skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, I guess a real criticism of Lisp would be that it is stuck in the past. Lispers are still looking down on C; they never try to look up. If they did, they would see languages like ML and Haskell have surpassed them in all respects. Heck, even Matlab and its descendants with the "everything is a matrix" philosophy have created a powerful new paradigm that is certainly not a special case of "everything is a list". In short, the world has flown by Lisp, and Lispers (at least the vocal ones on blogs) still did not notice.
Coda.

Hands-down it's the best text-editor I've ever used. But it's also an FTP/SFTP client. And it'll integrate with your version control. And it will provide you with a local console/SHH, CSS editor & browser preview (if you are a web-developer) and a small reference library built-in to the app...

In case you haven't noticed I really can't speak highly enough of Coda. And to make matters even better, if you have a bug: report it. Don't be surprised when you hear back from the developers the next day...

http://www.panic.com/coda/
There is value in static checking for some things, but it is also limiting. It requires that code be written such that those things are declarative, can be understood without running the program. There is also value in having those things to be programmable, dynamic. This is a "good reason" even if you prefer the alternative. In Clojure, the lack of static type checking was not done out of laziness.

> there is no good reason for a modern language to lack a powerful type system.

Lisps can and do have powerful type systems - you're confusing dynamic with none at all.
I use Eclipse for all my editing.

My deployment method is to commit to svn, then svn update on the server (plus a script to move the current live site to a backup location in case I need to roll back). This is faster than FTP and means I've never, ever launched code that I haven't committed. Even on a one-man project that's useful.
Lisp "printing" is used for two different purposes: 1) to display results for a human reader/viewer. and 2) to serialize Lisp forms for later READing.

Instead of print, try princ.

[1]> (princ "hello world")
hello world
"hello world"

The first unquoted string is the rendered display of the PRINT function, a side-effect. The second quoted string is the result, print returns the string it printed as a result.

Try nesting them and see what happens: (princ (princ "hello world"))

You admit to having an anti-lisp bias without knowing anything about lisp. This whole "I hate it because I don't know it" thing is silly and unbecoming of good programmers.
While trying to set up an account the menu boxes freeze up. OS: Ubuntu 9.10, Browser: Chromium.
How many of you enjoy working with your Indian boss, respect him technically and as a person, and learn from him (not your Indian peers or subordinates, but boss)?

There are significant cultural, regulatory/legal, and policy issues to be solved or evolved before India can take on Silicon Valley.
Textmate, Cyberduck, and SVN.
While the web seems to be alight with comparisons of Go to other languages (Python, Lisp, ...), what seems to make this post unique is the comparison of Go to a forty year old language in little common use today.

To me at least, this begs a question---where do the great trolls of the Internet go to brag about their exploits? I remember in the golden age of Slashdot one could read "TrollTalk" and see links to the best posts with the most comments trying to misguidedly correct the original troll, most mod points up or down, and so on. (I think it even had a scoring system and a best-of newsletter of sorts.) Where do the great trolls of today hang out and brag about their exploits?

I don't mean just the sort of mediocre trolls who might compare Go to Visual Basic or something, but the sort of highly specialised trolls who might start a fire storm by comparing it to Algol-68. Where does one look to find the Orson Welles of modern technology trolls? Has blogging killed the once fine art of trolling?
I agree with the direction one of the comments takes - if you're going to this trouble, why differentiate, if the username isn't taken, take the user straight to a 'confirm your password to create account'. One dialog box, two functions. Having to notice and choose the radiobutton is just another barrier to both types of users.
Wikipedia sued by German killers in privacy claim
PAKISTAN TO HOST TELECOM AND IT ASIA 2009.
The Time Travel Fund
Hey, you're in luck: http://github.com/nikodemus/raylisp
There's at least one problem with this approach: trying to sign up with a username that's already taken. If you want the username "foobar" and it's already taken, you're just going to get a "wrong password" error, when you really wanted to sign up. That certainly creates some sort of user confusion.
I think the standard argument would be that the average programmers are using average languages, so popularity is a horrible measuring stick for powerful languages.
Thanks.... If you were feeling really kind you could send a screenshot to info@studylance.com
I implemented exactly that for my web app (one dialog box - after the user enters an E-mail, automatically validate it and if it is unrecognized, just add a confirm password field and change the button to "Register"), and the response has been entirely positive.
The language does seem a bit vague now you say that. Any ideas for a better 1. XXXX 2.XXXX 3.XXXX sequence on the homepage?
This approach only really works with signups that ask for an E-mail instead of a separate username.
Also, I should be able to bid to answer a question at something much less than half a pound. I answered a question for someone in like 2 seconds, and I was just going to charge them a 0.1 pounds.
Facebook is the new Google
Perhaps because lua is obscure and aims to be innovative? I.E, pretty similar to Go.
I'll identify one problem that the Internet ca. 1997 did not have: excessive discussion site mobility. If I wanted security information, I subscribed to one mailing list, Bugtraq. (Ok, I toyed with Firewalls@GreatCircle and a few others, but they were a waste of time). I read comp.security.unix and sci.crypt. These never migrated. I never had to unsubscribe from Bugtraq and move to "new cybersecurity" or any other crap.

