skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There is value in static checking for some things, but it is also limiting.

Other than type-safe heterogenous lists(which is only true if you hold static type systems to a much higher standard of type-safety than dynamic type systems), what sorts of things do a type system with type classes, algebraic data types, and higher order functions prevent doing?

> Lisps can and do have powerful type systems - you're confusing dynamic with none at all.

Common Lisp has a powerful object system and dispatch scheme, but it isn't as powerful as Haskell's type system. Type classes provide compile-time multi-methods which can be every bit as dynamic as CLOS's when needed, but which are statically checked as much as is possible. In addition, type classes make it possible to dispatch not just on argument type but also on return type. How do you write a Common Lisp function which polymorphicly converts an integer to whatever type you need? This is admittedly a bit of a weak example, but polymorphic conversions like this can probably be useful(for example, you could use it to implement a somewhat inefficient heterogenous list).

In Haskell(I'm not very familiar with Haskell, but my testing indicates that this would work):
class FromInt t where
fromInt :: Integer -> t

Haskell also has parameterized types, which aren't as needed in dynamic type systems, but that relative lack of need is only because a dynamic type systems considers a program that calls a method which doesn't work on an object's type at runtime to be type-safe.

In a statically typed language with type classes and sufficiently powerful syntactic macros, it would be possible to conveniently defer to dynamic type checking in way that would type-check statically. The macros are only necessary for the convenience part. Otherwise, you'd have to create a lot of type classes for every type you wanted to use dynamically. With macros, you could just include the creation of the appropriate classes in the form that defines a new type. In fact, it could be built into the language making even macros unnecessary.
Google, Kosmix, and The Deep Web – A Love Triangle
Google "cliki" and "lisp success stories" in the future.

http://maxima.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html

http://www.izware.com/mirai/index.htm
I use org-mode for doing this type of time tracking and... Well. Tracking just about everything else too.

http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html provides a real good guide to org-mode and using the time tracking functionality.
So you're too smart for your own good?
The Pied Piper of Mucus
It's much harder to flamboyantly show off a virtual good, except in a virtual setting

While it doesn't take a degree from Harvard to ostentatiously flaunt virtual goods, I have noted that they sure seem to do it well. (I often tell people that I have two pieces of paper which cost $140,000 but, of course, it didn't cost $140,000 for the paper. It cost $140,000 to be able to say I have the paper.)
"Ugh, look at all that syntax."

As a common lisp programmer it's sad to see somebody do to another language what people do to CL. One superficial glance at the syntax and write it off, without further criticism.

"Lisp has a lot of brackets, LOL"
ML and Haskell have surpassed them in all respects.

I must have missed the memo explaining why static typing is always better. Can you forward it to me?

Lisp [is] stuck in the past...

You lose a little credibility here for not specifying which lisp you mean. I'll assume you mean Common Lisp because:

- Scheme is in the middle of reinventing itself after the R6RS unpleasantness, and that process could have any number of interesting repercussions.

- Clojure is very young, and already has a good chance of becoming the first mainstream functional programming language. I'll leave the value of that distinction unspecified for now, but it would be interesting.

- Some of the features available to Common Lisp programmers in the past really are impossible to duplicate today, and will probably remain so for the forseeable future. By all accounts, the system-level introspection and debugging capabilities available on Lisp Machines were a real treat to operate. We can reasonably disagree about how useful it might be to have OS, toolchain, editor, and system software all written in the same language and presenting a uniform interface, but I don't see how anyone could claim that ML and Haskell have surpassed Lisp on this point.
There's an interesting point made, but I'm not sure that I really like the direction Leah went in. To me, the fields stand out far more than the radio buttons, I stop reading the header after "Log in..." (what more do I need to know, it's a login form) and I really wouldn't notice that it's a sign-up form unless I look carefully - I had to look twice before I realized there was even a difference between the two screenshots.

I'd probably ditch the radio buttons and make the header more eyecatching, with "Join Now?" clearly a link. Clicking it changes the form in the way Leah shows, probably with a quick Javascript fade so the user notices.
1. I'd really like to see some copy. A nice 1-2-3 big and bold where I can see it.

2. Your sort/search isn't well thought through. Ideally I'm looking for high-dollar questions, in either CS or mathematics (fields in which I am knowledgeable), that need answers. I can sort by cost, (ascending cost is first? wtf?) but I get a lot of "deadline expired" questions. If I sort by "deadline", I lose the cost sort, which isn't what I want. I can filter by one field at a time, but not, say, the union of CS and math. As an answerer, seeing questions that already have answers or that the deadline has expired is totally worthless to me. People wanting answers to a specific question will probably come through Google anyway, rather than searching your site directly.

