skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am (now) a lisp programmer and find myself boring many people to tears about it. But perhaps I am first a language guy, and like to see new solutions to problems. None give me the satisfaction that Lisp has (smalltalk was close, however). But I like to see new well-designed languages and how well, or not, they address the engineering challenges.

For example, turbo pascal was written during the time that I was writing a pascal compiler. The Pascal standard was truly a harsh mistress, and turbo pascal made a lot of very useful engineering choices to make a fast, very useful compiler in a small environment. Anders went on to do C#, which itself was a good engineering feat.

I watch with interest Clojure and the ecocsystem that it plugs into and it has a REPL.

But it is a pragmatic fact of life that C is a very large force in the day-to-day world, along with a tool used by serious hackers (c.f. Coders At Work).

Python is very nicely designed and gets you to a higher level of programming with ease.

So I was curious when Go came along, as a language development observer, to see what were they coming up with.

It is clearly a language that has had a lot of thought put into it and it seems to be something that will challenge C on its own turf ultimately. Faster than Python, and possibly ultimately approaching C in speed, it has some useful new ideas. In particular, how it does goroutines and channels is quite refreshing. It addresses the admonition that "threads won't work if they are just libraries" with new language constructs.

So criticism of language ought to be tempered by some experience with the language. Having done enough of them, it seems that I often don't have a full appreciation for a language until I have done something significant in that language. So I feel comfortable offering severe criticism of languages like RPG-III and Fortran II and Altair Basic and Bliss-36.

I am probably to the point of being a lisp snob by now, but do appreciate the finer points of other languages.

I think Go is a step in the right direction for the problem that it wants to solve.
Ask HN: How do _you_ conduct market research? Survey? Focus group? ??
Privacy lawsuits are slowly becoming a paradoxical item, the Streisand Effect now is a meme of its own.

I've seen this many times over now, someone sues to keep their privacy protected somehow and within minutes of the news hitting the wires there is an internet snowball referring to the Streisand effect achieving the exact opposite of what the lawsuit intended.

The question now becomes if the Streisand effect is unstoppable (and it seems it is) does that mean that there is now officially no recourse to have your privacy protected ? Does the fact that these two are convicted killers count against them ? Even if they served their time ?

Presumably after you've served your sentence you and society are past it, you should be able to get on with your life.

Interesting detail is that due to a similar effect Sedlmayr came to be famous in the first place.
I had used rescuetime in the past, but not for project tracking. I logged back in right now after 8 months of inactivity, and, behold, they implemented project tracking yesterday.

Edit: Actually, it's a new, stand alone, product or something.
http://blog.rescuetime.com/2009/11/13/rescuetime-for-project...
Just because not all the time spent developing an application is spent on coding, doesn't mean it's not relevant to know how much time you spent on coding.
Nah. Using Lisp to script an engine written in C++ is not the same as writing the engine itself in Lisp. I'm not saying this is not possible, it's just that nobody tries.

You might be able to do a serious graphics or high-performance computing project in Lisp. You will be the first one, and I'll be very interested in how it goes.
I like the way justigining.com is using here: https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising-page/Creation/?pcid=5.... They made a clear distinction while still using only one page for registration and sign in (they have a "normal" log-in page too).
Flagged. We don't need articles by pick-artists on HN.
Both static typing and immutability are trade-offs and we need to know when its appropriate to make them. I get concurrency for the price of immutability in clojure, BUT i could still screw things up using java, and i think that this is a good thing(but im a power hungry lisp programmer, obviously :D). Its my oppinion that what you call the WRONG direction is actually the OTHER direction.
I have been an independent consultant for 12 years. I have a master services agreement/NDA that has slowly evolved over time, often adding something to get a gig.

Feel free to use mine (http://markwatson.com/consulting/nda.htm) but if you improve it, please share your changes back with me.

After just re-reading my own doc, it is probably too long. It used to be about half this length.
I think it very much depends on the kind of crime and the circumstances. Society has different rules for dealing with that on a 'gut' level than the standards of proof in court.

So you'll get different responses from ordinary people than you get from the legal entities, and these things have a way of finding an outlet. Just like you can't stop filesharing you can't stop the sharing of basic facts, if it happened and someone wants to get the word out there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop that.

And it has been like that for the last 15 years or so.

