / day. For some reason it seems to stop/crash after 24-36hrs without leaving anything in the logs.

I am using it on port 443 (https).
I see it as a traffic problem. I'm not that scared when driving of what I'll do next. But some of the other drivers on that same road scare the willies out of me.

Same with language features. If all you have is bicycles then nobody is going to hurt anybody badly. But if we're all driving rocket cars at 1000 MPh then the resulting pile-ups will be spectacular.

You use operator overloading in a disciplined fashion, because you understand fully what the consequences are when you are using them improperly. If a situation is a 'natural' for overloading then you'll use it, otherwise you'll use a function with a descriptive name.

Unfortunately that is not the norm. You'd almost want an '--expert' flag given to the compiler before you are allowed to use those features, and every time you want to use it you get this trick question about some obscure bug that you have to answer :)

The best little C bug I saw in some forum somewhere by the way was this one:

int x,y;

x = 0; /* initialize both x
y = 0; and y to 0 */

domorestuff(x,y);

Of course any C programmer worth his weight will spot that one in a heartbeat, but it is indicative of how easy a language 'feature' (multiline comments) can become a bug.
I don't think anyone is writing avionics software in Java? The automated code coverage tools I have seen handle those cases just fine.
Up-voted from oblivion not because I agree, but because it's a common attitude that I held for a long time, but which now drives me nuts.

Maybe my soul leaked away while I wasn't looking, but I've had to spend a lot of time selling in the last year, and the typical hacker contempt for 'marketroids' is way off the mark. It's a deep, deep art that deserves respect.

Can you cut corners, be a douche-bag and rip people off? Sure, but it doesn't work as well as you think, and show me a programmer who hasn't shipped something that has made at least one person's life a misery. All the used-car salesmen in the world have nothing on the Windows OS developers if you want to compare suffering inflicted on the world. I still can't look someone in the eye if I know they spent good money on the F1 '98 game I worked on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_1_98
Hmm do you have a link to that essay where PG talks about passion?
I like round numbers. It keeps everything nice and easy to multiply :)

As for the name of the subscription, I find this can be tough. We are launching with "Premium" for now, but we already have plans for a second level membership when some extra features are developed. When we get there the name thats being thrown around is "Tailored" since it will include a number of customization features.
Thanks for the plug for This Week in Startups. :-)

I also suggest: the "this week in tech" podcast, techcrunch, and thefunded
Google creates a huge document to describe what part of the language their developers can use for every language.
We do a lot of scraping and the best we've found, really, is beautifulsoup and being good at python. There's no UI or easy tool that's going to replace that.
I had a pastor who worked as a used car salesman during the day because our small congregation couldn't afford to pay him a full-time salary.

I have always thought that this was the worst kind of conflict of interest.
They're only doing line-based coverage analysis?
Point taken; I have never had to deal with poorly written code that makes casual use of obscure C++ features. My shop tends to be very careful with the sharp edges, so you don't have to have guru knowledge to skim our code and see what's happening. All potential "gotchas" are commented, just like any other difficult code. Obviously the standards you can realistically demand from your coworkers go out the window when you're dealing with legacy code.
If you take web business for instance, all businesses a certain person knows about are near each other (in the address bar), so you have to actually differentiate your product/service to sell it.
Agreed - particularly as mankind's awareness level of nature's engineering tricks is increasing at a pace undreamed of, even fifty years ago.
America's?
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=872813 (14 days ago)
Because C is not really a higher level language, C is very close to it's assembly core and often C and Assembly are combined in functions. Also don't forget that modern C compilers are very good in optimizing for speed AND size, if you see the generated assembly from the compile job there is hardly to none optimizing to be done by assembly specialists.

Down side of C is that every little algorithm or pattern needs to be made from scratch as there is almost none functionality in the language itself. What people see as C is most often the nowadays immense library of solutions.
Upside is it's proven flexibility, C can do almost anything and is to be found on every platform out there.

