skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two years is a tough call. part of me wants to say almost nothing will change. Look at the first iPhone vs iPhone 3GS.

Here are some safe bets:

1. Augmented reality will really be catching on. Many smart phones will offer augmented reality applications that we would find amazing in 2009.

2. Better cameras and most phones will have flashes.

3. The beginnings of universal translators, so you can at least get an idea of what the other person is saying.

But what do you guys think?
Where by absolutely required you mean pretty useful.
Maybe the term capitalism has a different meaning to you than it does to me, but I use almost synonymously with "free markets." And I would actually make the case that you can only have "pure" free-markets without government.

What I was suggesting in my comment above is that the failures of a bound and adulterated form of free markets do not indicate that free market principles are themselves flawed. The notion that banks' or other firms' abuse of bailout money is a problem with capitalism neglects that an extremely important (and often ignored) freedom in capitalism is the freedom to fail.
A lexical closure is similar in many ways to the class of an object-oriented language. In fact, lexical closures can be used to create an object system.

A class in PHP, for example, can have any number of class variables and for this demonstration consider these variables to be "private" (not accessible outside of the class or its own instances). One can, however, write methods or functions in the class that can provide an interface to operate on or access these private class variables.

That is, essentially, what a lexical closure is but without the overhead of an object system (remember, an object system can be created using closures!). They are a remarkably useful pattern of encapsulating certain kinds of logic.

Continuations, are another fun topic related to lexical closures too...
The banks, however, are another matter altogether, and this is where I think capitalism has hit a roadblock. The government has intervened to save many of them, [...]

That's not capitalism.
Not sure why this was downvoted, good point I think
Yup, makes more sense now! This is a good example, I think, to give to people who are used to objects being used for everything. Nice, clean, functional syntax.

(And of course you mean "d.DoDelete")
Yes, all the recent user research we've done (I work at Yahoo) says that users have got a lot more comfortable with scrolling since Nielsen's original research in the 90s. We officially Do Not Care About The Fold now.

Anecdotally, for some applications (documentation, news) a single really long document is preferred to lots of pagination. I haven't seen research to that effect though.
FYI: SSH is not vulnerable to the SSL/TLS MITM attack
Here's an excellent article detailing how the government over the past 40 years or so has been changing the measurements of our basic economic indicators: http://harpers.org/archive/2008/05/0082023
I took it anyway

That is the correct way to deal with the situation. If they ask you to leave, just buy whatever you were in the store for at half the price at Amazon. You don't need them, they need you.
The Android project uses Linux as a hardware abstraction layer, that's all.

It was never meant to be a full Linux distribution. Most of the things that the presenter picks on (lack of SysV IPC, prelinked libraries, hand-optimized custom libc) were meant in the interest of performance, not portability.
Umm, don't you think they have a regression test that checks if everything that's supposed to be displayed in a search result is actually displayed?

Seems like they're stretching the definition of bug here. Maybe a bug in the specification, almost certainly not in the code.
Well, our customers are newspapers who are remarkably collaborative. They aren't usually competitors because they're geographically bound.

I'm not sure if there's a magic formula to turn a customer into an evangelist. For us, a big part of it was being responsive, trying to find out what they wanted and giving it to them. We've found that most newspaper publishers have a secret ideas that they've been kicking around about how they would like to change advertising, and some of these ideas are quite good.

Of course, this doesn't scale forever, but we will do it as long as we can. So far, customer evangelism has been key to our growth.
Sad Sacks
Our take on the week: As a UK adviser is fired over politically unpalatable advice, and an English teacher is suspended over an article about animal sexuality, the fate of facts is on the line.
The current system rewards people who can amass capital and take risks with it more than people who actually create that capital in the first place.

The origin of this system was not created through free-market-capitalist methods.

scientists and engineers who make the world a better place and invent new technology that can revolutionize markets are not proportionally rewarded for this change,

But the men and women who take on risk to pay them are rewarded.
A map with ratings and a phone number is exactly what I want; unfortunately I'm also getting two full-bar text ads and another 4 pay-for-placement local search ads before I get to that. Combined they take up nearly 800 pixels of vertical space, a user experience so terrible and un-Googley that I have to assume it's an error.

Update: seconds after posting this, I refreshed and the full-bar ads went away. Have they just fixed the results?
You're making the assumption that Congress actually values listening :-)

I think government transparency is great as an ideal, but what seem to be happening so far is that there's a lot of lip service being paid to show that things are changing, and I realize that it is early days, but Congress "listens" to "polilng" because that is the only way they can stay in power, all other forms of listening have much lower value to them.