3. After looking for answered questions to get a feel, the first "answered" one i found was this: http://www.studylance.com/question/pos355-introduction-to-op... Seriously? There's no question and no answer.

4. After failing to find a truly "answered" question, I'm mystified as to how the site works. I see references to "bids", yet it appears that the question-askers name their prices. Is this an auction format, or a price-as-listed format? Also, see #1.

5. Your FAQ link is broken (Safari 4, OSX)

6. Most of the questions on this site are simple CS or math problems (like algebra 1). Something about the relative quantity and distribution of the questions makes the me suspect the number of real users is virtually nonexistent (for instance, I find it hard to believe this 20s guy with a GCSE can't plug-and-chug two variables into an algebra 1 equation given four possibilities: http://www.studylance.com/question/how-many-of-each-color-of... ).
I wouldn't track my time with it because the time I have the editor open is the trivial period of time when I reflect all that I have designed into code.
When you click on the ? next to qualifications to become a tutor, it shows a wad of lorem ipsum in the notification.

Oh and please don't display bids publicly to Tutors that have already been answered (still have it show up for Tutor who answered) or timed out.
Probably Microsoft's F# is the modern SML with more chances to become mainstream and start that big revolution.
Unsubstantiated claims. Common Lisp has been embedded inside Quake II:

http://ecls.sourceforge.net/ecl-in-quake2.jpg

That takes care of the graphics, networking, matrix manipulation and low-latency. What other FUD do you need answered?
We independently conceived of Hurl's approach. It looked like this: http://imgur.com/Th9yi

Maybe it was just a function of our design, but the feedback was that people didn't read and thought it was a login-only form. People are just conditioned to seeing long sign-up forms. A username/password pair just screams "login"!

There is enough innovation in the rest of our app to worry about, we didn't also need to be re-inventing authentication. Our login and sign-up forms are now on two separate pages and we added "Remember me" and "Confirm password" to the respective pages. Both pages have a link to the other.

We're trying to funnel users through the workflow such that we can present the correct page the vast majority of the time. For example, many features can be tried before making an account, but you get to them by clicking "try it now". Once you have an account, you get to them from your dashboard. This way, we can reasonably assume a user is new if they aren't authenticated already when they go to use such a feature.
For everyone who keeps saying that this is only at peak, that doesn't mean that it isn't important. If you can generate that much wind, then store the energy with pumped storage - you are still getting far more overall renewable energy than you would have otherwise.
False. If I'm just using a web app myself, email may be sufficient, but if I'm creating a public-facing profile, I want a username to be visible, not my email address.
editor: vim
FTP: FileZilla
file management: combo of VCS rsync

Editor: Substitute your favorite lightweight, powerful editor for vim. Emacs and textmate are good choices, I hear. I stuck with vim and am quite happy, because using the mouse or arrow keys feels like so much effort. I don't like the heavy meta key dependence of Emacs: most of the people I know who use Emacs have special keyboards, whereas I'm very comfortable using my notebook keyboard for vim. Haven't tried Textmate because I run Ubuntu, but Mac people give it a lot of praise.

FTP: I actually use FTP very sparingly, mostly for clients that have no idea what a VCS is, or have FTP-only access to their server. If I just need to upload miscellaneous files, like images etc., I'll scp or rsync from a shell. But FileZilla is pretty good, and it's cross-platform.

File Management: rsync for very large files (media stuff), giant tarballs, or stuff I don't like to keep in the VCS, like config files with secrets. Otherwise, I use whatever VCS is appropriate for the project, which is usually Subversion. I use Git when I have a choice.
Your market is a gate. The best team in the world can't build a billion dollar business in a ten million dollar market, so I think from Chris' point of view it is sort of a given. Distribution model, IMO, will be a function of the market (what it demands or will accept) and the team (what they figure out).
Tim Peters is very good at practical algorithm design. He one of the primary designers of the Python dictionary algorithms. His sort algorithm (timsort) is also pretty cool. Also check out the Knights Tour and N-Queens algorithms in the unit tests: <http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Lib/test/test_genera... .
Tell HN: The start of a new website for entrepreneurs
Please refrain from commenting on design and lack of features as this is a minimal viable product and merely the first interation of many, the design and features will come later when in demand. What I seek from HN is feature suggestions and perhaps, early adoption to make this future network not only possible, but successful. The premise behind my project "EntrepreneurHive" is that there is currently no certralized community behind the entrepreneurial spirit. There are many attempts, but all these websites/blogs/communities either lack adaption or lack the ability to interact with fellow entrepreneurs. There must be some happy medium and this is my persuit. This first interation is but one section of an anticipated larger network, it is dubbed "EntrepreneurHive TV"; for now, its simply built on Wordpress and is essentially a video blog, however what it allows me to do is tag and cateogorize videos from the beginning and it allows you to sort through the various categories for your viewing pleasure.