Lisp is mainly about a certain functionality, that is list processing, so you are comparing a general purpose language with a specialist one. In other words, you are comparing apples and pears.
How to get/generate free music for a game?
For example, do you know of any free software that generates generic but passable music in various styles?
"Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?"

Now, this is practically a prerequisite for getting a job at a good company.
True, but the topic here is C++, and it is not so interesting what they allow people to use as to see what are the points that are not to be used.

You can bet that behind each and every feature that they decided to rule 'against' was some pretty solid thinking and possibly some very hard-won experience.

There's a guide for:

C/C++

R

Objective-C

Python

see here:

http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/
How, on a site like HN that champions pragmatic entrepreneurialism, can you possibly claim that the success of C++, a language that has been deployed probably more than any other except C, is controversial? It's a matter of fact. C++ won the early OO race. Maybe Java and C# and whatever have since eclipsed it, but it was still a smashing success by all objective measures, and still is by some of those measures. Yeah it's ugly, but end users don't care.
Oh we had 1 click deployment too. It was FTP. :) That said, Capistrano is an easy way to make deployment much easier/fun/dangerous. I wish we'd had SCM and a deployment tool back in the day, but back then we just... didn't. Instead we had to focus on getting it right the first time, because there was no going back.

On my side projects I use cap+deprec+svn, so I completely understand the appeal. My point is that you don't have to use a bunch of tools, have tests, and/or use modern methods to be successful. Sure, it makes the journey easier, but its certainly no requirement for having a great product.
Ask HN: How much would you give to a non-profit to rewrite emacs in scheme?
I think part of the reason Guile failed is that it just sort of petered out. I think any attempt to replace elisp with scheme will have to start with a bang to overcome network effects. The hypothetical nonprofit would wait until they had enough money to do so, and then start development.
(They could hold the money and any interest in an escrow account to reassure donors.)

Personally, I hate dynamic scoping and having 2 namespaces. Also, whenever I see a piece of emacs is written in C I think it's best to just use the C function as written and not even try to understand it. Having scheme all the way down would dramatically lower the psychological barrier to fiddling with low-level functions like font-rendering. (i.e. I don't think it would have taken till version 23 to get anti-aliased fonts if it was scheme all the way down)

What do you all think? Bad idea? Good idea? Do you also hate lisp-2s and dynamic scooping?
Another confirmation that our culture is largely post-literate.
Yes.

How often do you read the word 'Halo' and it isn't referencing the popular game?
This assumes unlimited development effort. In reality, writing the fastest possible code may require many more lines of code in C than in Lisp, with correspondingly larger development cost.
If they're making stuff people want in small timeboxes, they're being agile.

Agreed that agile has become too religious.

Now having said that, I'd argue that smaller timeboxes with a tighter feedback loop into "what people want" would make them even more successful.

The neat thing about real agile isn't that it's a religion (although it is for many) it's that it gives us context to talk about what works better or worse in iterative, incremental development.
I'm all for short-and-to-the-point articles, but I think this one was too short.

Having said that, I think the article emphasizes a powerful point. One that i keep advocation to whomever listens. You have to do what you love....

I especially liked "If you think love needs to look like “Romeo and Juliet”, you'll overlook a great relationship that grows slowly."

I tend to be impatient(hey, aren't all programmers?) in almost everything I do. And I have to learn to stop that.
He spoke at TED: http://on.ted.com/48

And you might like "Designer forget sound design": http://juliantreasure.blogspot.com/2007/09/where-has-sonic-a...
Quite possible - You'd need to use the rewrite module to pass it as an argument. http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpRewriteModule

Maybe something like this...

location / {
rewrite ^/channel/(.+)$ /channel/?id=$1 last;
}

location /channel/{
#stuff
set $push_channel_id $arg_id; #/?id=239aff3 or somesuch
}
Your best bet is probably to try the Creative Commons-licensed music at jamendo.org or ccmixter.org.
Ultimately, there is nothing that can be done about sharing data.