Not that it isn't an interesting idea.
I think that is what richcollins is saying. What I took away from that article, although I don't think it is quite what the author had in mind, is that Capitalism is flaw by the fact that our government does not allow/force us be purely capitalistic. The safety nets open the doors for greater risk, which require bigger safety nets.
The author hits the drawbacks pretty well. Politicians only care about broad opinion polls because those tell them how to market themselves to actually win elections. Letters and emails, and tweets!, written to representatives suffer from too much selection bias for them to care.

However, this will be a great placebo for the masses of people that like to feel involved. So it could draw a lot of traffic anyway, which could mean money. I can see his site being something that Wolf Blitzer checks constantly the day before the election. Like CNN's moving maps, this can become part of the grand spectacle of Democracy that we have all grown to know and love.
Check out http://code.google.com/closure/compiler/docs/api-tutorial3.h...

(short version: inconsistencies between Closure renaming my_object.attribute to a minified a.a while in other places you use my_object['attribute'] which it can't minify to be a.a. You end up with a.a = 3 and a['attribute'] = {something else}).
Curious about the bit about strategy inspiration - do you remember where you learned that?

Sure, Jobs isn't designing every little piece - it's more that he serves as the dictator. Because he's very unforgiving in design reviews, I think his subordinates start to think like him.

Dictator usually have advisors, but in history, the dictators who are swayed by lots of advisors with strongly competing interests tend not to do too well.
Very nice to see a simple calendar of meetings, but are there no lisp meetups in the bay area? I was under the impression there was one in Berkeley at the very least.

I'll see if I can't dig it up to email to you.
Make your own iPhone app for $20
Historically, unemployment peaks after the official recession has ended.

http://media-files.gather.com/images/d637/d49/d746/d224/d96/...
Multiple closures can share the same state ("environment"). Consider:

(let ((i 0))
(list (lambda () (incf i))
(lambda () (decf i))
(lambda () i)))

If you evaluate the first function this form returns ("increment") and then the third form ("get"), the result is 1. If you evaluate the whole form again, you now have another "instance", with its own separate shared i.

In Python, you would probably just make this a class. (But sometimes it's nice to have something equivalent to a class that's automatically built for you, and closures are that something.)
It sounds like we need a Culling Of the Fold: http://www.google.com/search?q=culling+of+the+fold

Thanks for the free song, Google.
Penrose is the odd one out. IEEE spectrum surveilled the field of cognitive science a few years ago, for their Singularity issue - http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/singularity - & he was the only one that felt like that. I was annoyed with him because it seemed he wanted to shoot down the field without even trying, because clearly it would never work.

Max Tegmark looked into the timing required for quantum effects to be significant in synapses - http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/brain.html - & showed it was just not required to build an effective model. The rebuttals, such as they are, strike me as tenuous & argued from faith & dogma rather than evidence.

You can see a bit of this back-and-forth at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind#Ongoing_Debate

Edit: Links, & fixing word wrap.
You're being too literal. What I'm saying is that, at the moment, there is no harmful consequence for buggy programs. Buggy programs that people buy means $$ from the initial sale of the product and your company continues to live and you get paid in $$ to maintain and fix the buggy program.

As long as the software can run, we're rewarded for creating it, no matter its quality.

In our own minds, we have to treat that as fraud and need to feel awful about it.
Inventing something by itself does not create value, to create value it must solve a problem. If you invent something,self funded it, and then take it to market you will be incredibly rich.
I have a better title for this; one that doesn't require you read the article at all: "The Workplace is Always Changing Forever"
I was expecting a meetings calendar written in Lisp. :(
Goldman may have repaid their TARP payment, but they received a crazy amount of money through the AIG bailout. The amount of government flowing into these institutions is astronomical, and almost all of them should have entered bankruptcy -- had their assets sold to firms that were responsible.
I have toyed with R, and I think it's great. I love the data-focus of the language, and the capabilities of ggplot (for which there does not seem to be an equal to in Python). But to be honest as a controls guy, and not a software guy, learning new languages is not a trivial task for me. Python seems to meet both my computational and application aspirations.
I have recently been struggling with how one defines success. Many people (including those on HN) define it in terms of accumulated wealth or social status ("successful startup," IPO, etc.). More and more I and finding that this definition of success doesn't necessarily lead to happiness in life. There is probably no correlation between the two. If this is the case, why do we always speak in terms of "success?" Shouldn't we instead speak of happiness?