Contrast that to post-1997. You had a brief blip of SecurityFocus around 1999, and in 2003 it began fragmenting into a myriad of blogs. For tech news, we saw the migration of slashdot/digg/reddit/HN. Each time they grew, lost focus, and people with words worth reading moved on.

Bugtraq is around today but I do not read it. Take each minor bug report and multiply it by X-dozen vendor echo bulletins and it becomes unbearable. HN is on the verge of falling into the political trap of digg.

Meanwhile, random blogs pop up, have some useful posts for < 1 year and then die off or evolve into navel-gazing and I unsubscribe. An RSS reader is useless to find new blogs. I'll sit out twitter until it turns into a ghost town in a few years, thanks.

The BBS was great for locality. You knew most people on it because it was extremely local. Earlier Usenet was the same, just organized by topic instead of location. I contend that the web replacement for these has not yet arrived.

Craigslist or random PHPBB message boards may be somewhat local, but the former is too broad for real discussion and the latter tends to be too narrow (say, a neighborhood association focused on pets).

Topical discussion is very fragmented and migrates between sites too often. I don't think it's an advance to have to keep changing sites or access methods (NNTP, Web, RSS) without any real change in functionality. It's change due to novelty or running from spammers or dumb commenters.

We need less change, not more. This is something that was better in 1997.
If an individual answer costs less than 50p - I lose money as the transaction costs are too high...
If Go people succeeded with taking over some C area, that would be the direction right enough, don't you think? Simply because Go seems a bit better than C.

I'd love to see some modern SML or Haskell taking over the area of code compiled to binary, plus a constant growth of dynamic languages as well, because they are also cool. But that big revolution may not happen.
I disagree. I would argue that the MMO industry (World of Warcraft, et al.) essentially makes its living selling scare virtual goods. The game is a marketing adventure for the scare virtual goods. Customers are elated when they manage to get an artificially scarce good and happily pay for the chance to obtain them.
+1 for Dreamweaver being awful. I have to use it so that the content editors at my workplace can use it too, but that doesn't stop me from wondering how on earth so many obvious bugs make it into the release version of Dreamweaver...

Adobe, if you're listening at all, start again from scratch. Make something actually good!
During sign up, please change "accept TOS" to something like "accept terms"... the lay person may not understand what TOS is... just a suggestion.
I don't see how it is deceptive. It's stated quite plainly that it is a record, and not a normal occurrence. (None of this is spoken in a harsh, rude, or sarcastic tone.) How would you say it differently? (Real question.)
When I'm working on Windows, SmartFTP is my favorite FTP client. Along with UltraEdit, it's one of the few commercial utilities that were worth paying for.

You'd think that the free FTP utilities would be good enough, but SmartFTP has so much polish and so many small enhancements (especially when it comes to handling multiple connections, auto-resume, remote file editing, transfer queuing) that it blows everything else away.

That being said, I'm still on version 2.0, while the current release is 4.0. I can't comment on how much better or worse it's gotten.
The title of this post was edited after I posted, it was something like "Spain gets 53% of its energy from wind" first.
I think the name was meaningful in this case, and that this is true in most cases.

I'm not especially interested in a random person's thoughts on Go. I may be interested in their thoughts on Go if their post happens to make it to the top of YC: this probably indicates that they have something interesting to say. And I'm also interested in their thoughts on Go if they're someone who is a recognised as an authority in the field, as is the case with Bram Cohen. Or: I might be interested if they have a history of writing good posts.

So names in titles do usually convey useful information for me. (Even if I don't recognise it, the fact that the submitter used a name is informative.)
Even if you're not going to go the full monty and change the user-visible interaction, you can file off some of the sharp edges. For example, I have the traditional sign in and register forms, and (predictably, given that my customers are not too tech savvy and the forms look similar if you read none of the words on them which, after all, is the default behavior on the Internet) many people use the wrong one.

Since user intent is clear if they try to register a user name and password that are already in your database, rather than giving them a "that account already exists" error I just log them in straight away.
Well, there's the stuff from ITA Software that powers Orbitz. Flightcaster is using Clojure. Impact Solutions in Houston uses Lisp for real time analysis of oil rig data.