We're at the beginning of a cascading stupid-decision phenomenon. But, at some point we are going to have rethink our reward paradigm.

Change the meaning of money?
West German spies secretly monitored jokes to assess public mood
Science shop - most of our development is in perl (OO style), C and Fortran, with a smattering of whatever else we are saddled with.
That shouldn't be too hard with GPS, minus the whole "no background apps" thing: Just prompt users for a location (i.e. tap on a map) when setting an alarm, with a radius perhaps. And to accommodate the "alarm" case, just add a checkbox to "only activate while OUTSIDE this range".

Not sure if anything like this already exists either. It well might.
And when I have looked, at first I was surprised to see ugly code, things remmed out, variables declared and never used, debug statements still in production code...

Kind of shattered the whole "shrink-wrapped programmer on a pedestal" thing I had going...
I use scripting languages almost exclusively ( I haven't written C in about 10 yrs). In order of preference, JavaScript, Python & PHP.
> Thing thing I've come to realize is that it must be an integrated system that is automatically indexed and searchable, tagged by date, time, location as well as having speech recognition and face detection in order to be truly as useful as it should be.

Absolutely. But do we need those systems to exist before we start life-logging? As long as the data is available, we can always go back and then index. As it is, it looks like the recording capability will be there long before the software is polished to perfection. If people wait until the software is perfect, then every day they wait is a day they'll never be able to put into the database.

> I also think there should be a 30 second rolling frame buffer so that you can hit 'record' and capture five minutes of full-motion video starting 30 second earlier so that you can fully capture important conversations and the like.

Short-term optimization. The real goal is just default full-motion video; collect everything. The long-term storage space is essentially here already: you can right now buy 1.5TB for ~100$ (see http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152... ). The problem is on the collection end - I mean, a fish-eye camera with 1gb for $800? How much is a 16gb flash drive these days, 30$?

Instead of hacking around the limits, let's just do the right thing: a small video camera hooked up to a couple dozen gigabytes of Flash.

How much? Well, I've heard that a minute of H.264 480 x 272 is about 3.5mb, let's call it 4mb. Recording sleep is useless, so 4 * 60 * 16 = 3840; 3.8 gigs per day means that even a basic flash drive would suffice for multiple days of video, and that we fill up our 100$ 1500mb hard-drive in ~394 days, or more than a year.

(I keep wondering: is it really that difficult to have a small video camera, that all these researchers keep using still cameras? Why don't we have easy life-logging now? As you say, all of the tech exists.)
1.9 TB & 1.6 Million IOPS in 1 RU
> minus the whole "no background apps" thing

That's kind of a huge thing - it's the difference between this idea working and not working on the iPhone... and a great example of the kind of app innovation Apple could inspire by allowing background processes.
You'd be hard pushed to find an organisation that is able to be loyal to it's employees. There are some but they're in the minority, especially if we're talking about a company that can employ a lot of people.

The whole employer-employee relationship has inherent friction due to pay. This affects trust and loyalty. It is an employee's responsibility to ensure they maximise their earnings for the skills they have and it is the company's responsibility to keep outgoings low. Such a scenario will always breed suspicion if the working relationship is not sweet and parties do not spell out their long-term expectations.
If you could integrate this with calenders and to-do lists on a hand held device you'd really have something. In general the idea of an integrated, contextually-aware smartphone would be great.
I thought the logo was Warhol too, but it was somebody else: http://www.johnpasche.com/

[edit: googling I see there's some controversy about whether it was Pasche or another artist named Ernie Cefalu. Either way, not Warhol]
Depending on how much time/effort you want to invest... AFAIK Pure Data [1] was used for generative (background) music scores in SPORE. Maybe this is a good place to start: http://obiwannabe.co.uk/html/sound-design/sound-design-all.h...