Shouldn't the question be, "Will going to college make one happy?" That Starbucks barista with a B.A. in Polynesian languages might actually be happier than the hotshot programmer at the startup of the month.
I just tried scanning their test barcode off the screen with my G1 and it worked fine.
SilverStripe, A CMS To Keep Your Client’s Site Working As It Should
Running a freemium web app? Here's a big reason we're growing.
If you were attempting a parody of amichail, you've failed, because you've shown the faintest glimmer of analysis.
Expansion of the money supply is not "counterfeit" money, although there are circumstances where it is a bad idea. Counterfeiting is when a private citizen decides to, as it were, expand the money supply with his or her own printing press.
It seems the trouble with this idea is roughly the same reason that it makes economic sense for poor people to not have car insurance. You're playing with other people's money, and it's an asymmetric risk situation: when your bet doesn't pay off you do not have to pay the entire price, because you don't have it. So it makes economic sense to subject yourself to long-term risk for short-term profit because if/when the crash happens you're not able to pay for the damage you did even if you were liable for it. (As opposed to now when money made is safe, at worst you can be fired.)
Modern day science is built upon a mosh pit of physical theories that don't all fit together well.

The number one premise failing physical theory today, is the concept of a stationary container (the Universe) within which "matter" interacts. Traditional physical theory states that the Universe is one of matter, which is oh so limiting. Another hallmark of popular physical theory is much of it's theories are based on empirical findings rather than a set of purely theoretical postulates... Physical theory today is a posteriori rather than a priori and using scientific experimentation to verify the theoretical deductions.

Consider, for a moment, that the primary component of the Universe is not matter, but motion. Discard the idea that there is a static natural reference system (or stage) upon which things can be measured (you can tell actors are moving on the stage because the stage doesn't move).

Instead of there being three dimensions with a fourth dimension added for time; there are three dimensions of both space and time (time being a reciprocal of space).

Also consider, in this system, that there can be motion without anything moving. If the primary component of the Universe is motion, then material objects are a compound aggregate of motion; motion is, therefore, the antecedent to matter.

For more, look here: http://www.reciprocalsystem.com/nbm/nbm02.htm
One Definition:

"the automatic rejection of the obvious, without thought, inspection, or experiment"
I disavow myself of any unintended vicioun, I simply wished to point out that 'nothing is completely secure' is a bit of an irrelevant nitpick.

:)
Yeah but that programmer probably doesn't have a ton of pointless debt weighing them down.
HOT 108 JAMZ #1 FOR HIP HOP - 128K HD) * CONNECT... - SHOUTcast Radio Player
Here's the main page:
http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html
It's not a good long-term strategy but in some cases, you don't need it long-term. They're most probably set for life. (or until they invest in newspapers)
As an aside, the reason that laziness isn't as popular a strategy in Erlang is probably because it conflicts with the language's priority on (soft) real-time behavior. Being reasonably certain about upper bounds for time (and space) is very important in Erlang's niche.
Closures are different from objects in only a couple of ways:
(1) the creation protocol is extremely concise (lambda)
(2) the access interface is the function call

Say that closures lower the syntactic overhead of accessing
the same flexibility he normally turns to objects for.

So if he uses closures he will effectively use objects in
more situations simply because it becomes easier and this
will increase the flexibility of his code.
I'll say we haven't reached maximal liberty, all one has to do is look at the drug war, education, and medicine. You'll quickly see limitation on your liberty.

The way things are better is when people are free to choose what they want through voluntary interaction without force. If I want certain standards for a school or a doctor, I seek those out -- If I want to go to witch doctor that's ok too.

I'd highly recommend Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia if you're interested in this question.
The Internet swallows the games business
Improved conversions by 25%. Thanks Hacker News!
"[O]nly a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters."

-Ben Franklin

The flaw in capitalism is us.
Ask YC: Got a YC interview invitation, now what?
My co-founder avk and I just got an invitation to interview for this round of ycombinator for our startup called Outspokes. We're both really excited at the opportunity and don't want to screw it up. There was a thread earlier from DirectedEdge about their YC interview (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=923722), and it emphasized that a strong demo would be helpful. What are the experiences of other current YC companies? For people who interviewed in previous years but didn't get accepted, what would you have done differently?

I'd love to get everyone's opinion on what we've built so far too.

http://outspokes.com/

If anyone works at a web consulting firm or does freelance web work, I'd like to talk to you more about how to make our product fit your workflow. Shoot me an email at jerry(at)outspokes.com or leave a reply.
thx a lot for feedback. I'll remove quick-start from description. It's better to have it on app's site.
The colored gif image at the top of the page is an in game implementation. The black and white characters are diagrams, but are quite accurate to what the game would show.
Rubrics And The Bimodality Of 1-5 Ratings
But to say that clinical descriptions of animal sex in the context of a science article is inappropriate for 16-year-old honors students is to say the real world is inappropriate.

But er, isn't the real world inappropriate for kids? Isn't the whole idea of schooling is to gradually introduce kids to more and more of the real world? And aren't such decisions always subjective in nature? So wouldn't politics play a heavy role in what was or wasn't appropriate?