Now to make this successful, what I want to do is build the project from the start utilizing suggestions that would most benefit the Entrepreneur. The all encompassing goal is to build a community in which it becomes the medium that can connect entrepreneurs; I think it would be awesome for an entrepreneur who grows oranges in Flordia to easily find and connect with a fellow entrepreneur in California who also grows oranges, they could discuss tips and trade advice. I want to build the Hive mentality, a collective of entrepreneurs acting as one and helping each other succeed.

In following the EntrepreneurialHive spirit, people who are starting ventures or have one up and running, often like exposure. So what I want to do is allow people to submit videos they think are helpful to their fellow entrepreneurs, they can write a paragraph breif about the talk and then I would like those individuals to write a brief about themself; you see, my anticipation is that other entrepreneurs will be watching these videos and by adding your own information about your venture/what you are doing, it will give you incetive to help me out by getting you some exposure. You can add all the linkage you want and there is no such thing as shameful self promotion. Please, keep the links clean.

So Hacker News, what do you think about this? I know the idea is not original, but I would like to make the best attempt at executing the idea. Here is to starting small and going big. Critique away. I will be listening.

Link: http://EntrepreneurHive.com
All of this seems to fall under the general principle of "eliminate before you optimize", but it's good to have reminders of specific applications every once in a while.
OS X didn't exist in the 80s and 90s.
The Lure of the Paycheck Stub
I think that this is an unfair criticism; you don't really supply any evidence. (Other than that Lispers are completely oblivious to anything but lisp).

ML and Haskell have certainly surpassed common lisp in some respects, but to say that they have surpassed all lisps in all respects has got to be some sort of sophistry.

Lisp is a form of syntax (and a few primitives like Eval and quote) that makes it easy to write programs that manipulate programs.

Common Lisp and Lisp 1.5 and Scheme and Clojure all have certain other things in common.

However, they have those things in common because they are generally recognized as being good things to have in a language for the purpose of programmer productivity. In no place is it written in stone that to be a Lisp, it must not use Hindley-Milner type inference.

I think you'll also find that most Lispers are chronic dabblers in programming languages, to say that I'm sticking my head in the sand when I choose to write whatever-it-is in Clojure is insulting.
True, the piece is so fluffy it's nearly information-free, but HN is a curation site. Including the occasional tweet, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=921863
Yeah, the five year plans have been rather a bane for the Indian economy. In fact, central control and planning in all spheres are generally looked up to in India. We even used to have joint families which were very common till very recently - a joint family is where many generations of a family tree under a patriarch live together. Even businesses till recently were more likely to be family owned.

Entrepreneurship in India is on the rise now though. But my problem with the article is that the author is talking about taking on Silicon Valley, but he does not have a region or even a city to compare. He is just taking a whole country - India - and talking it up. Silicon valley is what it is not just because there is a secret formula which you can use to replicate. I am not even sure if there are places in other parts of US which are comparable to the ecosystem here.

These kind of articles probably make for good copy. But without first trying to understand what makes Silicon Valley unique even in US - they are nothing but misleading.
Interestingly, this was one thing PG pushed us to take out of Posterous registration. And he was right. You want to lower barriers. Since we already were getting the user's email address, it really wasn't painful at all to let the 'forgot password' flow handle the case where the user mis-typed their initial pw.
I don't know about anyone else, but for me this is a hard one; I'm really mixed on it.

On the one hand, you'll get no arguments against free speech or in favour of official censorship from me; go First Amendment, for sure. Likewise, it does not seem tenable to endorse the idea that someone who committed a crime can compel or mandate society to "forget" about it in all repositories of its institutional memory, including those which are created and maintained by private individuals in addition to governmental organisations.

On the other hand, having known and watched people who were incarcerated and rehabilitated attempt to reintegrate into society and lead normal, law-abiding lives and find jobs and housing fail because of the prejudices that arise against them on the basis of their having been convicted of a felony or whatnot, I can definitely appreciate the spirit of this law. To me it seems absolutely imperative that criminals - up to and including those guilty of capital crimes - be given a new lease on life, contingent upon the terms of their sentencing.