I've got exactly one example where it ended differently, and someone managed to successfully remove something from the internet in a more or less permanent fashion, but it involved some pretty drastic measure.
The problem is that this law -- like so much of the currently broken bits of IP law, like so much of the publishing business -- made a degree of sense before modern information technology came along. Now, however well-intentioned it may be, however real the problem may be -- and I agree, it's a real problem -- the law is completely broken. I don't think I can afford to have "mixed feelings" on this subject: The law has to be repealed, and its proponents have to try to come up with another answer.

Here's a layperson's description of this German law (with the caveat that it comes from an extremely biased source):

Alexander Stopp, the lawyer for the two men, noted that Germany's courts allow a criminal's name to be withheld in news reports once they have served a prison term and a set period has expired.

This is the twenty-first century. There is no longer any such thing as a "news report", as distinct from a "history book", a "personal letter", or even a "word-of-mouth rumor". There was once a time when you could define, fairly objectively, what a "news report" was -- let's try this definition: "a piece of communications designed to be delivered to thousands or millions of people within a time period less than a month" -- but now that time is over. That definition is now rubbish. Anything I type here, anything I say out loud near a blogger, anything I write that comes into view of someone else's digital camera can be captured and distributed to the entire world, in much less than one day, for a price too cheap to meter. Anything that appears on the Internet, even if it is buried inside a dry Ph.D. thesis on a single web server in a locked basement on an isolated Pacific island, is one well-placed retweet away from becoming a "news report".

I wish I knew how else to solve the problem, but even if you believe that censorship was the answer before, it isn't any more. The German legal system is literally trying to enforce the world of 1984: One is legally required to delete or rewrite history after N years.
They have the Blackberry App World.

It's horrible because the platform views the web as an afterthought, so there are no modern APIs for dealing with it. The Java version is ancient as well, and you have ridiculously small system limitations, like number of open files and such. I could go on, it's so bad it's almost comical.

This is why there isn't a really healthy app ecosystem, only people who are paid enough by their employers to offset the pain develop apps, or people just pay Blackberry itself to develop something for them.
Amazing startup pitches (Loopt, Mint, Dropbox, etc) [videos]
Secrets Of Nonverbal Communication
Understanding the funnel (Internet Marketing, 2006)
Netherlands To Tax Drivers By the Kilometer
have you considered building it on a platform that better supports collaboration and/or threaded conversation? a wiki, or forum would be my suggestion
You make a very good point: definitely cross out and initial parts of a customer's agreement that you are uncomfortable with.

Once I had the president of a company (new client) tell me how much he appreciated me haggling a bit. This guy was a lawyer and told me he was surprised by how often people just sign stuff. Anyway, his telling me this after the fact made me feel much better about haggling in the future.
Upvoted. While there may be reasons that this was done (I assume to minimize using HN for google juice) I don't understand why you're being downvoted for this.

This is inconvenient, and expressing that is reasonable, especially as it wasn't even a random rant, but in direct response to the clickable link being posted.

Seems like a little javascript would address this issue. PG could make the link unclickable in the HTML, but add a JS function to make it clickable, thus reconciling the goals of user convenience and google juice withholding.

Edit: Or add (rel="nofollow") of course, would be even easier.
Where did you get your data from?

Most of the time, here in Spain, the wind come from the Atlantic Ocean, from an area a hundred miles to the west of UK. And it's nothing special, compared with France, AFAICT.

The wind from the east blows a half as often and it's only strong near Tarifa.
"Sometimes I put my log in information into the register fields." "Me too! I hate that not only do I feel stupid, I have to retype everything again."

I hate the page LinkedIn shows when you're not logged in, it asks you to signup, and the login page is actually a different one. I find the call to action to register stands out, but they seem to hide the link to the login page. I never feel stupid when I encounter this, I feel like the site doesn't want repeat users, they want new user signups, and don't care if you end up recreating your account (this may explain why I've seen so many duplicate and inactive accounts on LinkedIn).
A Blade Runner umbrella
Make your illuminated umbrella ( it is equal to blade runner umbrellas )
How about visas etc? Do you need to leave every few months to renew your visa?
Unnecessary. If you don't want the advice, then don't click on it. Besides, there's nothing in this article about picking up chicks. I got a lot of value from this article. Did something in it strike close to home? :)
I sure hope you aren't storing passwords in plaintext...
I can't see it from the article: are they talking about total generated energy or consumed?

In Spain our government has banned new nuclear plants, so we have to buy electricity from France, that produces it using nuclear plants anyway.

The high percentages of wind power is no wonder. There are a lot of generators installed.
there is now officially no recourse to have your privacy protected ?

You could change your name.