As for the political adviser giving advice contrary to his party -- once again, aren't we all a bit confused here? The purpose of political appointees in the science and medicine communities is to fulfill a political role, not a scientific one. Surely there are thousands of competent scientists able to ask great questions and do substantive research. What's needed is a person to be a bridge between the scientific and political worlds. And that person, guess what, regardless of their credentials is a politician, not a scientist.

I understand the narrative is supposed to be "science under attack by (fill-in-the-blank) idiots!" but I haven't seen it, and I'm not seeing it here. In fact, in both of these cases people were making political statements -- about the penalties of drug use or the appropriateness of training material -- and using the "it's science!" simply as cover.

They might be selling, but I'm not buying.

More nerd flame-baiting.
http://cnettv.cnet.com/60-minutes-steve-jobs/9742-1_53-50004...
I'm Jnovek's co-founder. We deal with businesses who are used to being trampled on, so impressing them is really not that hard--but here's a quick list of some of the things we've done:

1) We're honest and super-fast in responding to problems. This is huge, even if you say, "whoa, we have no idea what's wrong but we're working on it" that makes them feel like you care.

2) If anything does break, we're quick to give discounts. I firmly believe that if our product doesn't perform as advertised then our customer shouldn't have to pay for it.

3) I take any chance I can to "wow" them. For example, once an employee of one of our clients had to do a bunch of extra work to make our product work on their platform, while on the phone I had overheard her talking about how excited she was to go see New Kids on the Block in concert and so we had a NKTB shirt sent to her the next day. It cost us $50 but we have that client's love forever.

4) We send letters. Real letters. (In the mail.) When you send someone a hand-written note in the mail, they know you took the time to make that happen--little things add up to big things.

5) We ask our clients for suggestions, and work with them to make the product work better for them. It's very important that our client is making money with our product--not just paying us for it.

6) I try to understand how their business works and uses our product. For example, if I know they are usually busy on Wednesdays, I'll write that down and call them on another day.

When you sit down with a client, talk about their problems, and try to build products that solve those problems they get really excited--when you use their ideas, they feel like they have ownership of your product.

How does this pay off? We have clients who go to events and speak to others in their field about our product. And most of our clients are happy to receive calls from others about our business.

Our self-appointed evangelist clients are probably worth more to our company than the code we write.
Diederik from Stunf here.

Back when we started on Thymer we considered the market. In fact, we asked ourselves: "do we want to enter a saturated market?". But then we realized that we just assumed the market was saturated, but we think the evidence points to the contrary.

True, there are a lot of competitors. But surely the number of competitors alone doesn't mean the market is saturated? The market isn't saturated until you can choose between 4 or 5 products that are all great, and that all suit your needs well. There may be hundreds of email services, but Gmail put them all to shame. Sometimes taking just a slightly different approach can make all the difference.

At this point only few of our competitors have great products, and even fewer are truly successful. Or to put it another way: in another 5 years we expect all the products to be radically different. The market hasn't matured yet (like Word Processors have), which means the market leader of tomorrow probably hasn't incorporated yet.

Or we can look at it from another perspective. Because task & project management apps attract the GTD (Getting Things Done) crowd, people will happily try out your product, blog about it, and so on. So in a way entering an established market makes life easier for us. We don't have to explain what we do, or what software as a service is -- people know what to expect. We just emphasize what we're good at and we get people to give Thymer a test drive. If they love Thymer they may buy it or recommend it to others.

So people know roughly what to expect when they hear of "another task and project management app". From that point on we just have to exceed their every expectation. That's of course easier said than done, but we don't expect it to be easy.

Contrast this with marketing, say, a new search engine. People would ask: "Why do I need this?" or "What's wrong with Google?". Even if your search engine _is_ objectively better people will still compare what you do to what Google does at every step. "Why don't you have a translate link?", and so on. Because there are a good number of competing task and project management services the comparison becomes much more nuanced. "So you have tags like Gmail, projects like X, and teams like Y. That's nifty!". That makes our life pretty easy. Imagine what marketing something entirely new would be like. I wouldn't know where to start.

If you're interested we could write some more on our blog about this; explain our point of view a little better.
Companies lining up for IPOs
How investigators tracked down a Modern Warfare 2 cyber pirate
How much traffic do the biggest typo domains get?
18 truths: The long fail of complexity
Banks, more so than most enterprises, are stepchildren of the state. You can't charter a bank without "government intervention", because a bank's stability, and hence its ability to attract depositors, depends on things like access to credit from the government (the Federal Reserve, in the US). The question is not "government intervention" vs. "no government intervention", but rather what kind of intervention is in the best interest of the public.