[1] http://puredata.info
Google Code: Issue Tracker Data API for Project Housing
I bought an ipod touch hoping to make some productive use of it The no background processes thing makes that next to impossible. I can't risk my fancy dancy alarm clock not going of because I went and checked my email and forgot to re-open the alarm clock program. It's a huge problem with the platform in my opinion. Heck, my Dell Axim PDA from 5 years ago would happily run 6 or 8 apps at a time.
I've wanted behavior-aware alarms for a long time, but this is a good first approximation.
FindMeByIP
> or example: In C, C++, Java, or related, you "first" have
to build you structure to represent a Person with
first_name and last_name

Not if you're using Protocol Buffers, which is essentially a version of JSON that has "batteries included."

> Lisp ver:

Lisp is not the only programming language around. How am I going to consume that data from another language? Embed an entire Lisp interpreter?
Climacs and Hemlock have existed for many years, but there's been no flood of users. Both are high-quality emacs-like editors written in common lisp; both have many extensions for development, mail, news etc.

I can't imagine a donation-supported project going from scratch would be substantially more successful just because it used Scheme instead of CL.

Climacs:
http://common-lisp.net/project/climacs/

CMUCL Hemlock:
http://www.cons.org/cmucl/hemlock/

Portable Hemlock:
http://common-lisp.net/project/phemlock/

P.S.

I agree with your goals: I really don't enjoy elisp at all. It reminds me just enough of CL and Scheme to be sick at what it lacks.
The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.

I once calculated my per hour wage from the work I did. About $1.50

Hang in there Bill!
Jeff Atwood Doesn't Know What Autism Is
The android application Locale ( http://www.twofortyfouram.com/ ) certainly seems like it could do (or come close to doing) most of these things.
In this case, the information was lost because it was no longer needed. The eggs in supermarkets already where 'old eggs' and so any egg you picked up was already ready to be used. Now that there is a trend toward 'farm-fresh' or even raising your own chickens in your backyard, the information is necessary again, but there are people that don't even realize that the information existed.
It's the only language I really feel comfortable programming in, and everything else seems
1) slow or
2) alien
in comparison.

I'm digging scala's design, but have yet to really compare it for number crunching, and big library building.

By the way, the article didn't really dig into any specifics besides saying there was feature bloat in C++. Which languages don't have feature bloat? How much use can I get out of them?
Ok, I found this video linked from their site, and I'm not sure if its a joke. Skip to when he turns the fan on, about 1 minute in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1ZcpCY2O6k&feature=playe...
C#, Python, Javascript
Unimpressed. By the title, I assumed they would make the case for some difference in the chicken's environment or the way the egg is processed before it's sold.

"'As the contents of the egg contracts and the air cell enlarges, the shell becomes easier to peel,' the USDA Shell Eggs from Farm to Table fact sheet states. 'For this reason, older eggs make better candidates for hard cooking,'"

...

"Statistics on the time it takes for an egg to go from hen to supermarket have not been calculated, a USDA representative told Wired.com, but there’s some reason to believe that new production techniques could be delivering eggs to markets faster."

So this article is just saying that eggs sold today are more fresh? Not even that - they "could be" more fresh? This hardly seems newsworthy.
same here mahmud. I was thinking to myself.. how corny.. then as he went on I appreciated both the music, his poetry and the web design advice. It's obviously a product of serious thought, good stuff from Charles.
Pretty novel effort I'd say.. I made the same mistake with speech recognition. I built out the product only to realize that the technology is pretty difficult to scale.

I've heard a great many fail and success stories and success, it seems, is built on failure... So keep failing and eventually you'll succeed, it's almost inevitable..

You seem to have a good grasp of what went wrong as well so it seems like you've learned a great deal from your experience.. That's what counts.

Good luck on your next venture and never give up.. It's in our DNA to build and so most of us have no choice but to keep doing it =)