Not that this is a definitive solution -- it's obviously rather painful to have to change the entire rest of your identity, rather than simply filing off the offensive part. And (for example), it won't get you off the sex offender registries that have proliferated in the USA, because you'll get arrested if you don't update the registry with your new name. But it would certainly be more practical than trying to "remove a drop of food coloring from a swimming pool", to steal Doctorow's metaphor.
Ahem. Tony, I was ready to explore the pricing section but there is no such link in that blog post. Might want to fix that.
This is a different method, but for the last few years I've been using Personal Brain (http://thebrain.com) for note taking on pretty much everything I read. There's a free version available that is unrestricted enough for most uses.

Think of it as a mind map where every node has the potential to be the central node and where connections can be made from any node to any other. Mine, for example, has several thousand nodes on topics from everything ranging from science to literature to my business ideas to pretty much anything else.

Having everything in one place is great because I find that I'll often stumble on something I added months or years before and I can associate it with what I'm doing now. It often exposes patterns, reminds me of stuff I'd forgotten and it's fun to explore.

I haven't found any other software like it. I'm not particularly anxious to replace it but I think some competition would be great. A web app or something non-Java would be interesting.

I've written about it more here, and in several other blog articles:
http://marcusvorwaller.com/blog/archives/2008/07/18/personal... . I also did a quick video of how I use it awhile back http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTNlRPAq3gE .

Hopefully that doesn't sound too much like an infomercial, I'm not associated with PersonalBrain in any way, but I do really, really like using the software and I'm surprised it isn't used more widely.
Well I will be writing my own code base eventually, in fact I have a decent start on it right now. However, following the release early and often motto, I am doing just that. I am releasing the "concept" and testing the idea based on the Wordpress platform. A wiki or forum will not support my eventual goal and my goal was to get the concept out asap.
heh good timing

that doesnt look quite like I wanted though, I was hoping to be able to say if I am editing files in x folder, its for y project, and so on, similiar to how firefox url segmenting works, I imagine the api would allow this type of integration already though.

one day I hope I get some time to work on the linux rescuetime, its an awesome product but the current build is just too much hassle and breaks all the time
b) The assurance of getting paid is a potential problem, I dont think
theres any way of giving that assurance...

Of course there is. It's called escrow. I pony up the money when I ask the question. You pay it to the answerer that I designate the winner. If I don't designate a winner, you pay the money to a random answerer, to keep me from never picking a winner, but benefitting from their answers. Finally, of course, if nobody answers, the money stays in the account to use for the next question.
Just an opinion, but my wife and I both like Heifer Project, and I also like afsc.org/
MySpace Fashion relaunch, Van Natta's transformation continues | nextATOM
State College, PA (Penn State) Hacker News Meetup
Is there anyone else from State College that reads Hacker News? Would you like to have a meetup? I'd love to meet up with others and be social.
Curbside appeal has several components, starting with looks. Tidy, neat, conservative clothes are preferable, Navarro says. A good rule of thumb: mirror, don't shock. "Observe how upper management dresses, and follow their lead," he advises. "Casualness can kill credibility." Unless, that is, you work in a place where the top brass wear jeans and polo shirts, like, say, CBS Studios in Hollywood, where Navarro recently discovered he was the only person in a suit.

I don't know about this "tidy, neat, conservative" stuff. For people working in a creative field, I think tidy, neat and conservative would be detrimental to success. It's a generational thing, too. People don't dress like the did in the 50's any more for a reason.
I tried this. It failed due to lack of revenue. I was trying an ad-supported model.
Yeah, that definitely depends on your type of company. For example, some startups build stuff that they aim to sell to larger companies or corporations, then you might need to hire someone to help start the sales process, long before your product is "done". Or in contrast, you might not be able to sell/release until a certain point in time, and it might be better to hire programmers so you can reach that point sooner.

Probably obvious, but it also depends on funding. Some startups can afford to hire a lot of programmers and build stuff for a longer time before they have to make money. Others have less funding and need to make money as soon as they can.
What about arbtt? http://hackage.haskell.org/package/arbtt

The way it works is superior to most other trackers, as you don't have to care about anything. It's only "flaw" is that it polls only every X seconds, so if you switch the window for less than X, it won't get recorded.
I guess you have never looked at the ANSI Common Lisp standard and the manuals of some of Lisp systems...
Or give them assurance in big bold letters that their email is safe with you, and won't be published, but is only used to forward answers to them.
Cryptographic voting system developed by MIT prof has first real world trial
Hey jacques, thanks for the review and the honest feedback. I'd be happy to help you debug the second set of pages you mentioned - tim@mixpanel.com.
The headline has been edited since I made the comment.
It originally didn't start "At peak".
It is now more representative of the article.
layer on top of maven(for dependency resolution) and ant(build). seems pretty nice. Will certainly try this one out.
There's a great article on the "Right to be Forgotten" at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1401357 which compares the different approaches taken in the US vs Europe in these sorts of matters.
Lispers have used lots of powerful paradigms - and no, not everything is a list. If you look at the current Common Lisp development environments, everything is a CLOS object.
If you read the introduction you'd see that this person is (1) not in America and (2) has been living of his company for a long time.