There're a lot more.
That's a logical fallacy. Something can be both great and unknown to you. Usually, you seek information about things you know you need/want, and can afford. If a topic does not interest you, you will forever remain oblivious to it, except maybe for some tangential news about it that reach you by accident.

It's naive to think that just because you're a programmer you know everything there is to know about the software industry. You don't. You know about a small fraction of the mainstream development tools, and even those, at a superficial level. For example, can you name the top software products for running local elections? how about automating a chemistry research lab? packages for oil exploration? vacation property management? real-time spoken Chinese processing? computational archeology? artist talent management? threat modeling for distributed corporate networks?

See? :-)

"Social" programmers, the guys you see in chat rooms and "community" websites are all mostly generalists, and typically work in well defined roles as grunt programmers. Nothing fancy, website here, a database there, a GUI or two, click, generate, zip, distribute, and call it a day type work. Don't let this closed echo-system define your perception of "the software industry".
Visual Studio and the Publish button
expandrive for SFTP. People really still use regular FTP?
Some Google research comes to the same conclusion Leah does, with slightly different behavior.

http://sites.google.com/site/oauthgoog/UXFedLogin
You are incorrect, they also have an API for data entry, which you can use to register arbitrary data from the server. (Including, I suppose, browser versions or referring URLs since those are, after all, sent in with the HTTP requests. I haven't actually implemented those since they aren't useful for my purposes.)

See here for how I use the API through Rails (sans Javascript):

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/articles/tracking-with-mixpa...
There are decent reasons for avoiding SFTP; regular FTP + VPN is more secure. Neither of them are as good as a trivial web app that will accept authenticated uploads and unpack them for you.
I have a feeling curious_cat will come back with more questions.
Notepad++/Filezilla for SFTP
If someone made a really intuitive web app for this I would totally use it. Usability would be key though. Painless to enter data, easy tagging system, and easy wandering system to keep on top of everything.
I liked Coda, but I had the same problem with it that I have with pretty much every specialty editor on the Mac: once you've got your Emacs groove worked out, there's very little you can do to create a serious value-add. I didn't find Coda so much better than the tools I already had to make it worthwhile.

I'm also not a huge fan of the Coda CSS editor, although modern browsers are quickly obsoleting CSS editors anyways.
The funny part is that they could probably sue you for preventing their wiretap on you.
"Sigh. (Programming language quality is usually inversely proportional to the number of special forms.)"

I tend to agree with this, and I'm not a lisp fanatic.
Switzerland takes Google to court
Finding an OSS project to contribute to (H.S. Edition)
Hello. I am a junior in High School and I'm looking for advice on how to get into open source contribution.
I am skilled in the following languages (ordered from high to low proficiency): Java, Python, Perl, HTML/CSS (I know this isn't a REAL langauge), C. I've tried joining some
projects in the past, but they have either fallen apart, already had too many active contributors, or had a
codebase that was too deep and complex for me to understand. I'd be grateful for any suggestions the HN community could offer me.
I don't know about Japan, but in America, you can register a company and keep it "afloat" for as long as you like, even if it doesn't do anything.
Loops, subroutines, and I believe dynamic allocation all came from ALGOL.

The initial release of Fortran had loops and subroutines. But I don't think even they invented those things.

I'm not sure about dynamic allocation.
As should all of them, really...
IMHO, he is not a snob. Realist would be a more
apropriate term.

Just my 2c.

-lisp guy
I don't see a single mention of long term memory in this article. Cognitive psychology is not a grab bag to use for marketing.
This sort of approach will leak information about what usernames exist in the system, which has security implications.

Depending on the nature of the application you may or may not need to worry about this (e.g., obviously irrelevant if the site has a user list that shows the login names).
Codewright, rysnc, cvs.
news.ycombinator.com is written in a new lisp dialect.
I'll admit that I never actually use the CSS editor... I'm very comfortable writing my CSS by hand so I continue to do it like I always have.

As far as Coda vs Emacs... I think that's like anything else. I can replicate all of the functionality of Coda using GEdit + plugins on Ubuntu but it doesn't have the same feel of a beautiful, coherent, whole. I've never gotten into vim/emacs in particular as I'm a bit of a fan of nice GUIs.
Go just strikes me as profoundly boring.

"Uh, we do lots of C. Yeah, and lots of Python. Dude. Let's make a language that's like, uh ... C and Python! Yes! Awesome."

In a world where the only thing harder than Haskell is Google's interview questions, you'd think they would've come up with something more original.
Making an intuitive app would be half the problem. The other half is finding enough customers to pay for it - there is no obvious way to segment and/or target users, other that a single life-hacker post that you're going to get.
There should at least be one canonical example. I'm not claiming to know everything, I'm trying to fill in my knowledge. If lisp is so great, and so much more productive, and used by the greatest programmers on Earth, point me to some great code so I can become more informed.