For the more conservative, law-and-order types among you who think this is a spineless bleeding-heart rant, I encourage you to contemplate for a moment what it's like to be in the shoes of someone who has committed a crime, experienced years or decades of imprisonment, whose will has been broken and whose remorse consumes them. As if they do not have enough of a burden to live with - and for far more criminals than you might think, it is a burden they excise with attempted suicide - society has conspired to ensure that it is so much more difficult for them to even meet the basic needs of livelihood.

Or consider the case of innumerable teenagers in the US - like the infamous Genarlow Wilson case here in Georgia - that fall prey to the criminalisation of their consensual sexual activity by retarded, ass-backward state laws and then experience a lifetime of stigmatisation by being placed for the rest of their life on the sex offender registries with which the American polity is so obsessively fixated.

My point is that the spirit of the law - that convicted criminals who have served their time have the right to be judged on their own terms subsequently without that cloud hanging over their head - deserves at least some intellectual consideration in this case. It certainly lends the issue some nuance that must be carefully weighed, even if you don't ultimately come down on the side of censorship.

It's precisely these kinds of draconian stances on prisoners' and criminals' rights arising from an overzealous, fanatical jurisprudential self-concept that give the US the record and reputation of being rather backward among "First World" nations. The human dimensions of the criminal element must be taken into account; just because someone committed a crime does not mean they are not a human being and do not deserve your thoughts and your empathy.
editplus, fireftp, explorer

Fireworks CS4 for graphics editing and splicing
Ask HN: Facebook canvas app vs. FB Connect/Platform?
Given the latest Facebook announcements affecting developers, how would you weigh the pros/cons of betting on doing a Facebook canvas app as your user's primary means of interacting with your application (as opposed to going to your own domain which would then use FB Connect for login and other the FB API for other features such as friend picker, constant auth, profile sharing, etc.)?
Some context: we're a social advice & reputation game.

By my calculation, it seems that the only a few benefits for developers in doing FB canvas apps anymore:

1) User doesn't have to open another browser window/tab to a site whose domain/brand they're not immediately familiar with.

2) If the user bookmarks the app, the app appears in the upcoming left profile/nav bar.

3) Presumably, I'd expect the new "secret sauce" FB newsfeed algorithm to include some preference towards native FB canvas app stories that can then be "liked" & commented upon from within the user's newsfeed/live feed.

A very prominent FB app company (top 20) told me that they're deprioritizing their native FB canvas app in lieu of their own site with FB Connect given they expect a "40-60% decline in native FB canvas app user activity with Facebook's recently announced changes". They think that Facebook can't be trusted to do well by developers since they're primarily interested in users.

Please mention if you're currently actively preparing or have already deployed a FB Connect &/or canvas app. Thanks!!
Congrats! ditch the flash
Take away static typing from Haskell and you still have a richer language than Lisp, with more interesting research happening in the community. It is ironic that e.g. nested data parallelism has its roots in Lisp (as early as 1990) but might soon enter the mainstream through Haskell.
(OSX) Textmate is a good text editor if you don't need wysiwyg editing. Coda might be a good alternative if you do.

Cyberduck is a good ftp/ssh over ftp/file client.

For sure use some form of source control to manage files. ( I don't care what you use just use something. Subversion is ok. Git and Mercurial are nice too.)

My preferred method for updating a site is to checkout/clone from source control to a new location in your websites hierarchy and then create a soft link to the new directory. Scripts can automate this process.

ln -si /var/www/mysitecheckedoutfromsourcecontrol /var/www/mysiterootsetupinwebserverconfig

After that, If you have problems with the new site, you have a simple one line command to revert the site back to a known good point in time. All you have to do is relink it to the old site and you are off and running.

ln -si /oldsitepath /var/www/mysitesetupinwebserver
I certainly accept AGW and the need to do something about it, but this is rather weak. A big, scary round number that we must avoid - and then a not-as-big, scary round number we really should avoid - but the very first sentence suggests that we should try for "less (possibly much less)".

So it's a big, scary, arbitrary number.
CLOS is runtime dynamic. Haskell is not. Haskell is a mostly static language. Common Lisp is a mostly dynamic language and provides all kinds of mechanism to make changes at runtime to the language and programs written in Lisp. The CLOS Meta-Object Protocol allows various ways to change the object system. This has been used for various object-oriented languages on top of Lisp, user interfaces, databases and other stuff.

The 'dynamic' part of Common Lisp means that is a runtime programmable programming language.

Haskell and Common Lisp serve totally different purposes. Common Lisp is there for incremental, interactive development of complex software - software that is always running in the development process and gets modified until is does something useful. Software that also can be modified when deployed, while running.
Here is my app. Needs some more work on the really intuitive part: http://flashcarddb.com
Software transactional memory (STM) as used by Clojure and Haskell...
Nice, but a little heavy on the dark blue.