That doesn't come close to having a dormant entity, and to try to equate it with that is disingenuous.
GT.M: High-performance transactional key/value store
I'll break out the beer pong table.
There is nothing to stop a lisp dialect from adopting static typing.
Never mind the idiotic title, this is a classic story about invention. His breakthrough was accidentally figuring out that a mouthpiece filter was more important than the entire rest of his complicated machine, and it invalidated the design he had been working on for 15 years. Can you imagine? Most people would never allow themselves to notice something like that: the cognitive dissonance would be way too intense.

"I felt so stupid because the answer was so simple" is a deeply creative, even heroic statement.
Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, and Blade Runner. Three "impossible love" stories.

The Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven.

The Wild Bunch.

Tampopo.
Hey Tim,

I was burning through my 'datapoints' so fast that I have already removed the tags (I think about 70% had gone by the time I finished my review), I'll re-implement it on a site that gets a bit less traffic later next week and spend more time on it.

You guys spent a lot of time on that and it shows.

edit: on another note, how are you set up for handling really large volume ?
Apart from hating the big brother aspects of this, it won't reduce greenhouse gas as effectively. Fuel taxation would do the same thing and be more efficient at reducing CO2.

The GPS is clever for reducing congestion, but I doubt they're able to evaluate if you're not contributing by, say, taking back roads to work. EZPass or license cams would be better for congestion charges.
There's a couple things to consider (having learned the hardway recently).

The company I work for, http://theinsider.com, uses Facebook Connect on our site. Before I started there, they had a fairly basic implementation of FB Connect that was put in place when that program was first made available. About 2 months ago I went through and re-wrote the entire FB Connect implementation our side to bring it up to date because the FB Connect API had changed a bit.

Within 2 weeks after we pushed my changes live, FB changed the 0.4.0 API we built against which resulted in some breakage on our side. This was pretty much without notice. So in the past week, I had started going through my code to update it again when I found that there is a completely new FP Connect JS api that is being released.

I got excited about it because the new api is much simpler to use, the js library is 10x smaller than the old one(which could pull in at close to 200kb at times), and its much better documented than the old one. However, its still alpha and we're having a couple of minor problems implementing it. That's mainly do to a change in the cookie structure, which is a problem we're addressing on our end.

The point of this is that in my experience, FB doesn't document much of their APIs in a consistent or well-organized manner. This is especially true on the FB Connect side of things. They can make sudden changes on their end that adversely affect companies and websites that are using their systems.

On the plus side, using FB Connect on our site has been really successful. We're getting more user interaction, more engagement, and higher page views at least in part of utilizing it.

The question of whether to use Connect or build a Facebook app isn't either/or. It depends on what kind of experience you're trying to build. The downside of FB apps is that they've been around for a while and have lost their luster. They really just clutter up a user's profile. Its much more difficult for users to find apps on Facebook now than it was a year ago, due to the constant changes that FB is making.
I don't know about super-programs, but I use Clojure at work (doing things no one else would ever care about) and I use it at home to solve fun problems. I previously did the same things in PHP and Perl and Ruby and Python and such, and the Clojure versions are easier to write and maintain, easier to use, less code, more fun etc. Same for Common Lisp, generally.

I wouldn't extrapolate beyond that. I don't know what languages are good for writing super-programs since I never wrote one. Super-programs are a small subset of all programs.
I've had a much harder time with Iframe apps (more bugs, less solutions) than FBML ones, for php implementations. Unless you have all the gotchas figured out for connect, you should go with FBML.

As for 2), doesn't this happen with XFBML, too?
Some people do, not by living in perpetually windy environments but by reducing consumption and using stored energy supply (eg batteries but pumping water to provide hydroelectric which can be used at any time is also a possibility).
It took me about 20 attempts to send a google map by email
wow google's new captchua security system is tough... i was amused by how long it took me to get one right. I don't think i'll be sending a map by them again. can someone reccomend to me emailable directions which don't require a captchua??? thx!!