Should I start reading EMACS source? Show me the code! If there's not at least one great open source project written in lisp, I'm not inclined to take your claims prima facie.
Get Google Wave Free Invites
Are you slamming the people of the island state of Java, or the programming language, or both?
Post Your Question.

What kind of question? Can I ask how to get rid of my cat's fleas?

The title of the site makes it somewhat obvious, but you should make it even more obvious in your call to action.

Also, I can see that you're using jQuery. I'm curious what you're running on the server.
Tell HN: Idea: Time-tracking Code Editor
I'm building a little app, and whenever I'm doing this kind of stuff, I like to know how long it took me to develop it - not days, but work hours.

At first I thought I'd use one of the online time trackers, but the problem is that I might forget to hit the "stop" button whenever I'm not coding. It would be useful to have a code editor or a plugin to an existing one that records the time you were actually working. And, when you stop using the application, or minimize it, it stops counting.

Granted, there are a few flaws. For instance, if I momentarily go StackOverflow to ask a question relative to my project, some might want to include that into their dev time. However, this wouldn't be recorded in the timer if the editor is closed or minimized.

I was wondering what HN thought of this idea, and if someone might want to develop it further :) I'm afraid I'm not much of a desktop programmer, at least not to the level of writing a code editor.
I write down things I want to remember later in Emacs org-mode files. It would be easy to set this up with org's SCHEDULED marker.

Just make a macro to emit a bunch of SCHEDULED markers for suitably spaced future dates, run it on new items, and review the items when they come up in the agenda in the future.
rescuetime is quite good for that type of thing, last time I used it it didnt quite have project integration but it was working on it

annoyingly for me it sucks on linux though
Combinations of Visual Studio, Notepad++, Team Foundation Server, Subversion, and FileZilla (all depending on which project I'm doing).
Etherpad might be close.
Aishwarya in Blue
A very short and very instructional video, from someone who has been in the trenches.

My own experience is that most entrepreneurs do not understand is that building startups is not just about building products and features but about mitigating risks for your customers. Until you can successfully do that, no one can put their career and their families at risk by buying your products.

So the best way is to get all your co-Founders and early employees together and have them focused on what it takes to best serve your customers. When you can do that then you will find that customers do expect a CEO and a bunch of VP's because their managers (who must approve the purchase) expect the same. So this is about helping your customers who are becoming your champion within their organization.

But the trick is to make sure that everyone on your team knows that their titles and positions are only temporary (including the CEO) and their job is to build the company to the point when they can find their own replacement.
And most of the time, it has much lower wind production, and they make up the difference by burning a lot of natural gas. This sort of thing is why the natural gas companies like wind so much.
Here's the original Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Sedlmayr

The murderers' names are Manfred Lauber and Wolfgang Werlé. Let's hear it for the Streisand Effect.
We prefer, 'enthusiasts'.
org-mode for emacs has a timer you could use for this purpose.
Okay, here's the fun bit: Having a nearby grandmother consistently increased or decreased a child's chances of surviving vs. not having a grandmother around, in proportion to the expected number of shared X chromosomes.

From the article: In other words, the effect of a grandmother perfectly tracked the DNA. "The higher the X-relatedness," the scientists write in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, "the more beneficial effect the grandmother has on that child's" survival. That the correlation held across four continents and four centuries suggests a biological, not cultural, explanation.

Putting this in more specific personal terms, if you're male, your mother has a biological instinct to harm the future success of your sons, even if she is not only unaware of it but aghast at the entire idea.

So, anyone still think that genes don't have much effect on behavior?
The idea is pretty much spaced repetition learning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition), even though article doesn't call it that or make any references to the existing work.
Komodo Edit: http://www.activestate.com/komodo_edit/
If an existing user misspells their username, being taken to a register screen is not where they want to go.
How is it a scam? If you're going to visit Tortola - there's basically no information about how to get there anywhere. I list the top places to stay, eat, and beaches. I list all of the ferry services between there and st thomas.

It's better than registering domains with names of big companies - now that's a scam.
These have been out for a while and they are free on iTunes.
The title suggests peak energy demand, in fact it achieved it at minimum energy demand (early hours of Sunday morning)

It's like an airport saying that all it's flights were on time at peak - then saying that they didn't mean thanksgiving, they meant that on sunay morning they peaked by getting both flights out on time.
Especially in this case, when you don't ask for an email, it seems like a mistake to only get the password once. If someone mistypes it, there's no way to get them access to their account again.

And yes, I'm aware HN has this problem, unless you go in and put your email in your profile.